Nary a spot could be found at the Rotary Spray Park Friday night. The weather was warm, clear, the stars were shining, and the eyes of hundreds of people were transfixed upon a huge jumbo screen showing Jurassic Park.
That scene typifies the weekend at DinoFest. Crowds of people both local and from afar enjoying a weekend of celebrating all things dinosaur.
“The Drumheller Festival Society is really happy with the way things turned out and how much support there was from the community and the Town of Drumheller. We’re looking forward to DinoFest 2013,” said Michael Dooley, with the Drumheller Festival Society.
“I think DinoFest is a huge success. Overall, I think we have a festival that did what it was meant to do. We’re feeling like we have something here that will grow year after year,” said Brooke Christensen, owner of Canalta who sponsored the event.
“For the first year, it’s been a brilliant success,” said Jim Barr, president of Seekers Media who helped organize the event.
Like Friday evening, the grounds were packed on Saturday morning and afternoon as festival attendees got a Taste of the Valley. The aroma’s the freshly cooked delicacies wafted through the grounds.
Tickets for the Taste of the Valley sold out fast and the restaurants who set up shop had to make several runs to get more ingredients.
“One of the big successes was the Taste of the Valley,” said Barr. “We’re thinking of expanding that or even making it it’s own Fall event.”
On the other side of the grounds was the wildly popular KidZone, where there was never a lull in the kids (or adults on occasion) decided to test their strength at the reverse bungee or sumo wrestling, or just plain have fun in the bouncy castle.
Barr hinted that they may be expanding the offerings at the KidZone and add more fun challenges similar to the Outhouse Games that were held Saturday afternoon.
Stormy weather forced the bands playing in the evening to move to the Legion and the movie, Jurassic Park 2, was shown in the Napier. Roughly 200 people still showed up for the movie.
The festival ended Sunday, late in afternoon. However, there is more to come next year.
“Everybody was asking what can we do to make this grow in 2013,” said Barr.
Despite the big turnout, there is still room to improve according to Barr. Working with businesses on the special promotions is key.
“Communication is always key. One of the things we could do a better job was the crossword puzzle. We had a brilliant prize in Dino Dan, but we need to see more community engagement to see programs like that become much stronger,” said Barr.
Barr hopes to add more in the way of stage entertainment as well so when the event goes live, the stage does as well. The stage this year was used by nine different bands who donated their time and talent.
“We’d like to showcase more bands at DinoFest. We really appreciate all the bands that donated their time to play,” said Dooley.
Overall, however, organizers felt the weekend was a huge success and are anticipating even bigger crowds next year.
“We had countless amounts of people at the info booth who said they’d be back, but with their friends and family,” said Barr. “We expect that multiplier effect next year. We’re going to have to expand next year.”
