What I Did On My Very First Vacation. Fort Stevens State Park part 1 (nosework)

This day on our OR coast vacation we decided to explore Fort Stevens State Park

Fort Stevens was the primary military defense installation in the three fort Harbor Defense System at the mouth of the Columbia River (Forts Canby and Columbia in Washington were the other two). The fort served for 84 years, beginning with the Civil War and closing at the end of World War II. Today, Fort Stevens has grown into a 3,700 acre park offering exploration of history, nature, and recreational opportunities.

There are a lot of trails in this park. You need more than a day to explore the whole thing. We have been here a few times and it seems like we always figure out one more cool trail to walk on and we did find some new territory this time too!

We found a large empty parking lot and so we decided to do a little nosework with the dogs. I got some good video of Skip doing his stuff.

Boring pic I know, but this is part of the parking lot where we were doing the nosework with the dogs. This is just a very small portion of the parking lot and we did hides in the lot and also down the trails.

We hid 5 hides (odor hides) and let Skip do some off leash searching, his favorite way to search (opposed to being leashed). He found all the hides in his own chosen order and I am sure it had to do with the way the odor was traveling that day.

As you can see Skip is a natural and it might seem easy but this is a huge parking lot and he had to do a lot of bracketing and thinking to figure it out. He is an amazing boy...

It is also interesting to think about that all the hides are in the same general area so the odor is coming off each one and co-mingling with each other but Skip has been doing this long enough now he has learned that once he finds a hide he is done with that one and needs to continue looking for another. Dogs are so smart!

In this next video you will see Skip start to go down one path then turn around the end up finding the hide down a different path. He was correct when he started down the first path (there was a hide down there too)

 

And in this last video he finds the last hide. The funny thing is he stopped to pee on the way to finding the hide and if this had been a trial he would have been disqualified! Luckily for Skip we were just doing this all for fun!

Next Tim took a turn and found all the hides in close to the same order as Skip! He also loves nosework and this was something that helped him to feel confident in this new place. After both boys took their turns we headed out the path to see what we could see!

Jenny says "mom are you coming?"

Tim sniffs a piece of sea grass that hangs over the trail, he is certain an animal has passed by recently. There were deer or elk tracks in the sand so I bet that was what he was smelling.

What could be at the end of the trail?

"Mom hurry, there is something I want you to see!"

Skip and Tim make us promise we will go down to that beach way down there.

We did go down to that beach down there, but you will have to check back to see our next adventure!