How many people do you think visit your local park where you walk your dog every day? 100? 22? If a thousand people a day visit your park every day, that would be 365,000 park users a year.
Imagine if your park received 25 million visitors every year.
That’s how many people go to New York’s Central Park each year. It is the most visited park in the United States. And that’s just the count of two legs. So what can you expect when you take your dog to America’s most popular park?
Everyone knows Central Park, but if you’ve never walked through its 843 acres, chances are your image of what it looks like is wrong. Are you imagining rocky outcroppings? Rolling Hills? Waterfalls in dense forests? It’s all part of Central Park.
The park covers 6% of the entire island of Manhattan. It would take the better part of a week to cover the 58 miles of trail that would take you across 9,000 benches and 36 individually designed bridges. The park is dotted with 26,000 trees and a good part of its surface is under water from 14 lakes and ponds. And the genius of Central Park is that every inch of it was created not by nature but by the hand of man. This naturalistic appearance is the design of architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux exactly 150 years ago.
As unlikely as it sounds, even with an average of 70,000 visitors a day, it’s possible to walk in relative solitude with your dog in Central Park. The two best places to disappear with your dog are The Rambles, in the center of the park, where many winding paths intersect under a tangle of trees and knolls, and on the rugged north end around Great Hill and Ravine. Although your dog can’t swim in any of the lakes, ponds, or fountains here, you may find some pooches splashing around on a hot day, including a waterfall in the creek.
Your dog will trot on surfaces ranging from asphalt to wood chips, dirt, and even some paw-friendly grass at Wildflower Meadow. Dogs can also share the bridle paths in the park. Better yet, the dogs can walk with you off-leash between 9:00 PM and 9:00 AM. leash in hand if asked to leash your dog.
A must-see in Central Park for your dog is the bronze sculpture of Balto, dedicated to the sled dogs that traveled more than 1,000 wintry miles of Alaska to deliver medicine to stop a diphtheria epidemic in Nome, an epic journey that inspired the today’s great Iditarod Sled Dog. Race. Balto, one of 29 sculptures in the park, can be found on a rocky outcropping on the main path leading north from the Tisch Children’s Zoo.
