As soon as the gate opens, Achilles, a giant, lovable Rottweiler mix bounds into the park and immediately runs over to check the nearest trees for new scents, before bounding off down the hill, chasing sticks with the other dogs and wagging his tail as hard as he can.

Erin Yanak, Achilles’ owner brings him to the Viking Dog Park near Bonney Lake Elementary six times a week for just this type of interaction.

“I love it,” she said of the park, which is about to celebrate its first anniversary. “You can let them run around with other dogs.”

It is exactly what Grant Sulham hoped for when he first began gathering a group of residents interested in dog park back in 2009.

“Here they can be dogs,” Sulham said this past week while letting his two corgis, Mitch and Cameo, run off their leashes. “They can explore and they can make their pack.”

Sulham was one of the driving forces behind the creation of the Viking Dog Park last September. The project was announced in April 2010 as a one-year trial run and over the last 12 months has become one of the most-used parks in the city.

“What has surprised me is how much use it gets,” Sulham said, adding that though it slowed some in the summer, during the winter months there were often between 10 and 20 dogs running around the one-acre park when he’d visit.

Deputy Mayor Dan Swatman, who helped spearhead the measure through the city council agreed.

“I think it’s been a fantastic success,” Swatman said. “It could have went a different way very easily, but we had a great group of people.”

Both Sulham and Swatman credit the volunteer-led nature of the park for its success.

Sulham said he began collecting signatures in 2009 to petition the city for an off-leash park for dogs, with the idea that the park could be built entirely through volunteer efforts.

Between August and October in 2009, Sulham collected approximately 575 signatures and from that list, a core group of volunteers was drawn.

The land identified for the park was an little-used stretch of green space the city acquired in the first part of this century. Known colloquially as the “Billy Goat Park” when it was brought into the city because of its steep terrain, Sulham said the plot of land was the best of what the group could find.

After getting city approval to use the land, and a minor in-kind contribution of about $2,000 in old fencing removed from a decommissioned stormwater retention pond and some hours of labor to help clean the park and aid in the construction of the fence lines.

The rest of the work was done through work parties, organized through an email list.

“It was a bunch of people who got together and wanted a dog park,” Sulham said of the group, several of whom are immortalized on the back of the sign welcoming people into the park. “And then it took off.”

Unlike most dog parks, which tend to be fenced off stretches of flat land in which the dogs can run and play, Viking Dog Park is more of a forested hillside, complete with trails – some made by humans and some by dogs – winding through the grounds.

Kathy Henke, who said she tries to bring her dogs to the park at least once a week, said she likes the woodsy nature of the park so her dogs can wander and explore.

It stands in contrast to the Puyallup and Federal Way parks, she said, and Henke said it is important to the quality of life in the city to have a place like this.

“Who wants to drive to Federal Way to take their dog to a park?” she said. “If we can have a skate park and we can have a kids park, we should have a dog park.”

Though intended as a temporary project, Swatman said he has heard no indication that the park will go away and said because it is such a success, the only talk is about possible expansion, though there are no definite plans to do so.

There have been some complaints from neighbors about barking and privacy along the fence line and several of the fences have had to be repaired. Sulham said on three occasions someone put a small padlock on the gates as well.

But generally, the response to the Viking Dog Park has been positive, for both the dogs and the owners.

“I love it. He gets all his puppy energy out,” said Heideh Sohi, nodding toward Slinky, her eight-month-old pitbull mix who was tugging on a stick with Achilles. “It’s so good for him. He just passes out when we get home.”