The Williams Lake Stampede Association has canceled their “Back In The Saddle Again” event scheduled for September 5th and 6th.
“On Friday afternoon, around 3:30, I believe it was Interior Health Authority issued a Health Order basically shutting down or severely restricting a number of events including outdoor organized events which is the part that affected us.” said former President of the Williams Lake Stampede Association, Tim Rolph. “An organized event could only have a maximum of 100 people and that is in place from our understanding until September 30th. So there’s no way we can hold our event with 100 people.”
Before the announcement came out, Rolph said the interest in this event was huge.
“The business community stepped up unbelievably with sponsorships. We were probably two and a half times above what we were hoping to get through sponsorship. Our ticket sales were doing extremely well and just the interest in the community was huge.” Everybody wanted to get out and do something. We were organizing what was going to be a really fun, family event, entertaining, and with absolutely zero notice it got pulled out from under us.”
Rolph added that the Williams Lake Stampede Association will start planning for next year and hopefully by July of 2022 rolls around we’ll be able to do something and that’s our focus now.