If it’s spring, it must be time for the Creston Auction and Country Fair.

The annual rite of spring is this Saturday and Sunday in Creston, 12 miles east of Kalispell on Montana 35.

This is not your ordinary auction. It annually attracts thousands of people and is often touted as the biggest spring gathering in this part of the state.

Saturday is the main event, with bidders going for building materials, household goods, tools, tack, antiques and many, many other items. In addition to the auction action, there’s an arts and crafts sale as well as a rummage and bake sale, plus hot food served all day.

Sunday at the auction is reserved for the big stuff: trucks, boats, recreational vehicles, tractors, farm equipment, trailers and the like.

The auction is for a good cause — to help out the all-volunteer Creston Fire Department.

For more information, go to www.crestonfire.org or call the auction hotline at 406-250-7396.

In a related note, the Creston community received sad news this week when longtime resident Les Mahugh died at age 87. Mahugh’s son Gary is the Creston fire chief, and the family has local roots that go back many years.

In fact, Les was the grand prize winner in the Daily Inter Lake’s Reader Rewards contest in 2013 to identify the person with the oldest subscription to the paper.

Les wrote a brief account of his appreciation for the newspaper through the years, noting that he “grew up with the Inter Lake from the 1920s on” and “virtually learned to read” from the newspaper as his folks were subscribers even before him.

Mahugh first began his own subscription to the Daily Inter Lake in 1945 when his dad passed away, and was a faithful reader ever since. We enjoyed spending a pleasant hour with him and his wife, Mary, when they came in to start the free year’s subscription they had won, and we share our condolences with the family and community who have lost a tremendous light.

Editorials represent the majority opinion of the Daily Inter Lake’s editorial board.