The sodden pandemonium of the Beaver River Rat Race was once our region’s most distinctive spring tradition.
By Willy Waterton // Photo by Willy Waterton
As winter lost its grip, the Beaver River, swelling with melting snow from her headwaters above Eugenia, rushed down the valley to Georgian Bay. Behind the doors of barns, drive sheds, garages and basements, homemade boats (if you could call them that) were taking shape as many locals prepared for a rite of spring and a chance to win the coveted Golden Beaver trophy.
The Beaver River Rat Race, according to legend, began officially in 1957 as a way for a few valley folk to let off steam after a long winter. Just as Ratty says to Mole in Kenneth Grahame’s classic children’s novel The Wind in the Willows, “Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing—absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”
Locals certainly took Ratty’s advice to heart. The name for the race derived after an early group of participants emerged from the Beaver River in Clarksburg wet, cold and looking like a pack of drowned rats. Starting in 1964, the Rotary Club, and later the Beaver Valley Athletic Association (BVAA), used the late-April boat race from Heathcote to Clarksburg as a fundraiser for the Easter Seals camp at Blue Mountain and local minor sports.
But everything changed in 1976, after footage from the Rat Race was used in a Carling O’Keefe beer TV commercial and the rest of North America caught onto the event’s wacky appeal. The year 1970 had 40 entries; 1971 marked the only drowning during the sanctioned event, when a young man from Barrie was trapped in a log jam; 1976 had 100 entries; and by 1978 there were triple that number and over 20,000 Rat Race spectators came to the valley.
With the word out, competitors arrived from not only Ontario but other provinces and the United States. Along with more entries came more spectators, more traffic jams and way too much illegal drinking. The cost of policing alone mounted to an estimated $120,000 a year. Neighbours and farmers were getting fed up with the garbage, public urinating and trespassing. Not to mention the abandoned boats and debris left in the river.
By 1980, the year I took this black-and-white photo at Haines dam in Clarksburg, there were over 400 boats entered and up to 40,000 spectators descending on Heathcote, Clarksburg and Thornbury. The Ontario Provincial Police, Ministry of Natural Resources and North Grey Conservation Authority were all expressing concerns about safety at the event, not to mention the Rotary Club and BVAA who are quoted in the 1980 Valley Courier Rat Race supplement as “having a tiger by the tail.”
The only way I could move from one photography location to another was by bicycle as all the local roads were blocked with traffic. The OPP even brought in a helicopter for traffic control and safety! The event had become too overwhelming to safely run, so 1981 was the final year of the race.
You can still paddle the Beaver River and “mess about in boats” as Ratty suggested, but the crazy days of the Rat Race are now just part of Beaver Valley lore.
