Casting Shade On The Playground

As the temperatures this summer season have heated up many people have retreated to the shadows for reprieve. Staying indoors and in shaded areas is a great choice for those who want to escape the heat. Unfortunately, this has often meant that a jewel of our community isn’t being used as much as we had hoped.

 Starting Off Strong

The Friends of the Soda Springs City Park has some exciting news! We recently received a donation of $5,000 from Guardian Realty, a local real estate brokerage who received a grant from the Idaho Realtors Association, for shade coverings at the Maverik Caribou CommUNITY Playground. Caribou Ford and Liberty CDJR in Montpelier also generously donated a total of $4,000 towards this project, bringing us closer to our goal of providing area children with shade over this popular attraction! The City of Soda Springs has also generously offered to lend support of this project to provide assistance in engineering the structures as well as donating in-kind labor for the installation.

A Proposed Solution

These proposed shade coverings will help provide the following benefits to the community:

•  Extend outdoor time by keeping the play area cooler and shaded, so that kids and adults can enjoy time at the playground during the hot summer months without hurting themselves on hot equipment.

•  Help protect from excess exposure to UV rays, which can help lower the risk of developing cancer later in life.

•  Help shield against bad weather, giving people in the community a chance to hang out and play as much as possible, which is the goal of any public playground.

• Reduce the incidents of heat exhaustion, heat stroke, sunburns and blisters.

• Makes the playground useful for more hours each day during hot weather months, further justifying the expense that was put into building this playground.

• Protects this community investment from sun damage, thus keeping the playground looking appealing and inviting for many years to come.

Who We Are

The Friends of the Soda Springs City Park, established in 2016, is a non-profit organization comprised of volunteers from Caribou County who had a dream to build an all-inclusive playground in downtown Soda Springs. That dream was made a reality in the summer of 2018, when the community came together to pay for and build the Maverik Caribou CommUNITY Playground. Since the completion of the playground the Friends of the Soda Springs City Park continues to be involved in maintaining and improving the playground by assisting with ongoing maintenance issues and costs, and paying for and installing security cameras in partnership with the City of Soda Springs and with a grant from Silver Star Communications, further improving the safety of the playground for children as well as improving efforts to preserve the play equipment and rubber surfacing.

Our Plan

The projected budget for the shade coverings is $50,000. This number is an estimate and is subject to change based off of the finalized design of the shade structures. Once a final design is chosen by the City of Soda Springs, engineering is completed, and bids are obtained for the work to be performed, we will update the community regarding the final budget and shade structure design. This $50,000 budget was preliminarily determined based off of two bids received at the beginning of this project. While we are still in the process of finalizing the design of the shade coverings as well as the budget, we are also dealing with a time requirement of when the Idaho Realtors Association Grant money must be used during 2024. For this reason, we are aiming to complete our fundraising efforts entirely by December 31, 2024. Our intention is to join with the community as soon as possible to meet this demand, so that this project can be completed by the end of the year. That means money will be fundraised and spent to purchase all building materials needed, with shade structure poles set in place and ready for play time in Spring 2025. As always, it’s a race against winter!

If you or your business is interested in helping support this project in any way please reach out to Laura Lind (208-604-0885) or Alana Burns (702-581-8371). 

*Proposed designs submitted by
Superior Shade and Great Western Recreation