Pataskala, OH Outdoor Activities

Floodlights replace the sun during nightfall at Four Seasons Golf and Ski Center, keeping the miniature golf courses and batting cages aglow for nighttime visitors. During the summer, guests can wind through miniature fairways that incorporate small-scale replicas of The Statue of Liberty, Niagara Falls, and the world's smallest caddies. During the winter, Four Seasons’ slopes welcome copious amounts of snow to facilitate skiing, snowboarding, and snowtubing. The newly renovated facility also hosts a game room and specialty ice cream shop.

High above reservoir banks and the forest floor, an intricate web of rope bridges and obstacles snakes itself through the towering trees of Walnut Bluffs. This is the site of Summit Vision––a pair of team-building rope courses with more than 40 combined climbing elements, designed to boost the confidence, leadership, and problem-solving skills of children, adults, and corporations.

On both courses, Summit Vision's highly trained staff safely guides adventurers through a variety of climbing endeavors, culminating in an epic zipline or giant swing dismount. The company also opens its rope courses for open-play sessions on weekends and hosts various ground-based exercises. During the summer, the 7Summits day camp provides youngsters a reprieve from the humdrum routine of remodeling their lemonade stands with more exhilarating activities such as archery, kayaking, and hiking.

Leave civilian life behind and suit up for three hours of extreme high-octane battles to determine whose clothes are the cleanest. Land Paintball provides all the necessities (a $17 value for rental package), including a mask, a marker, an air tank (with enough air to last the day), a hopper, a barrel sleeve, and 100 paintballs (a $5 value)—enough to apply a healthy base coat to any nearby corpus canvas. In the event that you take down 100 opponents with immaculate accuracy, or if you decide to graffiti your name on a nearby tree trunk, additional paintballs may be purchased on-site.

Since Tennis ltd's inception in 1982, when someone named Maria Sharapova was still fiction, the stone-accented two-story house has purveyed rackets, sunglasses, and sports apparel. It stocks these on-the-court essentials in high-quality brands such as Nike, Maui Jim, and Wilson. The store's knowledgeable staff is nearby to answer queries or expertly repair rackets, and the demo program invites players to test out rackets for a few days, looking for ones that match their swing and love of long walks on a tennis court.

Like a museum of living landscape paintings, The Dawes Arboretum combines the delicate beauties of a Japanese garden, a cypress swamp, and an azalea glen, creating a colorful haven of native plants. But this 1,800-acre wonderland wasn’t always so expansive. In 1929, when nature lovers Beman and Bertie Dawes first transformed their woodland property into an arboretum, it was just a 293-acre swath of Licking County. This stretch, with its rolling hills and mature trees, was so calm that it drew visitors from across the state and instilled a love of nature in the Dawes’ children.

Today, many of the arboretum’s more than 16,000 labeled trees and shrubs are representative of types native to central Ohio, such as the 17 Ohio buckeyes planted to form the number 17. Elsewhere, more than 100 bonsai trees adorn the courtyard by the visitors’ center. Along with plants, the grounds entice explorers with more than 12 miles of hiking trails and a 4-mile auto tour. Antiques and memorabilia from the 19th and 20th centuries adorn the Daweswood House Museum, and the Discovery Center enthralls youngsters with bird watching, crafts, and fun facts about honeybees and frogs.