The Calgary Stampede: The Really Wild West

Story and photography by
Nancy & Eric Anderson 

 

In the United States we surely love our festivals: Boise and Ashland, for example, brag about their annual Shakespeare celebrations, Cleveland its Oktoberfest, Albuquerque its Balloon Fiesta and Huntsville, Texas its Prison Rodeo. And though New Orleans goes crazy at Mardi Gras nothing pops its cork like Calgary, Alberta when July brings more than a million visitors and the ten best horse riders in the world -- invited at Stampede expense, for a purse of $1.6 million -- to perform at its famous Stampede.

The riders don’t always win. The Guinness Book of Records declares nobody managed to ride the bronco “Midnight” in his 12 appearances at the Stampede when the riders rode the horses till they quit bucking – often a long 10 minutes. Now horses are bred to dump their riders within the Stampede’s “8-second rule.” Many horses work only a total of five minutes in their entire lives. Some riders lying in the dirt may say that’s plenty.

From a simple beginning in 1912 with 75,000 spectators, the Calgary Stampede has grown to a mammoth 10-day July festival involving the whole city. This is when Calgary decorates its stores to resemble a frontier city and its people wear Western garb. Everyone dons a cowboy hat, clowns wander the streets and visitors and locals line up for the celebrated free chuckwagon breakfasts at Rope Park collectively knocking back 2 tons of bacon, 5 tons of pancakes and 85,000 bottles of juice. They have company: the Stampede grounds serve 55 miles of hot dogs, 3.6 tons of onions and 15,000 pounds of coffee to the cheering crowds.

They’re cheering because the spectacle is unique: afternoons are Man and Woman against the Beast (be it a furious outlaw horse or enraged 1,600 lb bull); evenings are crazy races where the chuckwagons challenge gravity and nearly overturn. At nights fun continues with a 90-minute, high-tech Las Vegas-style grandstand show on a 100 foot mobile stage that has hundreds and hundreds of dancers and singers including the celebrated Young Canadians – and one solitary comedian-bagpiper who comes on stage making his instrument sound like a police siren. He stops suddenly to apologize for this. “You see,” he says, “I’m only half Scottish. The other half is Irish. This is a problem for me: the half that’s Irish wants to drink all the time; the half that’s Scottish doesn’t want to pay!”

Today’s tourists don’t want to pay excessively for a vacation either. They’re often taken aback by how hotel prices can rise for special occasions. The paradox of Calgary is it’s so busy and successful during Stampede many hotels are able to drop their prices.

Hotels vary from downtown ones (where it’s easy to stand in the street and watch the Stampede parade go past with its 4,000 participants, 800 horses, 75 wagons, 30 floats, and 20 bands in a 3-mile line) to the two famous classic resorts in Banff and Lake Louise either of which surely justifies the short car trip to this World Heritage Site, Canada’s first National Park and–and some of the most beautiful scenery in North America.

This corner of Alberta became the site of the Banff Springs Hotel in 1886. A statue to its Canadian Pacific Railroad founder William Cornelius Van Horne stands in the courtyard outside the hotel inscribed with his celebrated remark, “If we can't export the scenery, we'll import the tourists.” The hotel’s been importing them ever since. Its sister resort, Chateau Lake Louise is conveniently to hand. Both are renowned for their afternoon teas but the Banff Springs Hotel now creates a much better production. Return guests to the Chateau will find the hotel no longer separates those fastidious guests savoring afternoon tea from exuberant families who are simply having a lunchtime snack and the ambiance of this superb location is completely lost for those who recall better times. Chateau Lake Louise lies along a most magnificent part of the Trans-Canada Highway and sits on the south shore of its lake with gorgeous vista of what’s been called “God’s Own Country.” Indeed, the cerulean blue skies, turquoise-green lake and crisply-carved mountains suggest our Maker was in a real good humor when He created Alberta.