Walk this way

Late songsmith Lou Reed said it best, “Take a walk on the wild side.”

Picture Butte’s Walk On the Wildside Society (WOW) is gearing up for a spring and summer of walking, wilderness and natural wonder close to home for community members and out-of-towners plus the pitching in of volunteers to help clean up the area.

May 10 is WOW’s annual community clean-up, according to Shirley Kiffiak, treasurer of the society. “We’re planning a clean-up for the garbage around the lake and then we’ll have some refreshments after and hot dogs for those that help. They did one last year and it was pretty successful,” said Kiffiak, adding the clean-up will approximately run between 10 a.m. and noon.

Kiffiak said the society, in the near future, hopes to get some of the gopher holes and badger holes filled in, as well as a bit of sprucing up the pathways so families can walk on the paths with children and strollers.

The big plan is to build a structure at the location to be used as a lookout. “We’re hoping to build a lookout or gazebo out on the lake. There’s a piece of concrete that’s been there for a long time and we’ve got plans to do some fundraising to build a structure on that and hopefully it will kind of match the one downtown across from the sportsplex,” said Kiffiak.

For the uninitiated, Kiffiak said Walk On the Wildside is a walking path around the top of the Picture Butte lake reservoir and has been in existence since the early 1990s. “I think they initially had $40,000 and they put some benches in and some information places there but over the years, it’s been a long time, they’ve been vandalized and pictures are falling apart because of rain and snow,” she noted.

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