The South Hill Community Association wants residents to come to beautify the southern part of the city and also discover some of its hidden gems at a pair of events later this summer.
The Association held its annual general meeting Thursday and announced that their annual South of the Bridge scavenger hunt will take place on June 8. They will also be hosting a community clean-up for Tatawaw Park – the recently re-named Wild Animal Park – on May 19 from 10 a.m. until noon.
“We’re asking anybody from all over the city who wants to come to help us start picking up litter and garbage,” said Crystal Froese from the South Hill Community Association. “We’re going to meet at the bottom of Seventh Avenue Southwest, just in front of the bridge. We’re going to supply gloves and garbage bags and have some refreshments there as well.”
Froese is hoping that they can gather enough volunteers to clean the area from the bridge to the entrance of the old Wild Animal Park. The SHCA was part of the drive to re-name the park and they are hoping that now that Tatawaw Park has a name it can be a source of pride for South Hill and Moose Jaw as a whole.
“That park hasn’t had any attention, but now that it has an official name we can draw attention to it in multiple ways. One of them is to have community pride rally around it and clean things up,” Froese said. “The South Hill Community Association really wants to look at doing a ‘carry out what you carry in’ campaign for all of the park. We understand people like to walk with a coffee or take their lunch in and have it in the park, but we see so much fast food garbage leftover that we really want to encourage people to carry out what they carry in.”
The annual South of the Bridge scavenger hunt is another event that brings the South Hill community together. This year’s event will run from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. in the parking lot next to South Hill Fine Foods.
The scavenger hunt is for any level of accessibility. There is a shorter hunt that is catered to smaller children who are in strollers and then there is an intermediate course for kids and adults can walk or explore on bicycles that covers all of South Hill.
“We had well over 100 kids last year, which was wonderful, kids biking and walking all over South Hill looking for the clues and having a great time that afternoon,” Froese said. “We’re a third of the population over here on South Hill. There’s a lot of history here and there are a lot of really unique areas and cool little things in each of the little neighbourhoods that we have. There are a lot of people who don’t know that but they always come back and say ‘I didn’t know we had that over here.’”
There will also be a heritage trolley tour of South Hill available for a donation and the Friendly City Optimist Club will be on hand to do a hot dog sale. There will also be music and a clown on hand.
“We highlight the heritage of this side of the city with the trolley tours and then the scavenger hunt is to take people around different neighbourhoods and different fun, little landmarks that people may not know of,” Froese said. “There are lots of prizes and we’ll have different vendors there from South Hill, some businesses, some community organizations there as well to interact with people.”
The Moose Jaw Police Service, the Moose Jaw Fire Department and Moose Jaw and District EMS will all be on hand as well to show off their vehicles to the kids.
