One downside to living in the PNW is how easily you can take advantage of where you are! What do I mean specifically? You know that beautiful – whatever it is- that you drive by every day and say to yourself “we should go there someday” and then never do? Go!! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve driven past Diablo Lake, the unreal ice blue water that SHINES against the deep green woods surrounding it, and thought to myself “I’d love to go to Diablo one of these days”. Thankfully, my traveling cousins rolled into town on their “Traveling the United States” journey and we got to adventure with them for the day. It took an out of town visitor to get us there! And, man, I’m so glad we went!
We met up with Phillip’s family as early as we could get there to snag a parking spot. Even at 9am the small lot was already jam packed. And for good reason! The sun was already hot on the rocky beach, the smooth water crystal clear and welcoming. We spent the morning paddle boarding, throwing rock at drift wood in the lake, building dams on the shore. Come lunch time, things took a bit of a turn. With the picnic lunch comes, of course, BEES. It’s like they were waiting for us! We hid the kids under towel forts, took them on the paddle board out on the lake, told them “Just eat really fast!” but eventually had to just put the boys in the hot car to get their lunch into them. This seemed like a great time to pack up the beach gear and shift to hiking gear. We hit the woods and left the bees behind, trading blue water for deep, lush, green woods. Phillip’s family is quite a bit more experienced with hiking, but our boys did great keeping up!
The hike to the Diablo Lake Look-out is [this long and this elevation]. We weren’t able to make the entire trip this time and opted to turn around when the kids were getting too hot and tired. During this process of building enthusiastic kid hikers I try to be really aware of the right time to call it quits. If we can end a hike on a high note they’re more likely to be excited for the next one. For more hiking with kids tips, check this out. This hike is definitely on our list to return to and finish one day! This is also the day that we learned about the National Park Junior Ranger Program! Pick up a booklet from the Ranger Station at the start of your visit to a National Park and fill out the activities inside. The booklets talk about the wildlife and vegetation within the park so as you’re exploring the kids can be playing pinecone bingo or drawing their favorite fungus. Once they’ve completed their activities, bring the booklets back into the Ranger Station to be sworn in and get your Junior Ranger Badge! After we learned about this program, we decided as a family that we’d like to continue learning about the National Parks and make those bucket list vacations for us in the future! This day at Diablo Lake is really the catalyst of foureverwander! We owe a lot of future adventures to that one day we said “let’s go today” instead of “lets go someday”.
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