A family who has spent five summers road-tripping North America in a converted Ford Transit just published their verdict: Quebec is the best place they've found for a hiking holiday with young kids. Over seven days near Québec City and up through the Charlevoix region, the parents of a six- and ten-year-old covered more than 15 trails and narrowed them down to ten winners — heavy on waterfalls, varied enough to keep children motivated, and all reachable within about an hour's drive of the city.

The list spans Quebec's 28-park national network. In Jacques-Cartier National Park, a glacial valley 1,800 feet deep holds short loops like the 1.3-mile La Tourbière boardwalk and a raft-friendly river, plus Huron-Wendat interpretive exhibits where kids can pick up Wendat words and plant lore. Also under an hour from Québec City, Canyon Sainte-Anne in Beaupré packs three suspension bridges, eight lookouts and a 1.9-mile circuit around a 243-foot waterfall, with a zipline and new obstacle course for extra adrenaline. Closer still, Parc de la Chute-Montmorency lets families climb 487 cliffside steps to a 272-foot falls, with a cable car, via ferrata and double zipline as alternatives — and fossilized trilobites visible in the gorge walls.

Into Charlevoix, a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, the highlights get loftier. Grands-Jardins National Park's La Choenne trail is a roughly 3-mile round trip to a 2,400-foot summit through subarctic taiga, past a glacier-deposited boulder left behind some 11,000 years ago. Hautes-Gorges National Park claims the highest rock faces east of the Canadian Rockies and serves everyone from toddler-loop hikers to those eyeing the 13.4-mile Les Riverain along the Malbaie River. A 4.6-mile Marine Forest Trail near the Charlevoix Maritime Museum climbs about 1,269 feet over some 300 wooden steps — through woods once logged to build schooners — and rewards hikers with St. Lawrence views that, oddly, draw almost no crowds.

Two standout cultural additions: the Hôtel-Musée Premières Nations in Wendake pairs a moving Huron-Wendat museum with riverside interpretive trails, and after dark the Onhwa' Lumina is a three-quarter-mile night walk through the Wendake forest, lit with video projections, songs and the Wendat creation story of the Great Turtle — a genuinely memorable way to mix hiking with Indigenous culture. For a splurge basecamp, the Club Med Québec-Charlevoix at Le Massif ski mountain offers a gondola, kids-only guided hikes and a 1.2-mile summit loop with 360-degree panoramas over the St. Lawrence.

For parents plotting a first big hiking trip, this is a ready-made blueprint: everything clusters along a Québec City-to-Charlevoix corridor that works by campervan or rental car, trails come in short, medium and all-day versions, and waterfalls do the motivational heavy lifting for small legs. French practice comes free.