Each Spring in the early years, in preparation for the June canoe trips, the Alberta school had a canoe race from Rocky Mountain House to the school at Genesee. In later years this race was run from Drayton Valley to the school.
This gallery shows pictures of the start of the race at Rocky Mountain House (the old bridge) from some point in the early 1970’s.
What are your memories of these races? send us your story. (Click on the title and scroll to the bottom to submit your story. Click on the pictures to see a larger version)
April 29, 2013 at 2:05 pm
One of the great strengths of SJ was that the male staff did everything the boys did. (We were not always enlighted, and while women *could* participate in the outdoor program, they weren’t required to.)
The Staff referee boats presented an opportunity to for new staff to try their hand at steering. Alas, I had some experience at canoeing (Canoeing merit badge in scouts) and we had a raft of new men that year.
I was stuck in the pit. A mere paddler. One of the _mileaux_.
Next to me was a blonde haired chap, Peter Jackson. The two of us had to do that slightly out of phase paddling stroke to keep our grip hands from colliding.
You get to know someone sharing a thwart. I learned that PJ wasn’t fond of puns, and that after an initial tolerance every attempt at word play resulted in his knuckles coming down on the back of my hand.
Peter learned that it didn’t work. I kept punning, although on the morning of day 3, I could barely open my hand.
April 29, 2013 at 2:16 pm
Day 3? What’s this day 3?
The RMH race was normally a 2 day event. We’d start Saturday around 9 or 10 — Like many events it ran on Saint John’s Time. Paddle until 5, everyone would make camp at that point. At 8 the next morning crews could set out again.
But this year on Sunday morning — half way done — not even to Drayton Valley yet — the wind came up, hard, out of the north. the temperature dropped. There are several reaches where the river runs north for a couple miles. Those sections, despite the current would take over an hour each.
I think we gave it up around 6 p.m. Built a fire, and had a meager supper on the leftovers and snacks. In the morning we dined on belt soup. Got back to the school on Monday, padding in wind and snow.
April 29, 2013 at 2:20 pm
Doing the RMH race the first time everything was new. It’s hard, but it’s good training for the upcoming trips where this will be done weeks on end.
Doing it the second time is a lot harder. You are playing corners. (The drayton valley bridge is just around the next corner.) Corners is a Time Machine game. You can stretch a morning into a week, quite easily.
Drayton to the school is even harder. Now the game is played with powerlines, and there are always at least two more powerlines than you remembered.
April 29, 2013 at 2:32 pm
I think it was my 2nd RMH race. We were sweep. Day 2 we’re coming around a corner, and we see a patch of canoe red on the gravel bar a mile ahead.
“That looks like a canoe”
“It’s on end. How would you put one of our canoes on end”
“It’s too short. Can’t be one of ours”
“That colour of red sure looks like ours”
We landed on the gravel bar. It was *half* a canoe, propped up. A note was tied to the bowline. “Every safe. All in X and Y’s canoes. Trey Morrison”
When we got back to the school, we found that that three canoes had rafted up, and were drifting down the current together. (It was a high water year, and the current was fast, the river brown with silt)
Suddenly they realize that the current is sweeping them toward a grounded deadfall — a huge poplar with its root ball on a submerged gravel bar. One canoe shoots forward, one backward. Trey’s canoe, in the middle, couldn’t get paddles in the water fast enough.
They hit the root ball sideways,flipped upstream, filled, and the force of the water on the canoe broke the canoe in half.
The other two canoes did a rescue, and they propped half a canoe up to let us know what happened.
The canoe was there for some years, a landmark.
April 29, 2013 at 3:08 pm
The Rocky Race was long enough that we had to camp overnight and make an early break in the morning to finish the race in good time. This changed in ’73 when Williams and his stalwart crew made it back to the school in one day and therefore many hours before the others.
May 1, 2013 at 1:40 pm
That must have been not only a dynamite crew, but exceptionally high water. Even overnight it was a slog. 9-4 on the first day, and 8 to mid afternoon on the second. Call it 12-14 hours.
Peter — did they not have a “off the water by X o’clock” rule then? Sunset by then is after 9 p.m. so 12 hours wouldn’t be unreasonable.
(A tale I’ve related elsewhere, the Selkirk interschool dogsled team was stopped by PJ 2 hours early to keep them from finishing the race the first day. These things happen.)
May 3, 2013 at 5:17 pm
I guess the SJCBS equivalent was the St Adolphe race. It started on the riverbank near St John’s Cathedral in Winnipeg and finished at St Adolphe, about 16 airline miles south. With the twists and turns of the River, the race was a bit more than 30 miles long, so still nothing near the length of the Alberta race. However, it started in the evening and ran during the night. And it ran against the current.
It was held in the spring and the steersmen were grade elevens – for most of them, their first taste of formal leadership over a crew, perhaps partly a preparation for next year in grade twelve when they would be leading work crews. I recall the grade twelves got a long weekend while the race was on so the race must have started on Friday night.
(I remember in grade twelve on one of our long weekends around eight of us checked into a suite at the Sheraton Carlton in downtown Winnipeg saying,
“We’re a broomball team from Gimli. We’re in town for the big tournament.”
We had one suitcase between us and it was full of contraband.
“Where’s your luggage?”
“We left it at the rink.”
The desk clerk bought the story and gave us a room but the jig was almost up when we tripped a burglar alarm smuggling beer through a fire escape. But that’s another story.)
I suppose every race was different, but there were things/events/stages of the race that you could anticipate. It never happened to a canoe I was in, but you heard stories of people throwing stones at canoes from the riverbank and from bridges during the section through the city. One tale told of a grade eleven who reacted by steering his canoe to shore, landing and ordering his crew to follow him and mete out a bit of rough justice to the stone throwers – who knows, it might even be true.
Most of it was non-eventful, there wasn’t much to see, though there was more than enough light to navigate coming from the homes and streetlights in the communities we were passing, places where in the months before and weeks to come we would be selling meat and honey.
The real crunch time in the race was passing upstream through the floodgates just south of St Norbert. By now, it was dawn. With the spring thaw only a month or so in the past, twin sheets of water were jetting through the two sluice gates and you could see a clear rise in the water level between the side on which you were approaching and the water beyond the gates – three or four feet, maybe more. You can see a picture someone has posted on flickr here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kidcontinuity/141142474/
It was a case of paddling as hard and as fast as you could to keep any sort of forward momentum. There may have been one or two members in every crew who required extra “encouragement” to put forward an acceptable amount of effort during the course of the race, but, at this point, no one needed encouragement to give every ounce he had. Your forward progress was very, very, slow – foot by foot. You crawled forward. I found it very, very, scary. And a great relief when, just when you felt you weren’t going to make it, you managed to get out of the strong current and out on the other side of the gate. I can’t think why it never occurred to us to portage around it.
Anyway, after that adrenaline rush, the rest of the race was pretty straightforward and you passed through countryside until you finally reached St Adolphe where you had a few hours sleep. The canoes usually got strung out during the night and I don’t recall any close finishes, though I expect some years there might well have been. I think my canoe came third in each of the three years I took part.
The race was a bit different my first year. Such was the water level that the River’s current was too strong to go upstream via the usual route. The solution was to change the route. We started at the school and paddled as far as Lockport where we portaged into the outlet of the Red River Floodway.
For anyone not familiar with the Floodway, I’ve pinched a bit of a descriptor from the Manitoba Historical Society’s website:
“It was during the spring of 1950 that Winnipeg experienced a flood that would eventually lead to the construction of the Red River Floodway. Over the course of the flood, 100,000 residents were evacuated from their homes. As the Red River rose, much of Winnipeg was inundated. After reviewing the impact of the flood, Manitoba Premier Duff Roblin sparked the idea of constructing a diversion channel around Winnipeg that could be used during extreme flood emergencies. Construction of the original floodway started in October 1962 and finished in March 1968, at a cost of $63 million. It was a major undertaking, resulting in the excavation of approximately 76.5 million cubic metres of earth. The floodway consists of a 47-km channel that, during flood periods, diverts part of the Red River’s flow around Winnipeg to the east and discharges back into the Red River near Lockport. Since its construction, and subsequent first use in 1969, the floodway has been operated numerous times and saved billions of dollars in flood damage”
Well, one of the times it has operated was in the spring of 1974. Obviously starting at the school meant the race was longer, maybe closer to 50 miles. But there was hardly any current in the Floodway. There was little or no man-made light along the whole distance, except in one place – the bridge where the Trans-Canada highway passed overhead about halfway through. The Floodway is one of those fabricated things that, maybe, you could see from space. It’s all straight lines. In the dark, the 30-mile trip past the grass-covered non-descript banks was very monotonous. In a way, it was the canoeing equivalent to snowshoeing across featureless prairie on a dark night, but even then it lacked what luminescence you would have got from the snow. It seemed to take forever.
We arrived at the entrance of the Floodway, just above the St Norbert gates, shortly after dawn on Saturday. I remember the water being so shallow that to get into the River itself we needed to get out and pull the canoe by its gunwales for the last hundred feet across a height of land that must keep water from going into the Floodway when the River is at normal level. That hundred feet was about as exciting as the whole Floodway experience got.
Here is a link to a picture someone has posted of the Floodway during the day. Imagine it at night. Blah.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/big_dadoo/528716639/
I can’t tell you anything about the town of St Adolphe itself; each year we camped on the riverbank outside of the town and got some sleep. I can’t quite remember if we stayed the night. The more I think about it the more I don’t think we did. I think later on Saturday we got back into the canoes and, as a group, headed back downriver to the school. That was twice the usual race distance, but because of the speed of the River’s current the return trip only took about the same amount of time as the race did.
I have a clear recollection of shooting through the sluice gates at St Norbert on the return trip in what must have been 1975, because one of the canoes had a radio on, turned up loud, and it was blasting out John Denver’s “Thank God I’m a country boy” which was topping the charts at the time. As we were passing through the gates the song had just got to the fiddle solo and I have a strong image in my mind of Dan Mahon standing up in the canoe he was in and holding his paddle blade up to his chin, holding the shaft out and up, and playing an “air fiddle” solo as the canoe swept through the standing waves below.
During the night, the flotilla drifted apart. I’m not sure how we dealt with the dam at Lockport. I think I would remember going through the lock as it would have been such a novel experience. We must have portaged I suppose. But by then you would have been able to smell home so strongly that you wouldn’t have noticed any associated hassle in doing a short portage.
Sometime later in the morning, you arrived back at the school. We carried our canoes up to the parallel line of telephone poles lying on their sides beside the path out to the kennels and set the canoes on this “rack”, before going to eat an end of snowshoe run type meal and then heading off to bed.