Between Mount Robson and McBride in British Columbia the highway runs in the Robson Valley, beautiful farmland with mountains on both sides of the valley which the Fraser River runs through. Not much else going on except a few cows, some horses, billboards and the like. I spotted a billboard I had not seen before, normally they are for hotels or tourist sites and the like. What the heck is that??
History in central BC isn't as long as in Eastern Canada the history in this part of Canada really only picks up in the early 1800s with the start of the fur trade, the Northwest Company first then around 1820 they were taken over by the Hudson’s Bay Company.
Starting in the early 1800s there were a series of fur trading posts all over western Canada, a few of note still exist, and still may have a Bay store, but none of them trade furs anymore. You may know a few, Fort McLeod (AB), Fort McMurray(AB), Fort St John, Fort Nelson, Prince George (Fort George) and Fort St James.
Fort St James is a National Historic Site, It’s very authentic, most of the buildings are original, so 1805ish, and in summer they hire actors to play period characters and give the place some life. It is about a 90 minute drive from Prince George in kind of the wrong direction so it's never right up there on the "hey let's go to Ft St James for lunch" list of things to do on a lazy summer afternoon.
So. Here we are back at the billboard we encountered between Mount Robson and McBride, from way back in paragraph 1. There is this billboard with HUGE chickens running across the bottom of the billboard and in HUGE letters across the top: FT ST JAMES.
Just below the Fort St James in a much smaller font size:
"World Class Chicken Racing"
Exactly. There was no way we could miss the World Class Chicken Races (WCCR).
So, we went, and it was amazing, and it was everything that you could ever imagine it to be, maybe more. They allowed betting on who the winner would be, I managed to pick the winner in the first of 2 races held on the day. I won a button that says I won at the chicken races. So, World Champion I guess? I think the second race may have been rigged, a duck seemed to have pulled off the victory in that race.
After the chicken races we visited the rest of the of the historic site, (which is where the WCCR are held) and had lunch, the setting is very nice. The parks staff do a great job, but none of the rest of it matched the excitement of the WCCR.
So after lunch and visiting the gift shop for commemorative t-shirts we headed back to Prince George content in the knowledge that we had witnessed a world class sporting event, 90 minutes from Prince George, even if it was in the wrong direction to be considered fashionable.
Enjoy!
Dean
