Road to Radium: The Columbia Valley Classics Show & Shine, From a Shop That Makes the Trip

The Columbia Valley Classics Show & Shine takes over Radium Hot Springs, BC on the third September weekend — September 18 and 19 in 2026, show day on the Saturday. More than a thousand classics fill the Springs Golf Course driving range. From Edmonton it is roughly 550 kilometres of the best driving in the country, which is exactly the point.

What is the Radium Show & Shine?

It is a village handing itself over to old cars for a weekend. The Columbia Valley Classics Car Club has run the show for decades — 2026 is the 36th annual — and the club describes an annual showing of over 1,000 classic cars on the golf course driving range, with the mountains standing straight up behind the rows.[1] Local reporting from 2024 counted roughly 800 registered vehicles plus a few hundred more that turn up and cruise without ever signing a form.[3]

The scale matters less than the shape of the thing. This is not a mall parking lot with pop-up tents. The whole valley participates: a poker run winds between the villages on the Friday, and in recent years the weekend has carried a fire-department pancake breakfast, a market, music in the park, and an unofficial cruise past the seniors homes in Invermere so the people who bought these cars new get a front-row seat.[3] Hotels fill. Restaurants run out of things. The club is blunt that the whole village benefits, and the village acts like it.

The field itself runs the full spectrum — trailer queens, rat rods, survivors wearing every kilometre honestly, and restomods that started life as farm trucks. Nobody is above or beneath the show. The one hard rule is temperament: the club posts zero tolerance for burnouts and stunting, and means it.[1] It is a show about cars, not about noise.

When is it in 2026, and how do you enter?

The verified 2026 details, straight from the club’s pages:

Friday, September 18 is the warm-up: the poker run — the eighth annual — tours the valley from late morning, and registration opens at the Radium Hot Springs Centre. Saturday, September 19 is the show, running through the day at the Springs Golf Course.[1] Registration is $25 plus a booking fee per vehicle online, or $30 cash in person on the Friday or at the administration tent Saturday morning.[2]

One detail worth reading twice: registering does not reserve a spot on the field. Volunteers park the show first come, first served, and the parking gates close at 11 a.m. — often effectively earlier, because the field fills. Arrive early or arrive a spectator.[2]And because schedules, fees, and hours move a little every year, treat the club’s official page as the authority and check it before you commit a weekend to the drive.[1]

How do you prep a classic for the Edmonton-to-Radium drive?

The usual route runs south on the QE2 to Calgary, west on the Trans-Canada past Canmore and Banff, then south at Castle Junction onto Highway 93 — over Vermilion Pass at the Continental Divide, down the length of Kootenay National Park, and finally through the red rock walls of Sinclair Canyon, which drops you directly into the village. Call it 547 kilometres and something under six hours in a modern car.[4] In a sixty-year-old vehicle, plan a full day. There is also the quieter option — Highway 11 west through Rocky Mountain House to Saskatchewan River Crossing, then south down 93 through Lake Louise — which trades divided highway for scenery and fewer fuel stops.

The mountain leg is what the car has to be ready for. Long climbs work the cooling system; long descents work the brakes; and late September in the passes can mean frost at dawn and weather that changes by the hour. The pre-trip list this shop runs on its own vehicles:

• Cooling system, honestly assessed. Coolant condition, hoses, belts, radiator cap, fan operation. A marginal system that survives city errands will announce itself on the grade out of the Bow Valley. Fix it at home, not in a pull-out.
• Brakes, for the way down. The descent from the Divide is long, and drum brakes fade when they cook. Fresh fluid, adjusted shoes, and the discipline to downshift and let the engine hold the truck back instead of riding the pedal.
• Every fluid checked, every leak known. Oil, coolant, transmission, differential, brake fluid. A known seep is a note on the checklist; an unknown one is a roadside diagnosis in a dead zone.
• A spares kit that matches the car. Belts, upper and lower hoses, points and condenser if the ignition still runs them, a fuel pump, fuses, clamps, a litre of oil, and the tools to fit all of it. Parts stores get sparse past Castle Junction.
• Tires judged by age, not tread. Mountain corners at highway speed are the wrong place to learn what fifteen-year-old rubber does. Check the date codes.
• A fuel plan. Stations thin out inside the parks, and the fuel your carburetor likes may not be at every pump. Top up in Canmore or Banff and know your honest range.
• Cold-morning kit. Layers, a scraper, and a block of patience. September frost on a show morning is normal up there; snow on the pass is not rare enough to ignore. Watch the forecast the week before.

None of this is exotic. It is the same mechanical honesty any long trip demands, applied to a vehicle old enough to have opinions. The cars that make the run every year are not the newest or the shiniest — they are the sorted ones.

Our road to Radium

Most years, this shop makes the trip. It has become the closest thing the calendar has to a standing appointment — the reels we have posted from the road tell the story better than a paragraph can, but the shape of it is always the same. Leave Edmonton early enough to see the shop lights in the mirror. Coffee somewhere south of Red Deer. The moment past Canmore when the windshield fills with rock and the whole cab goes quiet. And then Sinclair Canyon, where the walls close in red and tight and spit you out into a village that is already full of idling V8s.

The show is Saturday. The reason is the road.

Highway 93 in the third week of September is its own rolling show. You start recognizing the silhouettes two lanes over — a stepside here, a tri-five there, everybody southbound for the same reason, everybody waving. By Castle Junction it feels less like traffic and more like a convoy that never organized itself.

There is a professional excuse for going, and it is even true: a thousand cars on one field is a thousand solutions to the same problems we argue about all winter — stance, cooling, wiring routes, colour in mountain light instead of shop light. Ideas come home in the phone and end up on the whiteboard. The trucks on our builds page are built for exactly this kind of trip — that is the standard, a classic that can leave at dawn, cross two mountain passes, and idle through a village without drama. More on how the shop thinks about that on the about page. But the honest reason is simpler: it is the best weekend of the season, and it marks the turn of the year.

How do you get show-ready before the trip?

Show-ready starts with road-ready, because a car that arrives on a flatbed with a cooked head gasket is not getting judged on its paint. The mechanical sorting above wants to happen weeks out, not the Thursday before — anything the inspection turns up needs time for parts, and September is when every shop calendar in Alberta is already full of people who had the same idea. If the car needs real sorting first, that is what the restoration service page covers, and the earlier the conversation starts, the better the odds it happens this season.

The cosmetic pass is the easy part, and a golf course field rewards honesty over money. Wash before you leave and again when you arrive, because 550 kilometres of highway will put a film on anything. Clean glass and bright trim read from thirty feet; a tidy engine bay and a clean underside reward the people who crouch, and at Radium they crouch. Bring your own rags and waterless wash, a chair, and the patience to answer the same three questions all afternoon — that last one is most of what a show is.

If the plan is bigger than this September — if the truck in your garage is supposed to be the one you drive down Highway 93 some year soon — send photos through the quote page and say exactly that. A build with a destination attached gets scoped differently, and better.

Why is Radium the last show before storage season?

Look at the calendar. The third weekend of September sits right on the hinge of the Alberta season — after it come the first hard frosts, the first sanding trucks, and the end of honest driving weather. For most of the classics that make the trip, the run home from Radium is the last long drive of the year, and there is something right about that: the season ends with the best road instead of a battery tender.

Use it. The drive home is a rolling inspection — every noise, seep, and flat spot the trip surfaced is information, and it is freshest the week you get back. Write the list while the car is still warm, because those items are next spring’s work order, and winter is when shop time is easiest to book. Then put the car away properly — fuel, fluids, rubber, rodents, and battery all handled, not just a cover thrown over optimism. The full procedure is in the winter storage guide, and it is the difference between a car that wakes up in May ready for the season and one that starts it with a repair bill.

Then the whiteboard fills up, the bays fill up, and the countdown starts again — because the third weekend of September always comes back around. See you on 93.