Valerie G. Barnes Connell Jordan
Northern Advocate
The turnout was a good one for the annual Elk’s Fair from July 19-21, despite smoke from wildfires and bear spray attacks, Curtis Skalicky, a member of the La Ronge Elks, said, in an interview with the Northern Advocate.
“I think the smoke actually helped the sun from actually coming through and really cooking a lot of people,” he said.
Canuck Amusements provided the midway, as it has for some years.
“We had a lot of local vendors providing their food. The Seniors with their bingo tent and the Ice Wolves with their beer gardens and they kind of led the ball tournament,” Skalicky explained.
The event was marred by a series bear spray attack, leading to the arrest of four people by the La Ronge RCMP.
Scalicky gave credit to the RCMP, who “had a lot of people on site and they quickly deescalated situations. It was truly unfortunate that the bad decisions made by such a small few caused … a lot of this headache, these problems.”
Skalicky said, it was fortunate no one was seriously injured, but the Elks held an emergency meeting on Saturday to discuss the situation, and decided with Canuck Amusements, “to close the midway down early on Saturday … we said, let’s just get through Sunday, make sure all hands are on deck to prevent anything happening, and, there were no incidences on Sunday, which was great.”
Elks Club members will take a break to catch up with family friends, following all the volunteer work, which goes into the preparation and at the time of the Fair annually.
When they begin meeting in the fall, which involves planning for the next year, “we’re going to be looking at what we can do to make changes to provide a better, secure environment for future fairs to come,” Skalicky said.
He said he thinks the Fair attracted similar numbers to other years.
“It’s one of those things, we don’t have an exact number on how many people came into the Fair. We don’t have the clickers and things like that. We figure somewhere in the area of 3,000 to 5,000 people a day come through that gates,” Skalicky said.
The Fair is all run by volunteers, whether it’s for the Elks, the seniors, the Ice Wolves, whoever is running a piece of the event.
“We really consider this a great community event and we’re wanting to make it that much more every year.”
