All images by Justin Foulkes

The heat is already ferocious when Tim O’Connell sits down for breakfast, his shy smile in shadow beneath the brim of his straw hat. Around him, families start the day with mugs of coffee, bowls of chilli beans and easygoing chat. ‘It’s a game of bumps and bruises,’ he says in the nonchalant manner of someone discussing the weekend’s DIY plans. ‘I’ve broken every knuckle, broke my shoulder, ripped my ear half off, torn my collarbone off my sternum, Thankfully, the good Lord fixed me up.’

In four hours, Tim will make the short walk from the park to the grandstand. He’ll tape up his hands, check his riding rope and climb on to the back of a horse that would like nothing better than to remove him as quickly as possible. A bareback rodeo rider for six years – and a horseman since he was knee-high – Tim is one of the sport’s top athletes, invited to take part in one of its top competitions: the Calgary Stampede.

‘I’m from a little small town in Iowa,’ he says, fingers resting on his belt buckle. ‘We got a stop sign and a bar, that’s pretty much it. It’s a whole different world here. Where else are you going to go to a rodeo where there’s 30,000 people in the stands at noon on a Monday?’

For 10 days every year, Calgary goes cowboy-mad. Well over a million people pour through the gates for the Stampede, each in the compulsory uniform of broadbrimmed hat, denim jeans, checked shirt and cowboy boots. Some skip the rodeo and agricultural exhibitions that have been the historical focus of the festival, and head straight to venues paying less obvious tribute to Canada’s Western heritage.

Streets of food stalls prove the old adage that if you can put it on a stick, deep-fry it then wrap it in bacon, everyone will want to eat it. At the enormous fairground, teenagers strap themselves into rides designed to fling them up and down and round and round until they passionately regret that last grilled-cheese doughnut. And in the outdoor bars, friends gather for cans of Stampede-branded Budweiser and a chance to ride the mechanical bull (‘Good job, little lady!’ yells the compère as the latest recruit stumbles away defeated).

Many visitors are fresh from a visit to the Alberta Boot Company and Smithbilt Hats, traditional Calgary outfitters for real and drugstore cowboys alike. At Alberta Boots, official maker of the Strathcona HighBrowns encasing the feet of the Royal Mounted Canadian Police, a stream of customers, from grizzled old men to young women in cut-off denims, strolls down the aisles, searching for that perfect pair: boots made from snakeskin, ostrich or stingray, left natural or dyed purple, yellow or blue.

‘The guys here wear cowboy boots every day so they spend money on them,’ says manager Tom Gerwing in the workshop where the boots are still made by hand as they have been since his grandfather founded the company. ‘In Calgary, people wear a $2,000 pair of boots to do the gardening.’ He owns four pairs himself, and is planning to make himself another from some alligator belly that’s just come in. Tom has worn none, however, in the saddle. He stops to examine the stitching in some oil-tanned cowhide, and smiles a rueful smile. ‘I don’t ride. I’m allergic to horses.’

Across town at Smithbilt, Gerald Tyshkewich bends over a blocking machine, running steam through the felt of a Calgary white hat to shape it. The company, the only one in Canada to hand-press hats, has made the headgear for pretty much every cowboy film made in Alberta, Brokeback Mountain included. Framed pictures of famous customers, from the Princess of Wales to Kevin Costner, grace the walls.

Local customers, each greeted with the familiarity of an old friend by the staff, are what keep the 100-year-old machines of Smithbilt ticking along though. ‘Many Calgarians will have six or seven hats,’ says Gerry, mopping his forehead. ‘One for formal occasions, one to wear to drink a beer, one to wear to work in.’ Remarking on the absence of ‘one to wear on a horse’, he laughs. ‘I went on a trail ride with my sweetie once, but I’m more of an urban cowboy.’

The city’s passion for its cowboy culture is very real, whether or not its inhabitants have any desire to ride off into the sunset on the back of a golden palomino. The heart of the Stampede is the same as it has been throughout its 104-year-old history. Families stroll through the agricultural hall, the sweet smell of dung heavy in the air, learning the history of ranching in Alberta while stopping to milk a cow called Grumpy Pants or lasso a wooden horse. Over in the Indian Village, an essential fixture since the very first festival, members of Siksika, Tsuu T’ina, Stoney, Piikani and Kainai tribes share tales from their tipis and invite all to join their stamping moccasins in a welcome dance.

There’s a tangible air of excitement as the rodeo events draw near come afternoon, thousands breaking from their chosen activities across the Stampede grounds to take their seats in the grandstand and look down on the dusty arena below.

In the wooden chutes at the back, Tim is ready to go. Other competitors are already done for the day, and sit out the back, stripped down and bandaged, waiting for their turn on the massage table. ‘I feel electricity in my bones in the chute,’ says Tim. ‘But when I slide down on to an animal’s back, everything shuts off. Instinct takes over – the horse gives it everything he’s got, and you fire it back with everything you’ve got.’

He slaps his face hard, and climbs over the fence on to his horse. The gates open – and there is a sudden explosion of force. The animal bursts into the arena, jumping and bucking, twirling and kicking. Tim is flipped about like his back might snap, but he clings on, one hand raised above his head. And then it’s over. Tim has managed to stay on for the eight seconds needed, and scored enough points to get through to the final and a shot at the £50,000 prize money. He jumps off and waves to the crowd, and the horse, apparently aware his job is done, trots off down the exit. 

A parade of events keep the spectators in their seats and away from the temptations of a five-litre ice-cream cone or foot-long pizza dog. Young boys with names like Wyatt and Timber compete in bull-riding and saddle bronco. Female riders, in the only Stampede sport they compete in, steer their horses around obstacles in as short a time as possible in the barrel-racing. The climax of the day takes place as the floodlights come on over the grandstand: chuck-wagon racing. Pulled by four horses, and with a barely comprehensible set of rules involving a plastic bucket and two outriders, carriages thunder around the cushioned track to the encouraging screams of the crowd.  

As with rodeo across the Americas, Stampede has its roots on the ranch. It’s a story that begins in the prairie that stretches out endlessly from Calgary. Here in the 1800s, in ranches so big they’d take days to traverse, cattle would roam free for much of the year, led back to their farms by cowboys each autumn. It was a huge operation with the men each taking several horses and supported by chuck (or meal) wagons throughout the round-up.

Legend has it that chuck-wagon racing was born when they challenged each other to get back to the farm first, excited to return after months under open skies. Rodeo originated from attempts to tame unruly horses; pretty soon, people started to come and watch; and pretty soon after that, money followed.

The grassland around Calgary is still very much ranch territory. As the retail parks at the edge of the city start to thin, wooden barns, water tanks and grain silos take their place, surrounded by fields of rapeseed and barley. Cows and horses mill about pastures whose boundaries lie far beyond the horizon. Drivers go for hours on the few roads that slice through the prairie and find few reasons to bother the steering wheel.

Fifty miles south of Calgary lies one of Alberta’s largest ranches, Bar U. Now a historic site, it was established in 1882, during the good old days when men were encouraged by the Canadian government to ride out west and make their fortune raising cattle on the vast empty tracts of grassland – in part, to prevent those pesky Americans to the south from doing so themselves.

Its red farm buildings have been restored, and house traditional farriers, workshops, stables and cookhouses. Giant black Percheron horses, for which the ranch was once famous worldwide, stand in the fields. And everywhere there are old posters advertising the very first Calgary Stampede. Bar U was intimately involved in establishing the inaugural festival in 1912, as a way to cling on to and celebrate the old ways in a fast-changing world.

When that change came, it galloped in on the back of an iron horse: the steam trains of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR). Work on the railway began in the late 19th century, dreamt up as a way to bring in more people to the prairies, and link the disparate provinces of Canada all the way from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Beef from Bar U, lying in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, was used to feed workers laying down the tracks that tunnelled and twisted through that mighty range.

The grey silhouetted peaks that can be seen rising to the west of the ranch are but dimples compared to the crests and folds that lie beyond. It took four long years to find a way through them, with routes established by surveyors hacking their way through the undergrowth with axes, and equipment and tools carried in by packhorse.

It’s a lot easier to travel around the Rockies these days. Scenic parkways whisk people away from the prairies and up into the hills through gradually thickening forests of spruce and Douglas fir. Granite cliffs rear up from the valley floor, and behind them, more cliffs, and more, and more, all the way down to New Mexico. On bikes and in motorhomes, some so enormous you’d want to pack emergency supplies before setting out to circumnavigate them, tourists amble happily along, each new bend delivering some new and better reason for stupefied astonishment than the last.

Wildlife jams form when a magnificently antlered elk or snuffling brown-bear cub is spotted by the side of the road, entirely indifferent to the traffic that soon builds up around them, camera phones appearing on sticks out of the windows. Park rangers quickly arrive, to educate the majority – and, in one instance, to politely retrieve a fleece-clad gentleman striding confidently towards a huge grizzly feeding by the railway tracks.

The stars in this roll call of natural bedazzlement are the lakes that lie high up in the mountains, so bright and blue and still they look like coloured jelly. The railroads that first brought tourists to the area also brought in the men who would take them far beyond the tracks. Many of the CPR’s packers seized the opportunity to start work as outfitters, opening up trails through the region with the help of local Stoney Indian guides.

Packer Tom Wilson, who thought nothing of walking 70 miles for a lunch appointment, was the first white man to lay eyes upon the emerald waters of Lake Louise, exclaiming as it came into view, ‘As God is my judge, I never in all my explorations saw such a matchless scene.’ His employers wasted no time improving on its matchlessness with the addition of an enormous hotel.

The discoveries of Peyto Lake, a long curling tongue of water ringed by glaciers, and Moraine Lake, of so vivid a turquoise it hurts the eyes, soon followed. The CPR quickly set about making the lakes more accessible, building roads and teahouses, and providing every possible comfort for the 20th-century adventurer.

It is still possible to get a taste of those maiden days of exploration, to be Tom Wilson for a while. ‘This is the Canada of a thousand years ago,’ yells Julie Canning from her horse, holding on to her hat to duck under the looping branches of a tree. ‘We take people up to places even the locals don’t know.’

Co-owner of Banff Trail Riders, Julie and her team of packers, guides, mules and horses lead expeditions up through the Rockies’ back-country, away from the roads and the rails and into territory that feels as little trodden now as it did in the 19th century. On multi-day treks, horses and their human cargo plod slowly up and down narrow mountain trails, splash through rivers, and accelerate to a mild trot through meadows carpeted in scarlet Indian paintbrush and purple fireweed. Meals are taken at the banks of lakes hard to pinpoint on a map, hawks wheeling overhead and silver cutthroat trout flipping in the water. At night, in tents on the banks of the Cascade River, haunting tales of ghost encounters and bear attacks are insufficient barriers to sleep after a day high in the Rockies.

In their last job before they turn in for a few hours, guides Jimmy Gaudry and Chris Eggleton re-shoe their horses, hammering nails into the soft outer hoofs while country music plays from a radio resting on a tree trunk. Behind them, the golden light that ignited the rockface of Cascade Mountain at sunset is starting to fade. Chris, from New South Wales in Australia where his family own a ranch, planned on coming out for a short time and then heading home. He pulls a hoof between his legs and says, through a mouthful of nails, ‘This area is so beautiful though, I’m struggling to find a good reason to leave.’

Jimmy, a second-generation guide rider and renowned breaker-in of difficult horses, leans over the fences of the camp’s corral, stroking his horse’s nose. ‘I rode bareback at Stampede one year,’ he says in a slow drawl, cigarette hanging from his lips, the ash splashing on to the red maple leaf decorating his new leather boots. ‘But then I figured it was easier to train horses not to buck.’

Job done, Banff’s modern-day cowboys pack up their tools and head for camp. Chris pulls out a battered guitar and sings a few tunes by the river, behind him the dark shapes of the Rockies visible against the wide, starlit sky. A contented whinnying drifts over from the corral. All is well in the mountains for another night, and it’s time for bed – tomorrow is another day in the saddle.