On the Thursday before the fair opens, downtown Cloverdale fills with beds. Real ones, on casters, shoved down the street at a dead run by costumed teams while the Chamber of Commerce keeps time — a race held every spring since 1977, and one that went briefly, absurdly virtual in 2020 and 2021. It is an odd overture to a rodeo. It is also a fair summary of the place: a country fair first held in 1888 that has never outgrown its own sense of humour, bolted to a bucking arena that has spent much of the past two decades at the centre of an argument about livestock, tradition, and what a paying crowd should be asked to watch.
The first Surrey fair went up in September 1888, in and around the Municipal Hall — tables of preserves, pens of stock, the ordinary annual bookkeeping of a farming district taking its own measure. For half a century that was the shape of it. In 1938 the fair moved to the Cloverdale Fairgrounds and has stayed there ever since, on flat delta ground where the Fraser Valley's farms begin to give way to Surrey's suburbs.
Twice, early on, the fair simply stopped. There was none in 1917 or 1918, and none from 1942 through 1944. Both wars took the young men and the surplus grain elsewhere, and a livestock show in the Fraser Valley was not the priority it had been. Those are the only interruptions the record notes for more than a century afterward.
The rodeo is the younger half by nearly six decades. It was first held in 1945 and caught on at once — popular enough that by 1947 the Lower Fraser Valley Agricultural Association had taken it over outright. The Fraser Valley Exhibition Society assumed control of the fair in 1962, and in 1994 the whole enterprise was renamed the Cloverdale Rodeo & Exhibition Association.
The decisive change came in 1996, when organizers folded the old autumn fall fair into the May rodeo weekend so that both happened at once. That merger produced the event people recognize today: a Victoria Day long weekend, Friday through Monday, in which two rural traditions run side by side. In the arena, roughstock riding measured in seconds. In the barns and exhibition halls, the far slower business of judging jam.
In May 2007 a calf died during a roping event. The following day, activists from the Vancouver group Liberation BC walked into the ring in protest — part of a pattern that had already seen demonstrators unfurl banners inside the grounds and handcuff themselves to the gates of the bucking chutes. Pamela Anderson wrote to the rodeo's corporate sponsors urging them to end their partnerships, calling calf roping "particularly cruel."
What the association did next was unusual for a rodeo. It cut four timed events — tie-down roping, team roping, cowboy cow milking and steer wrestling — and in doing so disqualified itself from the Canadian Professional Rodeo Association circuit. Three roughstock events remained: bareback bronc riding, saddle bronc riding and bull riding, alongside barrel racing. Cloverdale traded its place on the national circuit for the change. The CPRA itself dropped cowboy cow milking as a sanctioned event after 2009.
Take the arena away and a complete fair is still standing. Cooking, baking and canning competitions fill the halls. So do arts and crafts displays, horticulture tables and livestock exhibits — the categories have barely changed since the Municipal Hall days, because the point of them has not changed either. A grower still wants to know whose dahlias beat theirs.
Saturday brings a parade through Cloverdale. A midway runs games and rides for the duration. Children have 4-H club displays and entertainers of their own. It is the half of the weekend that draws no protesters and no television cameras, and it is the half that has been running longest.
COVID-19 closed the fairgrounds in 2020 and kept them closed through 2022 — three lost springs, matching the longest gap either world war had managed. The fair returned in 2023.
It came back with appetite. The 2025 edition ran May 16 to 19, adding the South Gate Action Zone, a Roll-A-Rama and a Lasso Lounge, with more than fifty musical performances spread across six stages. Then in 2026 the grounds recorded their largest crowd ever: better than 82,000 people, for what the association counted as the 135th Cloverdale Country Fair and the 78th Cloverdale Rodeo — the biggest in the event's history. The next one is booked for May 20 to 24, 2027, and the beds will roll the night before.
Cloverdale Fairgrounds sit at 49.115°N, 122.727°W, on the Surrey uplands between the Serpentine and Nicomekl lowlands. Best viewed from 2,500–3,500 ft AGL: the oval of the Stetson Bowl and the broad arc of the Agriplex roof are the giveaway, with the fairgrounds' parking aprons standing out against surrounding cropland. Langley Regional (CYNJ) lies about 7 nm east-southeast and is the natural VFR base; Abbotsford International (CYXX) is roughly 17 nm east, Boundary Bay (CZBB) about 11 nm west-southwest, Pitt Meadows (CYPK) about 9 nm north, and Vancouver International (CYVR) some 19 nm west. Note that this airspace sits beneath the Vancouver terminal area and inside the Lower Mainland's busy training corridor — check VTA charts before transiting. May weekends bring the valley's characteristic morning marine cloud, usually burning off by midday to give clear views of Mount Baker on the southeast horizon.