Come Hell or High Water - Calgary Stampede 2013

Calgary has not had an easy 2013. Only a couple of weeks before it's busiest time of the year when it was expecting thousands of local and international visitors to come to town for the annual Calgary Stampede, Alberta experienced torrential rainfall that triggered state wide flooding. Calgary was badly affected with 26 neighbourhoods being evacuated as the river burst its banks and flooded the town down area. The electricity was shut off to the city and even a fortnight later when we arrived in town, there were still some areas without power. Despite the enormous volunteer clean up effort, the damage was still evident. We hadn't quite appreciated the extent of the flooding until we arrived and took a walk along the river and some of the neighbouring areas. The river runs alongside the stampede grounds and the concert arena filled up like an enormous bath tub with water making it up to the 10th row of seating! However, "come hell or high water" we were told that the Stampede would go on and we arrived excited to experience the 101st Calgary Stampede.

The Stampede is kicked off each year with a parade that winds it way around the centre of the city. Even with the unpredictable weather that was swinging between 30+ degrees to rain every 30 minutes, we were told to expect large crowds and to get there early. By 6am, Brendan and I had staked out our little slice of the side walk and were sitting on a stack of newspapers as a chair waiting for the 9am parade to start. The parade went from weird and wacky floats, to marching bands, horses and military demonstrations. Rather than elaborate, I have included a bunch of photos at the end of this post to give you a snapshot of the 2 hour parade. One of the highlights (other than all the pretty horses of course) was the mega army tank that slowly plodded its way down the road with its turret circling around. The ground actually shook a little as it passed us!

There was no time to sit around and recover from our early morning as we had tickets to the rodeo so we jumped on our figurative horse and galloped to the stampede grounds. The rodeo was pretty awesome. It started with some death defying motocross displays and then came the cowboys. Taking a look across the crowd, there wasn't a bald head to be seen amongst the sea of cowboy hats. There were six major events of the day – bull riding, barrel racing, steer wrestling, tie down roping, saddle bronc and bareback riding. We had very little clue what was going on most of the time - but oohed and ahhed our way along with the crowd when a rider survived the minimum time on the back of some of the craziest animals I have ever seen in my life. Why anyone in their good mind would think it is a good idea to get on the back of a bucking bull, I have no idea. The rodeo ended with a few events for the younger generation with junior steer riding, novice bareback, saddle bronc and wild pony racing. These cuties (probably all under the age of 10) gave it their best and one little bloke trying to tame a wild pony ended up going for a spin around the stadium face down in the dirt holding onto the rope as the little pony kept on running. He got a big cheer, so it probably made his day!

The other big event we bought tickets for was the chuckwagon races. We were even more clueless at this event! All we knew is that there were a bunch of chuckwagons being pulled by teams of 4 horses that had to navigate their way around a couple of barrels before charging like hell around the race track. For some reason there was another guy on a horse who seemed to be like a support crew but just chased the wagon around the track. Very odd, but entertaining. After the races was the evening concert which featured a variety of dance teams, singers (including a guess appearance from KISS - or was it a KISS cover band...hard to tell) and acrobatic performances. The concert was phenomenal and was finished off with a large fireworks display above us.

Apart from the two major shows, we just walked around the stampede grounds (very similar look and feel to the Easter show for sydneysiders) and walked around the city of Calgary itself. While the city has its charms, and certainly turned them on for the sake of the Stampede and the influx of tourists, we didn't find much else to do other than eat and drink at one of the many bars and restaurants around town.

We headed to Calgary airport having thoroughly enjoyed our Stampede experience and looking forward to spending the next two weeks with Pam and Rich, friends we met while in South korea who now live in Waterloo, Ontario. Only catch was that we got to the airport to see "delayed" splashed across the airport departures board as a huge lightning storm engulfed Toronto causing flash flooding city wide and shutting down the airport for several hours. What was it with us and rain / natural disasters. We should start selling our services to drought stricken nations. Five hours later the skies cleared and we boarded our plane to head to Toronto.

Come on sunshine...we know you are out there somewhere.... 


 //Kate

P.S keep scrolling below for some more pictures from the Calgary Stampede