Vancouver, BC Outdoor Activities

Richmond Indoor Paintball lets competitive sharpshooters live out intricate battle strategies in 25,000 square feet of barricades, abandoned buildings, and streets made to look like a real town. Open year-round, the facility’s graffiti-splattered walls surround the field, and the beat-up old cars littered about offer cover. Players find only premium rental equipment, paintballs, and all elements of play kept feeling as though they were plucked straight from a video game. The space accommodates up to 60 guests from noon to midnight each day except Tuesday, when the facility closes for cleaning and community art-history lectures. Click here to view a virtual tour.

The Vancouver Canadians are the only affiliated minor-league team in Canada. As a Triple-A team in the Pacific Coast League between 1978 and 1999, they claimed three championships as well as a Triple-A World Series. In 2011, the Canadians became the Toronto Blue Jays’ short-season class-A affiliate, taking home the Northwest League’s championship title that year and the next. The team plays its home games at Nat Bailey Stadium, which was built in 1951, a storied time in baseball when a hot dog cost a nickel and a tie was settled with a ten-step duel.

Recommended by Frommer's travel guide, Unicorn Balloon Company leads guided excursions through the aerial spectacles of the Sonoran Desert's landscapes and environs. Smoothly ascending sunrise and sunset tours provide an easygoing and elevated trip through the panoramic desert and mountain terrain, which includes resilient flora such as saguaro cacti, palo verde trees, and distant mountain ranges assembled by packs of Paleolithic tailgaters. The wicker baskets float above vegetation and discreetly hover over animal habitats, with occasional views of coyotes, jackrabbits, desert mule deer, and javelinas. Each 100-foot balloon drifts at heights from just above treetop levels to 3,000 feet above the ground, carefully following wind currents to prevent turbulence and stay on the scent trail of musky airplane pilots.

The vibrant blooms and lush foliage of approximately 12,000 plants greet visitors' eyes as they wander along the outdoor paths of UBC Botanical Garden. Guest are encouraged to make small talk with plants on display, which include international varietals such as Asian maple trees, alpine and montane flora, more than 400 species of rhododendrons, and vascular plants from the rainforest. Inside the Nitobe Memorial Garden, waterfalls and streams reflect the harmony of nature framing a traditional Japanese teahouse. The garden's classes can help students cultivate home botanicals, teaching techniques such as pruning and training fruit trees. The picturesque surroundings also play host to researchers, weddings, and school groups.

Not many people realize that the sea undergoes a radical transformation every night. Those who have taken UBC Aqua Society's night diving course do; they’ve witnessed nocturnal creatures and plants, which are strikingly different than their daytime counterparts, first hand. This night course is just one of 15 different specialty courses offered by UBC Aqua Facility, a non-profit organization that has helped its community explore subaquatic worlds for more than 50 years.

In addition to its specialty programs, the facility offers learn-to-dive courses for beginners, as well as rescue classes that prepare students to retrieve people that can't swim or the perfectly good burrito they threw overboard in a regretful fit of rage. Through it all, the business maintains a laid-back, yet professional attitude, evidenced especially by its frequent social gatherings for club members.

Among Diving Locker's group of seasoned and certified underwater experts, accomplishments include inspecting Australia's Great Barrier Reef up close, swimming with fish in the blue waters of Guam, and spending more than 40 years helping snorkellers choose the right fins. Diving Locker's staff of instructors combine their wealth of collective experience to provide students with technical education—such as PADI certifications and search-and-recovery training—and to impart their genuine love for the fruits of globe-trekking. In addition to being a hub for scuba equipment sales and instruction, the business' audacious employees also organize and lead diving jaunts around the world and to a number of local underwater destinations on weekends. Diving Locker has been in operation since the late 1960s and has been operated since 1972 by Greg Kocher, the facility's resident equipment guru and mermaid interpreter.