Tenkiller State Park

One of our favorite parks to visit is Tenkiller State Park.  While Tenkiller Lake is quite large, the state park is in Vian, Oklahoma.  It's about an hour drive from home, so we enjoy it for a day trip. Our favorite hike in the park is near the Pine Cove Marina.

If you turn between these two signs,
you're in the right place
for a good hike.

When we visit a state park, our first stop is always the restroom. With three kids, someone always has to go. The best restroom to visit is in the nature center.  Something I have learned along the way, take hand sanitizer.  The restrooms are usually pretty nice facilities, but they don't always have soap and paper towels. The nature center is really cool to visit.  They have snakes and some birds.  They have a touch table. You can park at the nature center or follow the road around until you reach the office that handles the cabin rentals.   

This is the nature center near the front of the park.

We like to park behind the cabin office and start our hike from there.  The trail that we enjoy starts behind the office and goes down to the lake.

This is the office that handles the cabin reservations. 
The trail we enjoy starts behind the office.

This is a fun area in front of the office. 
It has a beautiful waterfall and plants.

Last year when we visited (in 2019), we weren't able to go all the way down to the lake because of the flooding.  This year, we enjoyed getting close to the water to throw rocks in and enjoy the breeze coming off the lake. If you go down to the water, the trail is a little rocky and you have to watch your footing a bit, but the kids were able to clear it with no problems.

 The trail heading down to the water has a lot of trees and bushes.  We had to be careful of the thorns on a couple of the plants.  Also, DON'T Forget the bug spray.

If you don't want to go down to the water, you can follow the trail around and have a nice hike.  In our experience, the trail is narrow and is rugged in spots. There are a lot of places that you can wonder off the trail and climb a little higher on the rocks or climb down toward the water. 

The last four pictures were taken in May of 2019, when the water was REALLY high.  Even though we couldn't follow the path along the water, the lake was pretty close to the trail anyway.  All of the picnic tables were under water. 

The Goal

As a family we really enjoy the outdoors.  Back in 2018, as we were at Sequoyah State Park, in the Three Forks Nature Center, the woman working there asked if we had heard of the Oklahoma Passport Program.  We hadn't so she grabbed some books for us and explained that each of the Oklahoma State Parks offer stamps.  When you visit the park, you visit the office and get a stamp to help keep track of which parks you have visited.  I took the passport book she offered and stuck it in the console of the car and forgot about it.  

For Mother's Day of 2019, Hal planned a day of hiking at Tenkiller State Park for me.  I remembered the Passport book and had him stop at the park office to get a stamp for the book.  We had so much fun hiking and enjoying being together that I decided to make a goal.  The goal was to visit every state park in Oklahoma in a year.  We are coming up on Mother's Day 2020 and I haven't reached my goal (life sometimes gets in the way). We have visited every state park in the Northeast Region of Oklahoma (and a few in the Southeast region). We have even visited some of the parks twice to explore more. 

We have found areas in Oklahoma that aren't state parks, but are still fun. My hope is that we are able to share our experiences to help other families get out and explore the areas around them.