Parks Appreciation Day

This past Saturday we had the opportunity to participate in our local Parks Appreciation Day. This is an annual spring-time event intended to get the various neighborhoods together to clean up a local park. Our stake here is pretty heavily involved in promoting this service opportunity to the various wards and because of that, we tend to get very good participation from the members of the church here.

Our ward usually gets to help fix up one of our favorite places, Alderwood Park. This is a great little playground and grouping of forested walking trails just behind our neighborhood library. It is less than a half mile from our house so we walk down there semi-often. In fact, it was on this park's trails that we found our first ever geocache and now even have one of our own hidden there right now.

We were a little worried about the participation that the event would draw this year since mother nature for some reason seems to have not paid attention to the calendar. We had snow flurries at 9 AM for the start which is really unheard of here this time of year. I still showed and before long we had 62 volunteers working, 47 of which were from our ward.

It was a good thing that we had as many people as we did since there were 21 yards of wet woodchips to be moved to re-cover all of the walking trails in the park and the playground area. That is a lot of wood to move. The weather held up pretty nicely precipitation-wise and we were able to knock the work out pretty quickly. The park looks great again.

Afterwards, the City of Tacoma provided grilled burgers and the usual barbeque fare for everyone that participated which was very nice. Valerie, who had been braving the cold at one of Josh's baseball games during most of this event, was able to come up and join the fun as things were wrapping up.