Flint Outdoor Activities

One empty school bus, twenty-seven abandoned cars, and a desolate two-story house are the only refuges for combatants roving an expansive urban field. Fourteen additional playfields set the stage for games, surrounding players in open fields and dense forests. It's at Futureball Paintball's 115-acre facility that friendly paintball and Airsoft battles unfold each day and have unfolded for more than 20 years. While vehicle carcasses characterize the urban landscapes, two airfields exhibit red inflatables that mimic the ruins of ancient bounce castles. Between games, a 5-acre picnic area serves as neutral ground to strategize and nibble snacks.

To ensure fair play, Futureball Paintball's staff leads brief orientations and monitors all action. They can also repair and upgrade guns.

Each year at the onset of summer, the costumed bards, knights, and royalty at Mayfaire Renaissance Festival welcome visitors to enjoy rollicking entertainment and peruse handcrafted wares throughout the wooded festival grounds. Attendees step into a world of jousters and jesters, replete with Renaissance-era songs and dances and smartphones fashioned from mutton. All-ages-appropriate comedians regale families with zany antics, and visitors can ask mystical tarot-card readers questions about the future.

The baseball and softball instructors at Great Lakes Baseball Academy share their passion for America's pastime with students as they draw upon accolades that include two national minor-league titles and a high-school state softball record for strikeouts in one year. Inside the year-round, 5,000-square-foot facility, coaches with experience at the major, minor, and high-school levels enrich players' skills during private lessons and team-training sessions. Line drives echo through three climate-controlled, 80-foot batting and pitching tunnels, which include Iron Mike pitching machines that hurtle balls from 40 to 90 mph and occasionally charge the plate. Along with their training grounds, the academy's shop stays stocked with such gear as the latest bats and gloves.

Talladay Farms ushers in cool air and the smell of drying leaves with harvest-season festivities near an apple orchard. Each year, staff members chart out complex mazes that illustrate an annual theme—this year, it's pirates—across roughly 7.5 miles of twisting paths carved into 26 rolling acres of golden corn. When they're not meandering through the complex mazes, guests gather around bonfires and picnic tables or head next door to Wasem Fruit Farm's apple orchards and pumpkin patch. As Halloween nears, they convert the twisting and turning paths of one maze into a haunted labyrinth, where actors leap from the rustling dead stalks of corn wearing terrifying masks or shirts with facts about how often paper cuts happen. Conscientious staffers place several checkpoints throughout each maze and hand out maps to keep guests from getting lost.

For 26 years, the experienced instructors at Divers Incorporated have taught students about scuba skills and environmental awareness. Divers Incorporated is a PADI Five Star Instructor Development Center, and its staff of PADI-certified instructors introduce guests to scuba with a broad variety of classes designed to appeal to potential divers with varying levels of interest in the underwater world. The entry-level PADI Discover Scuba Diving Experience gives divers the opportunity to learn scuba basics in a low-pressure environment. First, classes view an instructional video and learn how to use the equipment, after which they take to the pool and learn how to breathe beneath the water's surface. Five-week instructional courses take a more thorough tack, instructing students on the fundamentals they need to know to take an open-water dive and secure their certifications.

Capital City Skydiving's air-riding experts take first-time and experienced jumpers to the stratosphere for jumps above the scenic vistas of Southern Michigan. Tethered to clients, they guide tandem rides to facilitate first tastes of terminal velocity before coasting in for a soft landing. To accommodate licensed skydivers with a current reserve parachute, the staff guides planes over the business's own scenic landing zone so jumpers can take to the air on their own. Beginners who wish to become full-fledged divers can opt for the Accelerated Freefall program, in which aficionados teach the skills necessary to make solo jumps such as how to handle equipment or merge into goose traffic without a blinker.