Getting a Feel for Each Park

I feel like it's become our unofficial family hobby to visit every site in the national park system. It is my favorite kind of family outing to plan.

With rare exception the first step of a visit to a national park is checking out the visitor center. We do the same things each time. We hit the bathrooms. I let my kids handle their exhibits. I photograph large text displays to read them in the car later. We stamp our passports. We pick up a map of trails, and check the white board where rangers have scrawled pertinent information for the day. I am such a creature of habit that way.

That is how our outing to Great Falls Park, operated through the national parks system, started on Saturday. We might have forgotten to check the weather forecast (was it posted on the white board), but I don't think it would have changed our plans that much.

Mather Gorge is spectacular. As we stood at the overlooks I tried to visualize the flood of 1996 in which water flow was one hundred times the volume on this calm August day nearly twenty years later. The landscape was beautiful.

(As a side note, dear boys, when you are wondering why A has a better photo record of her childhood, just try to remember how cooperative she was when the camera came out and remember how cooperative you were not.)

We hiked a couple miles of the trails and noted popular activities for the area: rock climbing classes, kayaking, running, and hiking. I decided in which order I want to do each of these on return trips to Mather Gorge.

We walked through the ruins of Matildaville, the small company town built two hundred years ago when these locks were operating at full capacity. We might have not realized that we shouldn't climb around the remnants of the locks. I think I missed that sign because I was so amazed that they had stood for so long in such great condition.

We weren't wet enough at this point, and so the sky opened up and poured on us. Luckily I had my awesome tote with waterproofing and I had remembered some coats.

On another note, our kids are still awesome in the car (and very safely strapped in most of time), even though on this trip I did have to mandate quiet time once. I'm hoping it still holds through next this weekend for our final road trip of the summer.