Clearspring Drive in Langill Farm renamed to Blind Creek Bvld.

Blind Creek Blvd. is a new street in the Langill Farm subdivision that is currently being built by Penn-Co Construction on the northwest side of Steinbach. 

It was previously named Clearspring Drive, and the developer requested it be renamed Blind Creek Blvd., as the creek in the area is called Blind Creek.

Steinbach City Councillor Jac Siemens says the history of the name Blind Creek itself is fairly recent. 

He says it started back in 2010, when Patrick Siemens and Jonathan Thompson organized a group called Kids of Mud, which was a kid's mountain biking club.

“They needed a trail close to Steinbach, so it was within riding distance. And they chose the creek that was West of the museum and North of Ledingham.” 

He says they built a trail about 1.5km that followed the North and the South side of the creek with wooden bridges so that you could get to each side.  

Every summer since then, it's been used for Kids of Mud. It was also used during the Manitoba Summer Games a couple of years ago. 

Siemens says when they were first developing the trail, they wanted to name it after the creek, but they couldn't find the creek’s name. 

“But then an 1882 map that Patrick had found from the Crow Wing area region, southeastern Manitoba was at one point known as the Crow Wing region, and on that map, he found creeks named Blind Creek," he says. "My understanding of it is that when a creek didn't have an obvious start or end, and there are no relevant reasons for that creek to be there, they often call those creeks Blind Creeks, so it was like a placeholder on the map.”  

The two couldn’t find an official name for the creek, so they decided to call it Blind Creek. 

“They posted that name onto apps like AllTrails, TrailForks, and Trip Advisor that mountain bikers use to find trails in different areas when they're new to an area, and so it became known as the Blind Creek Trail,” he says. “And it just happened that everybody then used that name for the trail and correlated it to the creek that was there, so now all of a sudden the creek had a name, it became the Blind Creek.”