Adventuring beyond through travel, food, and more.
Surrounded by Wind Cave, Jewel Cave, Mount Rushmore, and other national parks and monuments, Custer State Park is both a treat and unique compared to these other locations. After our visit, these are hands-down our family’s picks for the 4 best things to do in Custer State Park!
…We enjoyed the best family day in Wind Cave National Park! This is a fun park that can be enjoyed in a 1/2 day, full day, or more. Note: We receive a small commission for purchases made through links in this post.
Wind Cave, like Mammoth Cave, is named after the cave but includes a number of activities that are above ground and beautiful in their own right. While Wind Cave is a small park, it is close to a number of great parks in the Black Hills, South Dakota area including the Badlands National Park, Jewel Cave National Monument, Mount Rushmore, and the excellent Custer State Park. We stayed right in Custer and enjoyed down time at a great home VRBO home rental!
A long weekend is perfect for the area and gives you plenty of time to spend in each park. Wind Cave won’t take you all day unless you do some extended hiking, of which there are more than 30 miles of!
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The Mojave Preserve is a vastly under-appreciated gem of the National Park System in California. We visited on a trip that had us fly into Las Vegas before hitting the Mojave, Sequoia, Kings Canyon, Yosemite, and Death Valley National Parks. We had the best 1 day in the Mojave Preserve by doing some great hikes and appreciating the beauty of the park!
Tucked between I-15 and I-40 and touching the border with Nevada, this huge park (1.6 million acres and the third largest site in the contiguous US) encompasses abandoned mines, lava tubes, sand dunes, train depots, arguably more Joshua Trees than Joshua Tree National Park, mountains, and so much more that we were unable to do it all in a day! What we were able to do was enjoy some beauty and have a good visit as a family. And sweat… So, how do you have your best 1 day in the Mojave Preserve?
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Yosemite National Park is a great National Park for families as there are many beautiful sites to see that require little to no hiking as well as some amazingly beautiful longer hikes. During our visit to Yosemite we chose to do the popular Mist Trail hike and the less popular, but still beautiful, Wapama Falls hike in the Hetch Hetchy area of Yosemite (in addition to many overlooks and short hikes). Following is more info about our picks for the top 2 best family hikes in Yosemite National Park.
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Our family’s top picks for Mount Rainier National Park family day hikes. For our top picks for shorter hikes, visit this post.
While there are quite a few options for Mount Rainier National Park family day hikes, we chose two of the best on our visit. Some of the ones we were thinking of hiking still had quite a bit of snow on the trail, which is always possible even into July depending on snowfall that year. Our top choices for day hikes in Mount Rainier were the Comet Falls Trail and Mt. Fremont Lookout.
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