Great Local Parks for Family Caching Adventures

While I'm an avid cacher, my wife isn't, and our 7 year old son, Jack, likes caching but can get bored or frustrated with it pretty quickly.  I like being able to involve them in caching without actually having to drag them out of the house to do it, so I've been keeping track of cache locations that meet at least one of several criteria:

• Playground Area - The bigger, the better.  This gives a kid something to do if the cache takes a while to find, and has the added benefit of helping burn off excess energy.
• Nature Features - Is there a lake or a pond for fishing?  Is there an easy nature trail nearby?
• Interesting Sights - Is there a hidden path, or a ruin nearby?  Are there scenic views?

Note that I'm basing this around having a 7 year old - adjust for your child's age appropriately. I'm planning on keeping this list updated as I find locations that meet the criteria, so look for a link to this post in the Guides page as well.

Parks are listed in alphabetical order.  The initial batch of parks are all within about 12 miles from the base of Rt. 476 (the Blue Route), where it meets I-95.  All of them are within a 10-15 minute drive of the Blue Route, tops, with one in particular being about 500 feet off of exit 3.

The map below shows all of the parks and can be used to get directions.

View Great Local Parks for Family Geocaching Adventures in a larger map

Ashbridge Memorial Park - Lower Merion, PA 
Includes Playground Area and Nature Features

Very nice park, with a big playground.

This is a great park with a big playground, tennis courts, and plenty of open ground to wander around.  Keara's Monkey Cache is located on the premises, and is a great cache to pick up with a child "helper".

Other nearby caches include Austin Holly Cache, which is about 1/3 of a mile away, and the two caches in Emlen Tunnell Park, which is just under a mile away - Emlen Tunnell Park and Lone Ranger #7 Is it fair or foul? Another one nearby, Rio, is a little more than a mile and a half down Montgomery Ave. in a great little bird sanctuary.

Eastlake Park - Ridley Park, PA
Includes Playground Area (across the street) and Nature Features

Lots of fish and turtles.

Ok, so I'm a little biased toward this park as I live nearby and have two caches here, but this is a great place for kids if you want to take them fishing.  There is a dock located on the west side of the lake, and every day during the summer there are kids fishing there.  There are also a lot of critters living nearby -there is a Great Blue Heron, a Great Egret, tons of ducks and geese, as well as plenty of fish, turtles, frogs, and the occasional snake in the water.  A fox lives up in the area near the baseball field, and somebody spotted it while picking up my cache.

Photo from Google Earth that I actually took a few years ago.

There's also a playground area across the street from the park near the elementary school, but since it's off of park grounds I'm not listing it as official.  It's available for use any time except during school hours, so if you're here on a weekend feel free to take the kids over.

There are three caches in the park itself - View of the Lake, which happens to be the first cache I ever found, and two of my Arcade History caches: Breakout and Frogger.  All of them are within walking distance of each other.  You are also about a one minute drive to Hangin' Here Watchin' The Trains, which is a short two part multi with both steps in the same little park, so no driving needed.  That's right around the corner from step 1 of Hangin' Here Watchin' Traffic, which involves a little bit of driving (maybe about a mile), but should be solvable in about 20-30 minutes.  And as another shameless plug, my Local Movie Locations / Celebrity Stalker Memorial cache is less than a mile away in another park nearby.

Haverford Reserve - Haverford, PA
Includes Playground Area and Nature Features

Old picture - most of the dirt in the corners has since
turned into developed land.

This is a very large park, only about a 5 minute drive from Ithan Valley Park, mentioned below.  There is a huge playground area and several massive sports fields.  There is also a dog park, and quite a few long hiking trails.

There are two caches in this park - European Vacation, which is a quick grab right on the main road, and X-Men Marks The Spot: Wolverine #2, which is one of the best disguised caches I've found, located on one of the hiking trails.

With the proximity to Ithan Valley Park, this is a good two-for-one deal.  Ithan Valley is loaded with nature and Haverford Reserve has an awesome playground.

Houston Park - Nether Providence Twp., PA
Includes Nature Features and Interesting Sights

Very cool stuff underneath those trees.

As I already have a long post about this park with tons of pictures, I'll keep this one short.  There is a terrific nature trail underneath all of those trees in the above picture.  The trail leads you through the grounds of an old mansion from the 1920s.  There is a stream with a gorgeous stone bridge, and several other little ruined areas to explore.

Stone bridge.

When I went back here with Jack, the only issue we ran into was that he wasn't watching where he was going and almost fell down about a dozen times when we were going down the hill toward the bridge.  Once we were down there he thought this place was awesome!  No jungle gyms or anything, but lots of nature to look at and plenty to explore.

Two caches are in this park - Let The Sun Shine In is a regular cache pretty close to the trail, and a decent one to find with kids.  Houston, we've had a problem is a puzzle cache that will take a bit of work to solve before searching for it.  Taylor's Cache is a short drive away, and located in the Taylor Arboretum, so that's another neat one for kids to visit.

Indian Orchard Park - Middletown, PA
Includes Nature Features

Trees. Lots and lots of trees.

Indian Orchard Park is a large park full of nature trails.  There are no playground areas or anything like that, but it's a gorgeous area with very easy to navigate trails, and 6 caches.  This park is also only about a 5 minute drive from Linvilla Orchards, which is incredibly popular with kids and worth checking out if you have never been there before.  Two of the caches in the park are actually on the trail that runs against some of the back fields of Linvilla.  I had a bit of an adventure there right around my birthday.

There are six caches within the park. If you do the opposite of what I did and stay on the trails, you should be able to get all six caches in 60-90 minutes. This is probably a park best suited for older kids who like nature.  The caches are - X-Men Marks The Spot: Colossus (twin to the Wolverine cache in Haverford Reserve), Scouts' Stash, Snake Trap, Phobia #10, Wish it was summer, and I am friends with Russell Crowe.  Most of them are pretty close together and fairly straightforward.  The trickiest one of the bunch is the Russell Crowe cache.

Ithan Valley Park - Bryn Mawr, PA
Includes Nature Features and Interesting Sights

Lots of nature, right against the Blue Route.

Ithan Valley Park is what remains of an estate that was knocked down when they built the Blue Route, and parts of the park are against the highway sound barrier.  There are some really nice and easy nature trails, many of which are near a beautiful stream that has a little waterfall.  There was a mill here before the estate, and the owners of the mill and estate were interested in botany and brought many trees from around the world to this spot.  Those trees, and their descendants, are marked and should be pretty easy to find.

There are three caches in the park itself - Spectacular Crash II, Ithan Park Cache, and the premium members only By-Way to the HighWay.  You can walk or drive right down the road to This Is the End of Ithan Valley Park as well.  Of those four, Spectacular Crash II is one of the more impressive cache locations in the area, but may be a bit tricky for little kids, especially if you are there during a time of year when things are overgrown. The other hides are all pretty easy and very close to well defined trails.  You should be able to pick up all four caches within an hour or so, unless you get stuck finding one of them.

Lone Ranger #2 The Blue Route is a little less than a mile down S. Ithan Ave. and another quick find, but stealth is definitely required.

Jane Lownes Park - Springfield, PA
Includes Playground Area, Nature Features, and Interesting Sights

The Springfield Trail is in those trees.

This is actually not a very big park compared to the other ones in this post.  They neat thing that gets this park the "interesting sight" category is that the Springfield Trail is located behind the park, past an otherwise unmarked trail behind the basketball courts.  You could play at this park all day and probably never notice that the trail was back there.

There is a small playground area.  Not a lot of stuff on it, but Jack was happy enough.  The walk to the trail is a little steep starting out, and the trail itself is narrow and overlooks a stream. Probably not a great place for little ones - Jack was Ok as long as he kept his eyes on the ground, but I wouldn't have taken him back here when he was 5.

Stilted Stash is pretty close to where you cross the stream to the official trail, so maybe 5 minutes from the park, tops.  If you make a left on the trail, Cobras Rock! is about 10 minute hike, and STUMPED? is past that, though I haven't gone down that way far enough to find it yet and don't know if kids would enjoy it.  There is a little picnic area near Cobras Rock! with one table and an ancient trash can, so you can make it a hiking picnic lunch adventure or something.

The Merry Place - Haverford Twp, PA
Includes Playground Area and Nature Features

Playground Area and Nature Features

This is a terrific park for kids.  A major feature is a large wooden fort, shown below.  There are also giant board games painted onto a blacktop area (Jack particularly liked playing human sized Chutes and Ladders), as well as some playground equipment, tennis courts, and a sand volleyball court.

Huge fort for kids to play in.

There is a short nature trail nearby which parallels a decent sized stream and eventually leads you to the closest cache - Merry Space Place. The parking area is also the starting point to find 2yrs/200caches, which may be a bit tricky for kids, but is still a scenic walk paralleling the stream in the opposite direction of the first cache.  You're also less than a mile away from a quick log only find - Man of Steel 2.

Skunk Hollow Park (The Willows, Skunk Hollow, and Saw Mill Park) - Radnor Twp., PA
Includes Nature Features and Interesting Sights

I have posted previously about Skunk Hollow, and will be heading back there in the spring to get some pictures. Skunk Hollow is actually one of three connected parks, each of which has caches in it.  The Willows is on the northern end, and is the lands connected to an estate that is now managed by the township and used for weddings and events.  It's very picturesque, and the parking area for The Willows can be used to enter Skunk Hollow from the north.

Skunk Hollow itself is where the township piles all of their mulch.  The huge mulch piles are next to the community gardens, and can be seen as the brown blob area in the upper middle of the picture.  Several hiking trails wander through the park, which has decent elevation changes allowing you to get lots of scenic views, as well as a stream that cuts through the area. There is a nice mix of open fields and wooded areas, and it is probably one of the prettiest parks I've visited in the months since I've been caching.

Saw Mill park is on the southern end, across Sawmill Road.  The first park of a multi cache is there, and you can park there and walk across the street to get to Skunk Hollow from the southern side. There is a farm across the stream from Saw Mill Park, which often has large bovine-type creatures there in the warmer months.  They may be some type of fancy cow or something; I couldn't tell you as I was raised in the burbs and the only cows I ever saw were already processed into food.

There are tons of caches in this area.  Starting with The Willows, you have: Willows Micro, Willows Micro # 2, Willows Micro # 3, Willows Nano, and Lone Ranger #1 The Willows.  There is also a pair of premium member only caches - The Willows Two-Step: Step 1 and The Willows Two-Step: Step 2.  Step 1 has 13 favorite points as of this writing, but I have not gotten up there to check it out myself yet.

Skunk Hollow itself has six caches: Skunk Hollow, Skunk Hollow # 2, Skunk Hollow # 3, Skunk Hollow # 4, Skunk Hollow # 5, and Skunk Hollow # 6.

Saw Mill Park has part one of a two part multi - Saw Mill Two-Step.  Part two is in Skunk Hollow itself, so after picking up part one, walk across the street and down the trails to get to part 2.

These parks are in an area with a lot of caching spots, but the closest ones worth mentioning here are the ones in Dittmar Park, and a historical virtual cache I wrote about earlier - Who's Buried in Wayne's Tomb(s)?  Both are within a 5 minute drive.  You're also less than 10 minutes away from Ithan Valley Park, so if you want to make a day of it, there are plenty of options.

Smedley Park, Springfield and Media, PA
Includes Playground Area, Nature Features, and Interesting Sights

The Blue Route runs right over the park.

This is probably the easiest park to get to, as you reach it about 15 seconds off the exit from the Blue Route.  It's also right down the road from the Springfield Mall, so there are food options and shopping very close by.

This is a great park for kids, as there is a large playground area and plenty of open space to run around.  There are also a lot of trails, and one of the things that is most fascinating for kids (hence the Interesting Sights category) is that you can go underneath the Blue Route itself.

There are three regular and three premium member caches in the park itself - Vikings TB Stash, Warm Up, and Kaboom Tree ( Kaboom Car Redux), and the premiums are MY DAD HIT TEN GRAND, Tombstone Rock, and So Close Yet So Far.  I have not had a lot of time to get back here, so I have only found the two closest to the entrance of the park and don't have much insight on the others.  They are all active caches, though.

Also note that the Springfield Trail connects to Smedley Park... somehow. I think.  I'll have to walk it and post my GPS tracks or something.

Veterans Memorial Park - Springfield, PA
Includes Playground Area and Nature Features

There are two playground areas in this park - one right near the entrance on Springfield Road, and another located at the north end of the park, easily accessible from Memorial Park Drive, but you can also get there by parking at the end of the main lot and walking down a short trail around the baseball outfield.

Veteran's Cache is located pretty close to the north playground area, though you may get your feet wet getting to it.  There are a few other caches in other nearby parks, notably Support Your Local Parks and Support Your Local Parks 2.   Both are within a few minutes' drive.  There are also three quick finds in the shopping center nearby bordered by Rt. 320, Rt. 420, and State Road - Opposite of a Giant, A Well Guarded Cache, and Please Don't Park Here.

Wynnewood Valley Park - Wynnewood, PA
Includes Playground Area and Nature Features

You can't see the playground through the tree cover, but it's there.

This is another great park for kids. There is a large playground right off of the parking area, and some easy nature walks through the trees.  The cache in the park, Mega Mind, might be a bit too much for little kids, as its location is steep, but older kids should be just fine.

If you travel roughly northwest for a mile or two, toward Ardmore, you'll run into a ton of caches along the way.  A fun one for kids (Jack and I found a snake here) was Wampa Cave, located in South Ardmore Park, and pocktet cache located in the really neat, yet really tiny Linwood Park.