Lions egg hunt a 50-year tradition

For more than 50 years the Lion’s Club in Bonners Ferry has sponsored the Lion’s Club Easter Egg Hunt.

This year’s Easter egg hunt will begin at 11 a.m., Saturday, April 23, at Boundary County Fairgrounds. The Easter Bunny will also be there.

A Bonners Ferry tradition for many families the Lion’s Easter Egg Hunt has always been held at the fairgrounds.  Each year over 200 children show up at the fairgrounds ages 10 and under to pick up the 1,800 eggs hidden in the field.

One can come into the Herald office and go back into the old newspapers and find the Lion’s Easter Egg Hunt and photos as far back as 1959.  The Lion’s Club itself is almost a century old and was chartered in Bonners Ferry in 1945.

It takes about two hours for the Lion’s Club members to hide the eggs and 10 minutes for the children to find them all.

Toddlers will be seen filled with excitement and wonder and older children will be racing from egg to egg as fast as they can filling their baskets. 

Lion’s Club member Dr. Mark Barker said there will be special plastic eggs with quarters in them for children to find, something the Lion’s Club has done historically over the years.

“The Lion’s Club Members professionally boils 150 dozen eggs for the event,” said Barker.

The club members boil the eggs in large industrial size pots at member Harv Pedey’s house.  They have someone timing, someone boiling and someone drying and placing them back in the carton so they can be transported to the Restorium to store in their refrigerators until they are ready to be colored.

“We have quite the assembly line going when we boil them,” said Barker.

The local Restorium residents and staff color each one of these eggs by hand every year and have done it for at least 25 years according to Barker.

The Restorium is a senior assisted living facility owned and managed by Boundary County.

Barker said 30 years ago the club members would take a designated amount of eggs home to their wives for them to color. He said it is nice to have the Restorium residents and staff color them since there are a lot of people to dye all those eggs.

The Lion’s provide commercial grade food coloring for to the Restorium for the eggs and as a thank you the Lion’s donate to their arts fund each year.

Lion’s Club members are out early the day of the event hiding eggs according to age categories, making them harder to find for the older kids and easier for the toddlers. 

The age groups are Toddler to age two, ages three through four, ages five through six, seven through eight and ages nine and 10.

The local Lion’s Club also sponsors the fishing and demolition derbies in Bonners Ferry.

There are 45,000 Lion’s Clubs with 1.3 million members world wide.