Four Seasons, Two of Them Short

The real start of festival season in Grande Prairie is not an event. It is the first afternoon in May when someone at the office shows up in shorts and nobody says a word, because everyone has quietly agreed that it counts now. The snowbanks in the Walmart parking lot will be there another two weeks. Doesn't matter. Summer has been declared.

What follows is short, loud and heavily scheduled, because people here know exactly how much time they've got.

Stompede comes first, out at Evergreen Park around the turn from May into June, and it sets the tone. Chuckwagons, rodeo, a midway, and a fair chance of mud. The honest advice is to skip the rides and sit in the grandstand for the wagons. There is nothing else in town that sounds like four teams coming around the last turn, and nothing else that makes a crowd of otherwise reasonable adults stand up and yell at horses. Bring a jacket. Late spring in the Peace has a sense of humour.

July belongs to the small towns. Nearly every community with a rodeo ground and a hall runs a summer fair or a sports day, and the pleasure is in how little they've changed. Pie tables. Slo-pitch. A parade that takes eleven minutes and includes at least one fire truck and a kid on a decorated bike. Drive out to one you've never been to. The canola will be blooming along the way, a yellow so loud it looks like a mistake.

Then there's Bear Creek Folk Festival in August, in Muskoseepi Park, which is the best weekend of the year in this city and not especially close. Lawn chairs in rows, the creek down the slope, music drifting across the park as the evening goes blue. Some years the wildfire smoke rolls in and turns the sun orange, and people cough a little and stay anyway. That tells you most of what you need to know about the place.

Here is the unpopular opinion: September is better than all of it, and nobody has built a festival around it, which is probably why. The combines are out. The aspens along the Peace River valley go gold, and the drive to Dunvegan, down to the old suspension bridge and the mission grounds, is worth more than any ticket you'll buy all summer. The Kleskun Hills, those strange little badlands east of town, look their best in low autumn light. And out at Saskatoon Island, the trumpeter swans that gave this city its nickname are gathering to leave. No stage, no lineup. Go anyway.

Winter doesn't get festivals so much as endurance events with snacks. Christmas lights go up across the city and in the yards of people with more ambition and a longer extension cord than the rest of us. Nitehawk, south of town along the Wapiti, keeps the ski hill running for as long as the season allows. The skating in Muskoseepi is the civilized option, provided you define civilized loosely at minus twenty-eight. And on the right clear night, well past supper, the northern lights put on the only show in the region that is both free and completely unpredictable.

It's a lopsided calendar. Three crowded months, one perfect one, and a long quiet stretch where the entertainment is mostly the sky. Pack a lawn chair in August and a block heater cord in January. Around here, the calendar assumes you own both.