Lafayette, IN Outdoor Activities

The gravity-savvy professionals and instructors at Air Indiana Skydiving Center oversee safe and controlled adrenaline rushes every year between late March and early November. In addition to a comprehensive ground school, they also teach practical skills with training jumps that leave from Delphi Municipal Airport. Over time, they help familiarize students with skydiving by leading controlled tandem jumps, instructor-assisted deployments, and accelerated free falls that exit planes from as high as 9,500 feet.

In addition to its staff of instructors, Air Indiana Skydiving Center also hosts a professional skydiving team. The team of pro jumpers can perform demonstration jumps for company picnics or groundbreaking ceremonies for the neighborhood's new wind tunnel.

The Hunter family knows bees. At their family-owned and operated farm, they continue a more than 100-year-old tradition of producing honey and honey-related products. Managing several hundred hives across the state of Indiana, Hunter farms produce honey, beeswax, bee pollen, and propolis, which is used to make everything from beeswax soap and lip balm to honey hot-wing sauce and 32 different flavors of honey sticks.

Guided tours of the honey farm teach groups of all sizes and ages about the work of the honeybee, while forestry tours introduce tourists to the farm’s 65 acres of hardwood. The beehive tour lets guests shadow a beekeeper on the job while "Flight of the Bumblebee" plays on repeat in their heads. The Worker Special tour includes even more hands-on learning, teaching visitors how to roll their own beeswax candle and fill bear-shaped containers with honey.

Paintball Indiana's owner and operator Chris bought his first marker––a PCS Storm––almost 20 years ago. He was hooked from the very first paintball shot, and within five years began refereeing games and designing his own equipment. Six years ago, his passion led him to purchase Paintball Indiana's expansive 20 acres of fields, which revolve around a central defensive castle. Chris now employs his own referees, a staff of young and passionate players that regulates games of speedball, woodsball, or scenario play on the three fields and lobby sofas. Chris' fields also play host to three- and five-man speedball leagues, which help players hone their marksmanship before upcoming tournaments. Large-scale games are de rigueur as well, as Chris and the staff takes down the nets between fields for the Big Game––an event hosting vast armies of players battling across 700 feet of terrain in the hopes of capturing the castle's prized Beanie Baby collection.

Twenty-five-year-old Jamie Stevenson has been working her entire life toward making horses the focus of her career. When she was just knee-high to a pony’s tail, Jamie started saving her pennies inside her "horse money box." Though this fund never got big enough to help Jamie buy her own horse, she was eventually able to achieve this goal and more thanks to the engineering degree she earned at Purdue University. Jamie’s day job as an operations process engineer bankrolls her equine interests and makes it possible for her to maintain the riding facility where she first learned how to ride—and where she met the four-legged love of her life. Today, Jamie and her trusty sidekick, Dart, help riders of all ages and abilities overcome their fears, fine-tune their riding techniques, and succeed in riding competitions.