The Sheep River Valley clean up is quickly approaching and the town is looking for more volunteers.

This year community volunteers, town staff and committee members plan to spruce up the river valley by planting 3,000 native trees along with picking up any litter within the area.

Community Events Coordinator Mark Doherty says this year the town has some new plans up their sleeve.

"New this year we are also putting out to the community if they'd like to take part and clean up their neighborhoods, that can be coordinated in that pre-registration as well. And then what we will do is work with our parks department to ensure that we have an approved drop off area and the parks people will come and pick up all the refuse."

Along with cleaning up their neighborhoods, any residents that have the desire to clean up any local parks and playgrounds are encouraged to.

Doherty says it's not all hard work though, "To show our appreciation, we do this every year, we have a barbecue that takes place at noon. So registration starts at 9 a.m. and then we assign those locations again for clean up or tree planting and then request everybody comes back for 11:30 a.m. and we do prizes for every participant and an appreciation barbecue."

Doherty says last year was their best turn out so far but hopes to have even better numbers this time around.

"Last year was probably one of our best years ever, it think we had over 270 registered for the event and that was including pre-registration and registration the day of...and we are expecting more this year because more and more people get involved with it. It's a great community building thing, we take pride in our community by cleaning it up so our numbers continue to grow every year."

Last clean up, over 2,761 pounds of garbage was removed from the river valley.

Clean up crews will be supplied with gloves, clean up tools and directions on how to safely remove litter and how to properly plant the trees.

If you are interested in volunteering your time to the Sheep River Valley clean up you can pre-register online here or sign up May 7th, the day of the event.

More information on the spring event can be found at Okotoks.ca.

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