Sky Meadows State Park is now offering another fun and exciting way for kids and their families to enjoy the park.

On Saturday, August 12, 2017 Sky Meadows staff, volunteers and partnering organizations unlocked the gates to the park’s new Children’s Discovery Area.

Kids and their families can now set off at their own pace to explore, create, and hike their way to discovering the agriculture, nature, history and recreation of Sky Meadows State Park.

Learning to balance on the Animal Athletes play station

Exciting play stations are focused on the park’s themes of agriculture, nature, and history that allow children to create art, move freely, and make music, build, dance, climb, dig and crawl.

The Children’s Discovery Area also includes a Kids in Park TRACK Trail®.  Offering ample benches along its length, the TRACK Trail crosses streams, passes through woodlands, and traverses meadows before returning to its starting point. Families can explore the trail using four different colorful brochures.

The trail is designed so that each time you pick up a different brochure, you experience something new along the trail. The easy, well-marked .7 mile loop trail is designed to engage children and their families, helping them begin a lifetime of trail enjoyment.

The junction posts along the trail will guide you on your adventure through the entire Discovery Area. After you’ve “gotten your feet wet” on the TRACK Trail you can follow these same junction posts and explore the other 24 miles of trails in the park.

Begin your adventure here at the TRACK Trail

Of course we could not have done this by ourselves. Many hands joined to make the Children’s Discovery Area concept a reality. Sky Meadows State Park wish to thank Staff and volunteers, as well as the financial and programmatic contributors, including:

Many hands helped make Children’s Discovery Area this a reality

• Garden Club of Virginia’s Centennial Project
• Northern Virginia Hiking Club
• Friends of Sky Meadows
• Shenandoah Chapter of Virginia Master Naturalists
• Nature Explore
• Kids in Parks
• Virginia State Park’s Youth Conservation Corps

 Every day since the opening of the Children’s Discovery Area I’ve had parents tell me how much they and their children love it. I enjoy watching the kids’ faces light up as they tell me how they built a house to play frontier family in, or how they “planted” all the corn in the dirt.

If you’d like to come and discover the Children’s Discovery Area for yourself, enter the park via the main entrance on Edmonds Lane and follow the signs to the Picnic Area. There you can play, have a bite to eat, and relax while the kiddos have fun.

Learn more about Sky Meadows State Park here, or for Google map directions, click here.