Liberty City Park

Liberty, MO

The folks at Liberty Parks and Rec hit an absolute home run with this park. For parents, it checks nearly all the boxes, and it's an absolute blast for the kids. On our visit, the kids played hard for two straight hours and were upset when it was time to leave. This is really two parks in one. One side of the park is a sprayground with lots different ways for kids to play in the water. The star of the sprayground is the giant bucket in the middle that dumps every couple minutes. The area is big enough that it's easy for both big kids and little kids to have fun on the sprayground without getting in each others' way.

The other side of the park is a traditional playground with some of the best equipment that we've seen. It has all the elements that you'd expect to see on a great playground, including a tall climber with multiple slides, a couple different spinning elements, and a large rope climber. Where this playground really shines is in the details. All the equipment has a woodland theme, and our kids loved searching for the lifelike bugs and animals hidden all over the park. The natural looking elements also create plenty of little nooks and crannies for the kids to hang out in. Maybe the most impressive thing here is that the whole park is seamlessly integrated with ADA accessibility. Both of the climbing towers can be accessed by a hill with a paved path on the back side, and there is a groud-level merry go round with spots reserved specially for wheelchairs. The swings have accessible seats, and many of the picnic tables have spots for wheelchairs.

The park gets just about everything right from the parents' perspective. You can sit in the middle of the park and see all of the playground and sprayground at the same time, making it easy to keep track of multiple children. There is also a fence surrounding the whole play area with just a couple entry points. There are four family style bathrooms that are kept very clean, although the one that I used didn't have any way to dry hands after washing. There is plenty of parking, which is good because this park can get really busy on the weekends. We went on a Sunday and there were three different birthday parties going on! Even though it gets a little crowded, there's plenty of seating for adults and we never felt like there were so many people that we couldn't enjoy ourselves. One thing that's worth mentioning is that the playground gets wet and slippery with kids running back and forth from the sprayground. We found that slides were way faster when wet and there were some smaller kids that were getting thrown off the end pretty hard (they loved how fast it was). The kids also said that the rope climber was harder when they were wet. I don't think it was necessarily dangerous, but it's definitely something to keep in mind with the little ones.

Overall, this is one of our favorite summertime parks, and it's a great place to go on a hot day!