Dog park opens in the Foothills
Amenities include splash pad and agility equipment
A pet grooming/boarding business in the Foothills has opened a free dog park open to the public behind its building, bringing an amenity residents of the unincorporated area have been trying to get built for a decade or more.
Cindy Littlewolf, owner of 4 Paws Inn and Grooming Salon at 11855 S. Fortuna Road, said she’s been pushing Yuma County to install a park where dogs can run free and socialize, but every location she’s suggested has been turned down. Local housing subdivsions weren’t willing to get involved, either.
This went on until one day about two months ago, when she and her kennel manager were sitting behind the building, facing a concrete parking area which was never really used.
“I said, ‘you know, just maybe .... ’” Littlewolf said.
The Fortuna Dog Park formally opened at the beginning of this week. “I called it Fortuna because I didn’t wan’t people to think it was just for 4 Paws, it’s for everybody,” she said.
It’s open daily from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. and has about 6,000 square feet of space, fenced off and divided into sections for large and small dogs. The big-dog side has a small in-ground pool that goes three and a half feet deep, while the little-dog section has a splash pad, along with climbing and agility equipment. The large-dog section also has a tetherball and a seesaw.
In the future, she said, she may add some playground-type equipment for kids, because the seesaw now needs repairs after two children brought to the park with the family dog tried to use it.
Littlewolf sunk thousands of dollars into building the new amenity, breaking up the concrete and replacing it with soil and grasseed with lots of help from friends and local businesses. She said she’s especially grateful to Wellton Hardware, which came up with a puncture-proof liner for the pool after she didn’t think it would be possible.
She said there’s been a lot of interest in the park and questions about where it’s located (on the east side of Fortuna Road just north of 40th Street), but its use is growing slowly.
But she expects things will pick up after her neighbors learn they no longer have to drive into Yuma to use the city dog parks. “We
all had a 22-mile round trip to take our dogs anywhere, and now it’s right in our own neighborhood.”
For more information about the Fortuna Dog Park, call (928) 345-0777.
Yuma County Supervisor Darren Simmons, whose district includes the Foothills, said Friday he hadn’t heard much about the 4 Paws park, but is glad someone has taken the initiative to provide one.
He’s been looking for a way to put a park with a dog park and playground on land just east of the Foothills Library, since taking office a year ago, but nothing solid has come together.
He essentially took a plan to build the playground for $150,000 out of the running this week for federal Community Development Block Grant funding the county expects to receive this year, giving rebuilding the community of Tacna’s water system top priority.
“That was a tough choice because I want that park out there,” he said. “But people have to have water, and the system out in Tacna is terrible, it was down the other day.”
The county maintains few parks, and none in the Foothills besides a small retention area in Mesa Del Sol. Officials say the county can’t take on the cost of maintaining and insuring large, new ones.
Simmons said he’s still hoping to find a way to do it. “The park’s a priority for me, and we’re going to keep looking. The big holdup is finding somebody to insure it,” he said, with one interested group, the Foothills Rotary, unable to take on the expense.