Gorge Local - In Business: Best friends meet at Cascade Pet Camp, become owners five years later

From the time they met, they knew they wanted to find a way to work together with dogs, Reid said, despite being in fairly different fields. Fogarty was working as a veterinary nurse at Columbia Gorge Veterinary Clinic, and Reid was a physical therapist with her own business, Thrive Kinematics.

“From the first few months of us meeting, Shannen and I clicked,” Reid said. “And went, ‘How can we do this?’ And we started dreaming and brainstorming.”

What was apparent from early on was that Reid and Fogarty both had the passion and skills to own their own pet camp. Fogarty had her background in veterinary medicine and dog training and Reid, as a physical therapist, was able to get a specialty certification in animal rehabilitation.

In 2020, after years of planning, Reid and Fogarty started Flourish Canine Services out of Odell, where they would work with dogs, offering services for training, enrichment and even rehabilitation. They were living the dream.

However, in 2021, Jenni Lott, then-owner of Cascade Pet Camp, was thinking about selling the business. Seeing the opportunity to continue doing what they were doing on a larger scale at a place they already knew they loved, Fogarty and Reid jumped at the chance.

Lott was also happy to be able to sell to people who were passionate about dogs the way she was, Fogarty said.

“It was very important for her,” Fogarty said. “She wasn’t really ready to leave unless she found somebody to take it on.”

At Flourish, Fogarty and Reid had already built up quite the clientele that they were happy to bring with them.

“We actually brought just under 200 human clients with us that we had built up over a year,” Fogarty said. “It blew my mind when we were taking the mailing list from the other business to here. I was shocked at the number that we had. Because it seemed like such a small family. And it was, but I guess that grew pretty fast.”

The transition process was difficult, Reid said, but it was made a bit easier by how ready they were for it and how excited they were.

“It just felt natural in a lot of respects,” she said. “And that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t work. It was a lot of work, with a capital W, but it was like, ‘Yeah, this is the natural progression of what we want to do. And we’d been moving towards that for over a year actively, with teaching classes and doing rehab in a much smaller place.’”

Reid said being able to move to a larger space was extremely rewarding, as well as exciting for the clients they brought with them.

“Our clients that have followed us over here, they’re super excited,” Reid said. “They’re so excited for us, and they’re so excited to see the space compared to where we were.”

Now, through Cascade Pet Camp, Reid and Fogarty are able to provide many services. In fact, they do boarding, not just for dogs, but also for cats. They also do grooming, as well as training classes, physical therapy, and a lot more.

Going forward, Reid and Fogarty hope to expand the camp even further. Following the new arrival of an underwater treadmill, which will be a huge benefit to the physical therapy side of things, they hope to eventually be able to even get a pool for the animals, after they’ve had a chance to stabilize.

“It’s a beautiful, amazing piece of property,” Fogarty said. “We’re pretty ecstatic that we’re able to have it and come to work every day. Just adding things to it and modernizing. And we’ll revisit that pool in a few years.”

At this point, both Fogarty and Reid live extremely busy lives, they said, with each of them still having their foot in the door with their previous jobs, still working in their respective fields occasionally. They also both have livestock on hobby farms. Despite the work they have to put in every day on top of already busy schedules, they both agree it’s completely worth it.

“I hope in five to 10 years from now, I still walk in the building like I do every morning and go, ‘I can’t believe how excited I am to be here,’” Fogarty said.

Cascade Pet Camp is located at 3085 Lower Mill Drive in Hood River. Their hours are 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday through Friday, as well as 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday and 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Sunday.