Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 01:11:00

A service club with a ten-year lease and a big idea turned a river flat into Edmonton's festival lawn. Kinsmen Park, at 9100 Walterdale Hill NW on the south bank of the North Saskatchewan River between the High Level Bridge and Walterdale Road, is a 21-hectare river-valley park that doubles as one of the city's favourite outdoor concert and festival grounds. The story begins in 1953, when the Kinsmen Club of Edmonton - founded in 1925 - secured a 58-acre lease on the Walterdale Flats and spent a decade building the city a recreation ground from scratch: Edmonton's first hard-surfaced tennis courts in 1955, the Kinsmen Pitch and Putt golf course in 1958, and by 1961 a completed park with sports fields, an ice rink and a grandstand. The city formally designated the land Kinsmen Park in 1969. The park's indoor half made rock history: the Kinsmen Fieldhouse opened in January 1968 as a Centennial project - unique in Canada at the time - and through the 1970s and 1980s the Kinsmen Sports Centre complex hosted touring giants of the arena-rock era. The aquatic centre added for the 1978 Commonwealth Games gave the park five pools and an indoor running track, and the Kinsmen Twin Arenas followed in 1997. The outdoor lawn is the modern stage: the Kinsmen Club's Soundtrack Music Festival ran here from 2018 with headliners like Kesha, T.I., Nelly, Third Eye Blind and Mother Mother, and the Great Outdoors Comedy Festival now brings names of the scale of John Mulaney and Matt Rife to the riverbank each July - the skyline across the water doing scenography for free. The setting is the point: the park sits in the North Saskatchewan River valley parks system - the longest stretch of connected urban parkland in North America - with Queen Elizabeth Park to the east and Emily Murphy Park to the west, laced with walking and cycling trails, picnic sites, a spray park and cross-country ski loops in winter. Practical notes: Walterdale Hill connects the park to both downtown (over the Walterdale Bridge) and Old Strathcona up the hill; festival days fill the lots early, so the river-valley trails, transit to 109 Street or a bike are the smarter approaches, and the Kinsmen Sports Centre's parking is reserved for facility users on event days.