Extreme Frontiers: Racing Across Canada from Newfoundland to the Rockies by Boorman Charley

Author:Boorman, Charley [Boorman, Charley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780748132775
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2012-01-05T00:00:00+00:00

9

Old King Coal

Alberta sits directly to the west of Saskatchewan and is the fourth largest of the ten provinces at over 600,000 square kilometres. When you consider that the entire United Kingdom is only 240,000 square kilometres, that’s still pretty huge! It is very much cowboy country, still, famous for the largest rodeo in the world, the Calgary Stampede, and we were hoping to catch that while we were there. But before we even reached Calgary, we stopped for fuel in the small town of Maple Creek, still in Saskatchewan, and discovered another rodeo. Not quite the Stampede, but it was taking place today and we had to check it out. Yesterday in the Badlands had been all about the old-time cowboys; now we had a chance to see the modern-day version displaying their skills in the arena.

We had no idea what to expect when we arrived at the rodeo grounds. I asked around and was told that this was an annual event where local ranch hands had the chance to show their skills at roping and branding, penning cattle and riding a saddle bronc. There’s a part of every guy that wants to be a cowboy, and I really wanted to get involved. The organisers told us that a saddle bronc – an unbroken horse bred to buck – was too dangerous.

They would let me have a go on a cow. So I’d be riding a steer then, like the children, when I’d been imagining climbing the rail like Steve McQueen in Junior Bonner: it would be like the ice hockey all over again. Oh well, at least there was less risk of broken bones. Wandering over to the main arena, we watched a few contestants putting some horses through their paces. We took a seat up in the bleachers and I looked out beyond the metal fences – there was nothing but the road between us and the horizon far, far in the distance. It’s flat around Maple Creek, so flat there doesn’t really seem to be much of a horizon at all. I found that I was missing the cliffs of the Big Muddy.

The tournament announcer’s voice crackled over the tannoy, talking about the abilities of the competitors, and how they reflected their day jobs. The rodeo is the only sporting contest in the world where work-day skills are tested in open competition. And they’re big business – the Calgary Stampede is just one part of a professional circuit that takes the competitors all over Canada and the United States. Competitors come from as far afield as Brazil, Argentina and even Australia, and the prize money can run into hundreds of thousands of dollars. Not here, though; here there wasn’t any money on offer, only the traditional rodeo belt buckle awarded to the overall champion.

We listened intently as the announcer told us that if we were there for thrills and spills, we’d probably see a few. He added that what we were really going to witness, however, was something similar to a game of chess.

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