Cassie’s Ruminations

Howarth Park

Today Emma and I visited Howarth Park up in Everett for the first time. The park is right on the Sound and contains the city’s original swimming beach, as well as many great paths, picnic areas, a playground, and a native plant garden. The off-leash area for dogs is right next to the swimming beach. We had a bit of a tough time finding it, as there is no signage at all noting where it is. We took a lap around the main park area first and enjoyed the view.

When we saw a group with some dogs heading down the road a bit, we started that way. We couldn’t catch up with them, but we headed in the direction we saw them going. We came to another little parking lot and a path headed towards the water (with Naval Station Everett there in the background).

This lead to a steep set of concrete stairs that had me wondering if we’d missed something, but then another group with a dog came by and headed down the stairs, so we followed. There was only one set of the really steep stairs, then we crossed a trestle over some railroad tracks and turned onto a very large spiral staircase heading down to the beach itself. There were large landings in the center of each of the three levels, and the stairs were a fair bit shallower, so Emma and I had an easier go getting down them.

Once we made it down, we headed right to the off-leash area.

Emma promptly made friends with everyone she passed, and was especially fascinated by a retriever who was joyfully chasing a floating toy into the water. Emma wanted that toy soooo badly, but not enough to get submersed! She’d run up to the water’s edge and then turn around. Sometimes she’d put her paws up on a bit of driftwood to watch the retriever better, but this often backfired as she’d miss seeing waves come in and she’d get splashed pretty good. 😀

She also enjoyed hopping up on larger driftwood logs and trotting along them for a ways.

After about 40 minutes on the beach, we were pretty tired, so we worked our way back up the steps and headed back to the car. We’re pretty tuckered out, but we had fun 🙂