Afternoon at the Dog Park

After I finished the project I was working on today (draft of a funding proposal for my dissertation research), I decided it would be nice to get outside with Maizy. I was feeling a little more adventurous than the old walk around the neighborhood and decided to take her over to Mercer Island’s dog park. Seattle, it seems to me, has an unusually high number of dog parks/off-leash areas. I mean, there are a lot. Maybe it’s just that I never was clued into the dog park thing living on the east coast, since I had not had the wonderful privilege of living with a dog until I moved to Seattle. In any case, the region has a range of dog parks, ranging from the quickie sandy pit with a fence around it (e.g. Blue Dog Pond) to the dog nirvana (e.g. Marymoor Park). We have not nearly explored all of the off leash areas around Seattle, but our favorites so far are Marymoor, Mercer Island and Magnuson (is there something about M’s and great dog parks?!). The reason these parks are so great varies a bit, but the most important thing is that they all have water! Marymoor is out in Redmond, so honestly we’ve only been there once. But it made quite the impression–40 acres of dog park with nice paths meandering through woods and clearings along a little river. There are ramps down into the water ever few dozen yards and so dogs can swim and run and roll in the grass and tromp through the woods to their hearts’ content. Magnuson is up in northeast Seattle off of Sandpoint Way. This offleash area is also very big and has a small beach on Lake Washington. Unlike Marymoor and Mercer Island, Magnuson is good because there are lots of options of areas to play or walk in. There are a couple sets of gates between the beach access and the rest of the park. So, if you are with a dog who is not supposed to go in the water for whatever reason, you can enjoy the rest of the park (the other two don’t have separators between the rest of the park and the beach). Mercer Island is a much smaller offleash area than the other two, but it’s beautiful and well-kept and there are a couple of beach access points:

Maizy, being a lab and all, is quite the swimmer:

And quite the ball chaser. She kept digging under this rock, trying to get at something.

I should have known right away that it was a tennis ball. And not just any tennis ball, but a much newer, cleaner tennis ball than the one she brought to the park. She’s a girl who knows what she likes:

A couple of other features of Mercer Island off-leash area (and some of the other off-leash areas) are the small and shy dog area:

and the dog shower area:

After some great swimming, ball-chasing and running around, we headed back home so that Maizy could have a nap before she has a dinner date with her best friend, Mally: