Dozer Day: Great excavations

If You Go

• What: 11th annual Dozer Day.

• When: 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.

• Where: Clark County Event Center at the Fairgrounds, 17402 N.E. Delfel Rd.

• Cost: $8 online, $11 at the gate for children ages 2-12, $10 online, $13 at the gate for adults and free for children 2 and younger. Parking: $6.

• Information: dozerday.org

RIDGEFIELD — While Maddie Pratt, 5, enjoyed operating an excavator, she thought it was a bit loud sitting on the driver’s seat of the construction vehicle.

Things got a bit louder when her twin sister, Lanie Pratt, hopped inside the excavator next.

“I really liked honking the horn,” Lanie said.

The Pratt sisters, both kindergartners at Sifton Elementary School, got to play around on the excavator — with adult supervision, of course — Friday at the Clark County Event Center at the Fairgrounds. They were part of the 500-plus Sifton students invited to a preview of the 11th annual Dozer Day, which takes place Saturday and Sunday.

There are 26 vehicles children can ride at Dozer Day, each operated by one of roughly 600 volunteers at the event, according to Renee Nutter, spokeswoman for the Nutter Foundation, which organizes the event. Nutter added that about half of the volunteers are youths themselves, as a lot of local students help run the two-day event. The money raised at the event goes to grants for children’s charities, and Nutter said a new wrinkle to Dozer Day is a program in which if a group has at least 10 people volunteer, it is guaranteed a grant.

“If we don’t teach kids you have to give back to the community, it’s not likely they will do it,” Nutter said. “We have to show them and surround them with people who give back so they see the importance of it.”

This year, Dozer Day will feature a stage with live musical performances throughout both days. Another new addition to the event is the “Diamond Dig,” where kids can search through large piles of dirt for diamonds. While the diamonds weren’t placed into the dirt for the preview day on Friday, it was a highlight for a few of the kids already.

“The digging was a lot of fun,” said Sifton fifth-grader Hannah Scott, 10. “I liked that you could dig around and get dirty.”

Ryder Whitehurst, 10, who’s in fourth grade at Sifton, also liked the diamond-free digging.

“The thing about digging is, you never really know what you’re going to find,” he said. “I didn’t expect to find anything today, but it was still fun.”

Instead of finding something in the dirt, Ryder and some friends left something in the pile: another one of their friends, whom they slightly buried.

Ryder said he also enjoyed running through the pipe crawl.

Dozer Day also has a lot of large tires, some of which are spread out around the grounds, while others are piled high for children to climb.

“It was fun to go in the tires and hide out,” Hannah said.

On many of the solo tires, kids took turns jumping up and down trying to knock each other off, or held hands and jumped around in a circle.

There were a lot of hopping kids on Friday, including countless who yelled, “That was awesome” while skipping away after their turn operating a bulldozer.

“That’s really the best part of the whole weekend,” Nutter said. “You look around and see all those smiling kids so happy, and just knowing that you played a part in making all this happen.”