Huckleberries draw a crowd

Liz Cintrino, the 29th Annual Huckleberry Festival chair, called the event a huge success.

“I'm really pleased with how everything turned out,” Cintrino said. “We had a great time with it.”

Cintrino said that every year they try to do new things with the festival to help keep it new and exciting for people who may come out for it every year.

This year they added a karaoke sing-along on Friday night and the Jam and Jelly contest Saturday. Cintrino said they also restarted the idea of demonstrations and workshops by some of the different vendors and that is something that they hope to continue in the coming years.

“It is really interesting for people to find out how the different arts and crafts that vendors display are made,” she said. “We had some very talented people at the festival this year.”

Cintrino said there were about 100 vendors total at the festival over three days. While there is no way to gauge just how many people attended the festival, she estimated around 3,500 people over the course of the weekend. She also said that the pancake breakfast hosted by the Trout Creek Fire Department sold a new record of 1,100 breakfasts on Saturday morning.

“That was a whole lot of breakfast and definitely a new record, so we can tell that we had a good showing from that,” she said.

She said that everything went smoothly and, for the most part, things went off without a hitch - with one exception.

“We lost our children's activities, Adventure Land, this year,” Cintrino said. “However, we should have that in place again for next year.”

This was Cintrino's second year as the chair of the Huckleberry Festival and her third year involved. She said that she started her work with the Huckleberry Festival by doing the Web site as a way to let people know what was going on. The Web site has reached people across the country, Cintrino said, citing an examples of two women who came up this year from Texas.

“They saw the Web site and decided they had to come up and enter in their desserts,” she said.

Cintrino also said that the Web site has gotten people from all over the country interested in buying Huckleberry Festival T-shirts. “We've started to get more people who are interested in buying our T-shirts,” she said.

She said she was grateful from help from the community.

“We wouldn't be able to do this if it weren't for our volunteers or our sponsors,” she said, and added that total they have about a dozen volunteers who work to get the Huckleberry Festival up and running from the beginning, but as time moves on more people offer to help get the Trout Creek Park ready for the festival.

The festivities kicked off Friday night with karaoke and the Miss Huckleberry Pageant.

Saturday morning things got started with a very soggy run, as 173 runners braved the chilly and rainy weather to participate in the 30th Annual Huckleberry Festival Run for Fun 5k.

The top overall finisher was Shane Donaldson, a recent Thompson Falls High School graduate with a time of 17:05.

The top finisher out of the women was Ronda LeClair, of Plains, with a time of 22:03. People who entered received a T-shirt or tank top that featured the Huckleberry Run logo. The proceeds from the run will go to provide scholarships to runners in Sanders County who want to pursue running at the collegiate level. (See related story, page 23).

Also Saturday was the parade, which was a really popular event with people. There were over 60 entrants in this year's Huckleberry Parade. Both the Sanders County Democrats and Republicans were present in the parade, and the Thompson Falls VFW Post joined with the Paradise VFW Post to lead off with the parade.

Spectators were also able to enjoy the tunes of Swing Time, a band out of Sandpoint, Idaho, who have been performing at the Huckleberry Festival for the past 10 years.

Cintrino said that she hopes the success of this year's Huckleberry Festival continues in the years to come.

“We'd really like to see it get bigger and better every year that we do it,” she said.