Dear editor:
Riverfront Park is the name of Cochrane’s newest Park. You can see it from Hwy 22 and access it from Griffin Rd. But I am wondering if we need to ‘rename’ the park, as its emphasis is not about the once beautiful natural settings of the Bow River or the once quaint trails meandering throughout the area along Big Hill Creek and Millennial Creek.
The ‘loud’ emphasis now is about the red, steel, in your face signs promising a “story coming soon.”
My personal prediction of “stories coming soon” are “spray paint vandalism” and “the mighty Bow River spills its banks and takes out the paved path” adjacent to it.
Also, “the taxpayer’s of Cochrane will be on the hook for the repairs!” Make no mistake, the Bow River will one day flood and has all the power to take out a paved path.
So much for flood mitigation. I heard from experts on flood areas that you don’t hard pack the earth or pave it so that extra water cannot penetrate the ground.
I have some recommendations to improve the park and bring it once again back to a more “natural looking” area. Get rid of the ‘red’ in your face signs.
When we humans go outside to get away from the unrelenting urbanization of our world, we don’t want to see ‘signs’ of ‘urbanization’ in our beautiful disappearing natural surroundings.
If you walk along the beautiful Big Hill Creek, you would come across another huge red sign right across from a park bench. There was never anything there before, but now your eyes would be assaulted by this humongous, red, in your face sign! Why? It was such a beautiful spot.
Change out the vertical steel girders and steel threaded cables off of the bridges that span the tiny Millennial Creek and Big Hill Creeks in the park.
They too are an eyesore and have no place in our natural green spaces. Replace them with quieter horizontal wooden ones.
I will now leave you with a song that has been going through my mind since all of this ‘over development’ has been happening to this much beloved green space:
“Sign, sign everywhere a sign,
breaking up the scenery breaking my mind,
do this don’t do that, can’t you read the sign?”
S. Luyendyk
