Our View: Enjoy parks season and keep them pretty

Cloquet’s parks are the envy of many, with plenty of recreation areas for outdoor activities as varied as team sports, hiking, playing on playgrounds, skating, skiing and camping. Many of our prize attractions are located along the Highway 33 corridor, with high traffic from tourists who drive through our city in droves, on the way to other destinations.

We’d like to start focusing on keeping a few more of those tourists in town. Encouraging them to visit our parks is a good place to start.

We recently were encouraged that The Beach at Pinehurst Park is reopening this summer, and its convenient location adjacent to the highway makes that a good place to start. There’s adequate parking, so crowds at the beach have room to share with those using the tennis and basketball courts, and there are picnic tables and a playground for kids, along with wide open spaces and softball fields. Maybe some signage letting tourists know they’re welcome would be helpful.

And the new playground on Dunlap Island is a real attraction. With its zipline, playground, picnic tables and shelter house (which has electricity and public bathrooms), it’s a perfect place to attract families

traveling through town. This park has a year-round appeal, as its distinctive ice skating ribbon and warming house make it a great winter playground. Just under the bridge at Spafford Park are more picnic tables and a boat landing, and Veterans Park is nearby with lots of open space.

There’s room for improvement in our parks. Despite last year’s impressive work in keeping the garbage cans from overflowing, it still happens and needs to be addressed. More picnic tables are good, but we’ll need to figure out how to keep them cleaner: sometimes the tables can get pretty messy, by both people and animals. And vandalism is always a problem. Maybe there’s a group out there willing to do a little volunteer cleanup of the parks on a weekly basis to keep things looking spiffy.

We also encourage residents to welcome this summer’s batch of tourists. Greet them when you see them in the parks, and encourage them to check out our amenities when you see them in the stores. That’s the first step in getting more of those traveling through town to stick around awhile.