There’s lots of room to run and play, climb and hide at Mill Creek’s new Exploration Park. Your little adventurers get a taste of nature here – climbing boulders and tree trunks, exploring a streambed and scaling a mountain – all without a long drive by you. The 1.2-acre circular park is located in the North Pointe neighborhood just off 35^th Ave SE.     Half of the park is a grassy play lawn, which was still fenced off when we visited. The other half is nature-meets-parkour course. Kids can summit a mini mountain, duck through the tunnel underneath, cross wooden bridges and dig in the gravel-filled den. Playground equipment includes a hillside double slide, a balance beam, and a Kompan rope climber and swing set. A dry streambed filled with rocks leads down to a frog pond. The new picnic tables are wheelchair friendly and the concrete sidewalk circling the park meets Americans with Disabilities Act standards. It’s a great route for beginning bikers. A little boy practiced his balance bike, his dad trailing him with baby in the stroller. “You can keep going, bud! You can go wherever you want,” the dad called out. That’s something you don’t hear in the city.   Building this new park cost a mind-boggling $1.25 million, with half the money going to grading, drainage and irrigation work. (No more soggy grass!) The park closed from April to October, and its North Pointe neighbors got to listen to construction vehicles rumbling for six months.   But what a payoff. This park was specifically designed as a neighborhood park, primarily for the 225 homes in the North Pointe development. It’s intended for families within walkable/bikable distance, not as a destination park. There are only 22 parking spaces built into the circumference of the park.   There’s no restroom here by design, to discourage people from outside Mill Creek coming here. (Adding one would have cost another $1 million.) We planned ahead for that detail, though – there’s an Albertson’s and McDonald’s on 132^nd St SE. Exploration Park makes for an easy outing: kids get to explore a bit of man-made nature (surrounded by cookie-cutter homes), and parents have the convenience of big box stores around the corner. Because of the hillside play area, parents don’t have great sight lines. But on a weekday morning, the park was quiet enough a couple of moms could catch up at the picnic tables, and hear their kids playing. With all its nooks and crannies, Exploration Park was made for an epic game of hide-and-seek. The swing set includes two regular belt swings and a basket swing. We watched a baby having the tummy time of her life in that basket swing. Later, we saw a determined toddler scramble up the faux-rock steps to the top of the mountain. This park is really all ages – a super fun obstacle course for bigger kids, but accessible for waddlers and tots too.   The beautiful landscaping around the play area includes a frog pond/rain garden, which is designed to collect and filter stormwater runoff. You do have to keep an eye on kids around the little pond, if they’re the kind prone to toppling in. Rocks the size of ostrich eggs in the streambed proved irresistible to a gaggle of preschoolers. We saw them heaving the rocks into the pond, and it’s just a matter of time before that pond gets filled up.   I asked my 4-year-old what he liked best about Exploration Park, and it was the slide. At first he was scared and wanted to hold my hand, but then he discovered that the slide is super slow. So slow he could stroll up and down the slide in his sneakers. It was an exciting discovery.     There’s a ton of fun packed into this half-moon-shaped playground. It’s well worth putting on your circuit, even if you don’t live in the North Pointe neighborhood (shhh). Just plan a potty stop before and after playing.   This story ran on ParentMap here.