Volunteers clean up a well-loved park
EPHRATA — No sooner were the wood chips shoveled and spread out underneath the monkey bars than 7-year-old Maryah took hold and swung across.
“It’s fun, grandma!” she called out as she gripped the middle bars.
“Good job! Hold on!” said her grandmother, Rebecca Contreras, as she stood and watched. “We come to this park a lot. We really like this place.”
The place is Lions Park in Ephrata, and it’s a beautiful early Friday evening. The sky is clear and blue, the sun is slowly sinking behind the hills west of Ephrata, and two dozen volunteers are busy picking up garbage, pulling weeds, replanting grass, shoveling and raking fresh, new wood chips as part of the city’s yearly effort to clean up its largest park.
“We just had the Easter egg hunt here last week, and we’re still finding plastic Easter grass,” said Carrie Haines, recreation supervisor with the City of Ephrata. “There’s going to be a wedding here in a few weeks.”
Haines said the goal of the cleanup was to both make the park more presentable and also bring the community together in a short and simple project. Cleanup, which began at 5:30 p.m. or thereabouts, wasn’t expected to take more than an hour, and was to be followed by a barbecue — grilled hot dogs and hamburgers.
Rod Virden, Ephrata parks superintendent, was busy laying squares of turf sod and some dirt on what used to be a giant treat stump.
“I’m glad to be here,” he said. “I spent the day changing out 57 sprinkler heads at the soccer complex.”
Lions Park needs a lot less maintenance than the city’s soccer complex, its pool, or even its cemetery, Virden said. But echoing a problem the Grant County Fairgrounds is struggling with, Virden said that a number of trees in Lions Park are dying and, like the patch of dirt he’s busy covering with grass, will need to be felled and the stumps ground down.
“A lot of trees are old here, and it’s getting to the point where they will need to be replaced,” he said.
That, however, is a task for another day — something the clutch of 4-H volunteers are not here to do.
“This is my first community project,” said 10-year-old Hunter, a 4-H member, as he clutched a big, black trash bag in his hands. “I’m doing this to help the ecosystem. And this is my third trash bag!”