Dog Bark Park

Along U.S. Highway 95 at Cottonwood, Idaho, a beagle big enough to have held a two-room inn sits in plain view of passing traffic. Its builders call it Sweet Willy, and its official name is Dog Bark. Nearby stands Toby, a beagle statue twelve feet tall. By their makers’ reckoning the pair are the World’s Two Biggest Beagles. Both were built by Dennis Sullivan and Frances Conklin, husband-and-wife chainsaw artists who have since retired and closed their business. One of their own pages dates the retirement to December 2024 and another to early 2025.

The former gift shop beside the big dog is now a free, casual museum of the couple’s work over more than forty years. It opens on a sporadic basis or by appointment, and nothing in it is for sale. Every structure on the grounds is private property. The owners ask visitors to get permission before entering or touching anything and to take photographs from a distance. They are not always at the studio and ask travelers to be in touch before a planned stop.

The dog stands in the heart of the Camas Prairie in north central Idaho, where wheat, barley, canola, bluegrass and hay are the main crops. Cottonwood, population 944, is the second-largest town on the prairie. It has a compact downtown, a regional medical center and a Bureau of Land Management field office, and the Monastery of St. Gertrude is close by. Grangeville is fifteen minutes south and Lewiston an hour north. The owners place the spot about midway between Yellowstone and Glacier national parks. Cell phone service in parts of the region is limited or absent.

A flyer in Missoula

Conklin came originally from New Jersey and Sullivan from Massachusetts. According to Greg and Lydia Deiss, Cottonwood correspondents for the Idaho County Free Press, both had moved west when they met at a craft fair in Missoula, Montana. She was selling her sewing and he was selling carved dogs. Afterward Sullivan went back to a construction job in Grangeville and kept carving small dogs with his pocketknife. The two kept meeting at craft and trade fairs, and they learned early that the circuit would not support them full-time.

Conklin, still in Missoula, then came across a flyer. Producers from QVC wanted crafters to show home-grown goods one weekend in Sun Valley, Idaho. Sullivan brought his dogs and set up the display. As the Deisses tell it, the result was an order for 1,500 carvings, to be ready for broadcast in thirty days. The 1,500 sold out in 45 seconds and brought an order for 2,500 more. The next show also sold out, with an order for 10,000.

The couple date this “big break” to 1995. “We did nothing but carve wooden dogs for 18 months (our children barely remember seeing us during those days!),” they wrote, “made what seemed like a bundle of money, invested it all in developing and building Dog Bark Park.”

They founded the park in 1997. Sullivan was a self-taught chainsaw carver, and Conklin had joined him in the wooden-dog business in the early 1990s. They worked in a folk-art style. In 2014 the art-environment archive SPACES recorded that they made more than sixty breeds and poses of dog and often carved a client’s own dog from photographs. Visitors could watch the carvings being made.

Sleeping in the dog’s head

The owners place Sweet Willy in the line of roadside architecture from the early days of automobile vacations, when travelers bought gas, ate meals or slept in buildings shaped like something else. They name coffee-pot and teacup gas stations, milk-bottle restaurants, and shoe and duck houses. SPACES gives August 2003 as the month the bed and breakfast inside opened.

Inside, twenty-six carved dogs ran across the queen headboard. A loft room filled the dog’s head, and dog-shaped cookies waited on the pillows. Breakfast included home-baked pastries, Prairie’s Best Fruited Granola, fruit, cheeses, yogurts and bagels. A second-story deck looked out over the prairie. “Playin’ Jenga with my Dad; Doin’ a puzzle together; Sleepin’ in a dog’s head. Nothin’ could be better,” wrote one guest, Mary M. of Seattle. Rooms for the 2022 season sold out within a few hours.

By the owners’ count, the inn ran twenty-one years. In December 2023 they announced that no reservations would be taken for 2024 or after: “Sweet Willy needs a rest, and so do we.” The Idaho Department of Commerce reports that the last guests left in September 2023. One of the owners’ own pages gives 2025 as the year the big dog ceased being an inn.

A billboard, two awards, and the last log

Press attention gathered along the way. HGTV called the place “The Ultimate Dog House,” and the owners list coverage in the London Times, Ripley’s Believe It or Not, the Today Show, the Ellen DeGeneres Show and Netflix’s World’s Weirdest Homes. In January 2016 the Free Press reported that the big dog was appearing on billboards for Toyota’s RAV4 Hybrid under the line “Go Where No Neighbor Has Gone Before.” A freelance photographer, Scott Downing, had come from California to shoot the beagle and its surroundings in competition with other locations. Once the dog was chosen, he returned a few days later hoping for better weather.

The couple received a Take Pride in Idaho award for a large carved exhibit telling the story of Seaman, the dog who traveled with Lewis and Clark. They date the award to 2003. The Commerce Department dates it to 2004 and places the exhibit at Monticello, Virginia. Conklin served on the Idaho Travel Council from 2006 to 2013, as chair and vice chair. In October 2024, at the Idaho Conference on Recreation and Tourism in Garden City, the pair received the Governor’s Lifetime Achievement Award in Recreation and Tourism.

That same year they published an expanded edition of their book, Sweet Willy – A Noble & Absurd Undertaking. It had sold out by April 23, 2025, and no more copies are expected. In July 2024 they wrote that Sullivan was out of wood for carving dogs and would close that chapter of a career of nearly forty years once the remaining dogs were finished and sold. The Commerce Department reported that Conklin planned to keep working on a book about the area’s wildflowers, and that Sullivan looked forward to greeting drop-by visitors.

The couple described the studio as it used to be in August 2024: “Once upon a time we had a store full of completed dog carvings with more awaiting completion in the studio. And beyond that there was nearly always a huge log or two outside.”