Lubbock Pumpkin Trail celebrates 10 years

Lubbock residents and students strolled around the Lubbock Pumpkin Trail at Clapp Park to view more than 1,500 pumpkins that were all carved by the public.

The City of Lubbock Parks and Recreation hosts the trail to be open for four days, Thursday through Sunday. The trail was set to open on Thursday, Oct. 18, but it was postponed until Friday due to the rain. Out of the ten years the trail has been open, that is only the third time a night was taken away, said Nancy Neill, indoor recreation coordinator of Lubbock Parks and Recreation.

Neill said herself and another supervisor at one of the community centers in Lubbock brainstormed the idea ten years ago based on a festival in New Hampshire, where they compete for the most lighted pumpkins and won multiple times by receiving over 25,000 pumpkins. Neill said she thought something similar would be a great addition to Lubbock, in the form of a trail from all the pumpkins brought from the public.

“We never turn a pumpkin away,” she said. “The public carves them, they bring them to us, and we put every pumpkin on the trail.”

Throughout Wednesday, Oct. 17, Parks and Recreation accepted pumpkin donations, and within one day, they received 1,043 pumpkins.

Walking through the trail, attendees will see pumpkins carved from Texas Tech dorm residents, Lubbock schools, employees of local businesses and more.

Melanie Gaum, a volunteer of the Pumpkin Trail, helped when people dropped off their pumpkins on Wednesday. She said families would bring in 2-4, but then there were groups who brought over 30 pumpkins at a time.

After lining most of the trail on Thursday, Gaum said they had to bring the pumpkins inside and clean some of them because of the rain, then decorate again Friday. With pumpkin lighting starting around 6 p.m. to make sure each one is lit before dark, Gaum said one of her favorite things is seeing all the carved pumpkins at night.

“I just moved here from Orlando. There’s so many Halloween things going on with all the theme parks that I don’t always know about the smaller stuff,” Gaum said. “I like it.”

Jordan Smith, a Lubbock resident, has visited the Pumpkin Trail with her friends for the past four years.

“I think now that we’ve been so many years, it’s kind of a tradition,” Smith said.

Throughout the trail are decorations and references to the Day of the Dead and the Disney movie Coco. Smith said this is the first year she has seen the trail participate in a central theme. With it previously being a simple trail of pumpkins, Smith said it was always neat to attend, but that she loves the idea of a theme, especially one that relates to Halloween, because it is more interactive.

“It’s something fall to do, it’s free and it’s fun to look at all the pumpkins,” she said.

Throughout the years, Smith said she has seen vast growth in the amount of pumpkins on the trail. Now that the trail has over 1,500 pumpkin donations, she said there are pumpkins all along the trail, opposed to being more spread out to reach the end of the walk.

“I think it’s cool to see all the people from the community contribute and bring pumpkins,” Smith said.

Neill said Parks and Recreation has a new goal each year, and for 2018 it was to receive 2,000 pumpkins. The trail’s length loops to around a third of a mile, which Neill said takes around 20 minutes to walk through, dependent on the time length of attendees stopping to look at the design of pumpkins.

At the end of the Sunday night, the pumpkins reach the end of their attention. The sun rises Monday morning, and the park is cleaned out of every last pumpkin. Thousands of visitors walked the trail over the weekend to view pumpkins and more will do the same every year when the celebration of fall continues again.

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