October 1, 2010

Merritt will host its first countrywide motorcycle rally next July. The Great Canadian Bike Rally is scheduled to take place over four days, from July 14-17, 2011.

Active since last July, the Great Canadian Bike Rally Association is putting together the event and donating proceeds to the B.C. Children's Hospital Foundation and Circle Square Ranch Children's Fund. The association is made up of locals.

In a statement released last week, the association's president, Mike Fairfield, says, "Our community is planning to roll out the red carpet for motorcycle riders and enthusiasts from all over the country."

Fairfield says Merritt is the perfect location for a first-class motorcycle rally.

"We are already well known for putting on world-class festivals, we have the sunniest dry climate in the country, and riding in the Interior is second to none.

"We will be catering to many professionals that have made substantial investments in their bikes. Regardless of make or model, the bikes themselves will be a main attraction."

Organizers say the rally schedule will feature outdoor concerts, show bikes, builders, vendors and plenty of riding activities in the evening.

Daytime events will take place mainly in the city centre and include entertainment and motorcycle demonstrations.

As for riders who want to hit the open road "poker runs and dice runs" with stops in surrounding towns like Spences Bridge, Ashcroft, Kamloops, and Quilchena are planned.

Concerts, including beer gardens and camping, are planned for the festival grounds at night. A shuttle bus service will be in place connecting Merritt to Kamloops.

Although the Great Canadian Bike Rally is now proceeding, it nearly collapsed in the face of a potential rival during the summer.

The association sent a delegation to the City of Merritt council on Aug. 10.

At that meeting, the council was also supposed to receive a presentation from another group, Ray Sasseville representing Sturgis North, about holding a motorcycle rally with similar dates in July.

Fairfield told council that locals would not proceed if the Sturgis North event went ahead.

"Being our first year, we have enough challenges to face.

Some councillors suggested that both organizers combine their efforts.

"There is a possibility he may wish to be involved but we have yet to see that," Fairfield replied.

"I would rather do this as a community."

Sasseville was out of the country and could not appear before council Aug. 10. He then cancelled his second scheduled appearance Aug. 24, when he was due to meet with both the council and Fairfield.

Coun. Mike Goetz urged the City of Merritt to endorse the local rally over the Sturgis North event, a step the city has now taken.

Ski bum turned software entrepreneur turned elite rally car driver Patrick Richard takes on the back roads around Merritt this weekend at the Pacific Forest Rally

Impressive Impreza: Rally car champion Patrick Richard is happy to give the 2011 Subaru WRX a workout. Photograph by: Ian Lindsay, Vancouver Sun, Vancouver Sun

If only this were a January day -- the kind of bone-chilling West Coast day that leaves a sheen of ice up and down this twisty road that would make an ice-road trucker call in sick.

"The best thing about driving on ice is you can't actually stop," Patrick Richard says matter-of-factly as we reach the apex of one of the many tight corners between West Vancouver and his hometown of Squamish. "So the way to be fast is to constantly have the car skating in a drift. Boy, I really love that."

We're driving north in a 2011 Subaru WRX, an all-wheel drive sport sedan built with roads like this in mind.

Instead of through snow and ice, however, we're driving through a driving rain, and in Richard's sure hands, the Impreza hugs the road tightly through the corners and its boxer engine opens up with an understated growl on the infrequent straight bits.

If Patrick Richard were a pro hockey player, he'd have his name on fans' jerseys across the nation and he wouldn't be able to eat out without signing an autograph or two.

But since the 36-year-old makes his living racing, tuning and selling high-performance rally cars, his fame is limited to a more discerning crowd.

Still, he is, without argument, the most-accomplished pro rally driver this country has ever produced. That he did it pretty much all on his own in a province where, for decades, the sport was moribund, and that he didn't even compete in a rally event until his mid-20s makes the Quebecborn, Nova Scotia-raised racer's story a compelling one.

The same can be said for the 2011 WRX, a turbocharged, performance-based version of the Impreza that marks a decade of steady sales growth for the all-wheel drive model in Canada. New for 2011 is a wider body and quad muffler tips integrated into a rear diffuser. Interior updates are also limited to cosmetic ones.

Richard was a Subaru convert long before his now decade-long association with the manufacturer, a relationship that has grown to the point that today his Squamish-based shop and team, Rocket Rally Racing, is factory sponsored and supported like few others in the world.

"The great thing about this 2011 Impreza WRX is that it now shares the same body style as the STi," Richard notes as we pass traffic in the slow lane. "Meaning it has the same wide fender flares and the big tire and wheel package. That's a big step up for the WRX."

Richard's own ascendance to the dizzying, and dangerous, heights of World Cup Rally racing started quite literally by accident. Okay, quite a few accidents (see Big Wheels, next page).

Growing up your typical skateboard-, snowboard-obsessed Canadian kid, Richard left Nova Scotia for the University of Waterloo in the early 1990s to pursue a computer science degree. That school's famed co-op program was the main draw to the East Coast student -- not because he could make some money while earning his degree, but "because a couple of really good friends moved to Whistler to be ski bums, and I knew I could get a co-op in Vancouver and visit them."

He did, with Microsoft no less, and instead of heading back to class after his first work term, he did another. Then another.

"I really liked B.C. -- and snowboarding -- and ended up doing a bunch of co-op terms in a row, then was just hired by Microsoft."

The call of the mountain proved too much, so he moved from Vancouver up to Whistler full time and set up his own business, eventually developing software that enabled Blackcomb to accept and keep secure credit card numbers submitted online.

He would spend seven years living in the mountain resort, and by the time he left he'd found a new winter passion.

"Toward the end up there, every time it snowed we'd get really excited. Not for boarding, but for driving."

After one too many off-road excursions, his friends confronted him.

"Basically, they said they would never drive with me again, so I started to look around for ways to have fun driving but in a controlled setting," Richard explains.

He tried auto-crossing, but felt hindered by the fact it wasn't a fastest-wins proposition, but rather a closest to a predetermined time deal.

So in the spring of 1999, he and longtime friend Ian McCurdy entered Richard's daily driver Subaru in a rally in Calgary.

"We got there totally green. Didn't know how it works, didn't know the rules. I even had my snowboard racks on the roof still," he recalls with a laugh, though race organizers were not amused.

"It had snowed the first day, and I was so slow, I was trying to wave the sweep truck by me. But the next day we did really well, and that was what really hooked."

In retrospect, he admits that up to that point his driving activities had been "reckless, dangerous, not safe."

In the heavily regulated world of rally races, "It was organized with safety gear and medical crews. "And I could do what I love without losing my licence."

Instead, he quickly got his racer's licence, and in just a couple of years made a name for himself -- to the point that pro teams were offering him rides.

In 2002, Subaru Canada came calling with a factory team ride, and the next year Richard lived the dream by competing in the top level of rally racing, the FIA World Rally Championship.

Today he's a four-time Canadian Rally Championship driver champion and is the current reigning champ heading into this weekend's Pacific Forest Rally in Merritt, the only B.C. stop on the national calendar.

"You'll get a chance to see some of the top drivers in Canada taking their cars sideways over big jumps," he says of this weekend's action on 200 kilometres of closed public roads (for complete details visit www.pacificforestrally.com).

Just as the Impreza WRX has improved and matured since its 2001 debut in British Columbia, so, too, has the province's rally scene.

"We've come a long way in terms of organized events here in B.C.," says Richard as we pull into the Rocket Rally Racing shop in a Squamish industrial area. "There's six rallies in a B.C.-Alberta series now, and also some rally cross events on loose surfaces."

He's also a big supporter of the Sea to Sky Rally Club.

"We're doing a lot to provide an outlet for kids who are like I was -- only in a safe and controlled environment," he says of his wild and crazy driving days, adding the club works with ICBC and the local RCMP to promote safe and responsible racing (visit www.rallybc.com).

But if you think getting married and having two sons has tamed the hard-core, wild side of Patrick Richard, type 'Rally BDC Pat Richard" into YouTube, and find out why he still believes you just can't kill a Subaru.

First Cars: "When I was 16 my parents had a Volvo 740 turbo station wagon . . . I was sliding it all over the place.

At 23, Richard got his own car -- a 1983 VW Sirocco -- in a trade for his mountain bike. "We used to take that thing up and down the ski runs, and two weeks after I got it I rolled it."

A Whistler junkyard tour revealed a 1972 Fiat 128, "and we souped it up and built a jump in one of the big mountain parking lots. My friend was following me in his truck over the ramp, but I got hung up on it and he crashed into me. Somehow we figured out he owed me a car, so he gave me a 1976 Ford Fiesta. It was cool because it had a 1.6-litre engine, the same as Formula Ford races, so I put a bunch of performance parts on it. . . . I ended flipping it off a cliff."

After going to the hospital to get checked out, he headed to a bar to relive the day. "And there was rally racing on TV. My friends and I are like, 'Hey, that's what we like to do.' I saw that, and that day I knew that's what I had to do."

Within days, Richard found and bought a 1993 Subaru GL10. Brown. For $300.

"That car was cool because it had this handle, sort of where the hand-brake would be, that would lock the differential . . . you could do a really long four-wheel drift. We called it 'the hockey stop.' "

". . . we took it up the microwave towers road and drove down the hill taking every jump and hitting every rock. By the bottom of the hill all the glass was smashed out, all four tires were flat, and it was still going. We couldn't kill it!"

He's owned Subarus ever since.

Current cars: 2010 Subaru Forester XT; 1993 Subaru Legacy Turbo (with a 2010 drivetrain); and soon a 2011 Subaru Impreza STi sedan

August 13, 2010

(in photo)First city council of Merritt 1911. Back row L-R: Alderman A.P. Boyd, Alderman D. Munro, Alderman N. McMIllan, Mayor Issac Eastwood, Alderman F.A. Reid, Alderman J.A. Menzies, Alderman A. Jackson Front row sitting: H. Priest (city clerk), M.L. Grimmett (city solicitor). photo courtesy of Nicola Valley Museum and Archives

The City of Merritt will commemorate Merritt’s 100th birthday with a series of special events, the first of which will be a New Year’s Eve party this December.

Following the first meeting of the 1911 Merritt Centennial Celebration Committee on what to do for Merritt’s biggest birthday, Mayor Roline says the idea is for the City to host a series of events to build up to the final big party next summer.

“Thoughts are to kick off with a New Years eve party on December 31, 2010, then on April 1, which is the official inaugural of Merritt into an incorporated municipality, a re-enactment of that meeting, with a reception after,” says Roline.

“July 1 would be a combined Canada Day-Merritt 100th celebration,” she adds.

The biggest event is slated for the week of July 27 through to the August long weekend for a “big homecoming.”

Coinciding with Merritt’s big year are two reunions, one for Merritt Secondary School alumni, and the other for Friends of the 50s and 60s.

With the 100-year anniversary, the Nicola Valley Museum Archives Association will get to update its booklet on Merritt’s 75th birthday.

“There are just slight revisions being made to it and updated pages,” says Brodie Douglas, who handles publications for the Archives.

The booklet provides a history of Merritt and relevant symbols of identity. Archives director Mavis Polmans will be putting it together.

Merritt’s Centennial Committee will meet again on August 19 in the Community Room at City Hall.

Roline says they have yet to formalize the dates of key events.

“It will be a busy, fun-filled year for the entire community.”

The Centennial Committee meeting on July 28 was attended by members of the Museum, Heritage Commission, Baillie House, Merritt Theatre Society, and the Chamber of Commerce.

“This committee will continue to be built from residents of Merritt, as there will be a great need for a large number of volunteers to bring it all together,” says Roline

“We are looking at the communities service groups to also be involved, as anytime there are large groups of people, there needs to be food, drinks etc.”

Roline adds that several other groups in Merritt are also celebrating their 100th next year and will be holding their celebrations in conjunction with the 1911 Celebrations.

Published: September 21, 2010

(in photo:Until the introduction of machinery in the late 1930’s all logging was done by hand with horses.Photo submitted

The Nicola Valley has long been supported by the forests that surround it. Logging has played an integral part in the development of the local economy.

In the early 1870’s, several small, family run mills were operating near Merritt. All the lumber produced was used locally in the construction of homes, schools, businesses and churches.

In the early 1900’s, the introduction of railways, and the development of mining in the area created a boom in the forest industry. As the population increased to support the industry, the city of Merritt grew to support the population. Before long, Merritt transitioned from a strictly mining town to a diverse community that was partially supported by timber dollars.

Up until the introduction of machinery in the late 1930’s, all logging was done by hand and with horses. Small mills were built near stands of timber, and logs were moved either down the local rivers, or on the railway into town. Evidence of hand and horse logging can be seen in local archives and antique shops.

By 1940, as the industry became more mechanized and, therefore, efficient, larger mills were constructed on the outskirts of town. Two significant local mills,Tolko and Aspen Planers, still operate on these original sites.