Counting down to Nature City Fest
As temperatures get warmer, organizers of Saskatoon’s Nature City Festival hope the sunshine will help draw people out into nature.
The festival, organized by Wild About Saskatoon, is unique to the city and intended to promote urban nature areas like the northeast swale, Meewasin Valley and Chappell Marsh.
“It’s a made-in- Saskatoon event,” said Candace Savage, chair of Wild About Saskatoon. “It’s a group of volunteers who are at the centre of it, and throughout the community there are 40 different organizations that create and contribute events to the festival.”
Although the festival doesn’t begin until May 22, the countdown began Friday with a homemade paint demonstration by Grade 8 EcoQuest students, who then used the paint to decorate sidewalks around River Landing using stencils of a red fox and its tracks.
The fox tracks will show up all over the city until the five-day festival begins, as a way to get people interested and excited to spend time in nature. Savage said more than 50 events are planned across the city — including canoe excursions, family readings, tours of natural areas, hikes and more.
“It’s mostly free and lots of fun,” she said. “There are people who say we’re suffering from nature deficit disorder. Well, not in Saskatoon — we can just grow wild here.”
This year’s theme is Aniskopicikewin — the Cree word for the idea that all things are linked together.
“Wild spaces are places that we connect to one another as a community and celebrate our natural connections to our environment and our cultural heritage here, as well as our shared experience of what we are building for the future,” festival spokeswoman Jen Antony said.
She says it’s all about understanding how all things are connected and celebrating the city’s cultural diversity using nature as a lens to show how it can bring people together.