Two Spokane dog parks expected to open in October with more ADA-accessible renovations

Renovations for a 10-acre joint dog park and outdoor facility began Monday at High Bridge Park.

The work truly began in 2021 with a citywide master plan that included the need to provide better dog park services, said Nicholas Hamad, city of Spokane Parks art planning and development manager.

“This renovation follows guidelines we developed from user and non-user feedback around how to build healthy dog park spaces and how to mitigate their impacts to surrounding areas,” Jason Conley, the city’s parks and recreation interim director, said in a news release. “We really learned how dog parks don’t just serve as an off-leash space for dogs, but as places where you build community and meet new neighbors; they are as much for people as they are for dogs, in that sense.”

When Peperzak Middle School was going through construction, resulting in the loss of a South Hill dog park, the city saw an opportunity to partner with Spokane Public Schools to invest in a regional dog park, Hamad said.

“We spent quite a bit of time talking to the community and looking for locations to add a facility and ultimately we landed on an investment in renovating High Bridge Park … to address concerns about safety, concerns about functionality, concerns about just level of quality of that space,” he said.

Additions to the park include an extra half-acre of space, making the area a 10-acre facility that includes a fully ADA-accessible dog park, Hamad said.

“One of the concerns we heard from folks that were older was that it was hard to get up on the hillside in the dog park and they wanted some areas where they could have dogs down on a flatter area, so we’ll do that,” he said.

The ADA-accessible renovations include a new entry, a new paved access road and paved parking, as well as tree thinning to open up site lines, Hamad said.

Other renovations include a shade structure, new stairs and access improvements for the upper level of the dog park.

“Our focus there is to try and invest to improve the safety, improve the functionality and improve the access to the facility,” Hamad said. “This is an opportunity to really make it a proper dog park.”

During the two months of renovation in the park, dog owners can take their pets to the temporary dog park at 65th Avenue and Mt. Vernon Street on the South Hill or to the dog park downtown near Riverside Avenue and Adams Street.

The High Bridge Dog Park and another at 63rd and Regal are expected to open in early October, Hamad said. The updated High Bridge Park is expected to be a regional facility that can handle more people and dogs at once as compared to the neighborhood model of the South Hill location.

“We’re really looking forward to providing a better service for people that have been wanting it for a long time,” Hamad said. “The community has been asking for dog parks. We spent quite a long time developing the right formula for where and how to improve service and we’re really excited to get it all open for folks to use it … I just thank the public for being patient with us as we work through this.”