A hometown newspaper with a local office, local owners & lots of local news
A hometown newspaper with a local office, local owners & lots of local news
Annual egg hunt draws a crowd
Children run helter-skelter across Pine Valley, picking up brightly colored plastic Easter eggs and looking for the special golden ones during the Cloquet egg hunt, held at Pine Valley Park Saturday morning. Close to 400 children participated in the popular annual event.
A tiny fan gets a moment to chat with the Easter Bunny in the parking lot at Pine Valley.
Little Kyle Jenninson of Cloquet takes great care dumping the plastic eggs into the box so they can be reused next year. The kids all get bags of candy in exchange for their eggs, which are empty when they are hidden at the park.
Thank goodness Easter came later this year. Had it fallen a week earlier, the parking lot at Cloquet's Pine Valley would have been covered in snow.
Instead, the day was bright and sunny - although there were still puddles to be jumped in - offering children and their parents the warmest Easter egg hunt since the city of Cloquet, Cloquet Chamber of Commerce and Cloquet Community Ed started the free annual event seven years ago.
Brightly colored plastic eggs littered the ground at the woodland park, which was divided into sections according to age groups. When the gates were opened at precisely 11 a.m., kids swept through like tiny vacuum cleaners, hoovering up the eggs and depositing them into baskets and plastic bags as fast as they could.
It is a fairly sustainable event, as the children trade in their empty eggs for bags of candy or, in the case of a golden egg, for prizes donated by area businesses. Then the thousands of plastic eggs can be reused the following year.
"The temperature was almost 70 degrees, our best day ever," Community Ed director Ruth Reeves told the Cloquet school board Monday, adding that they had close to 400 kids turn out for the free egg hunt.
