Things to Do in Woodinville

Baseball players can't skimp on their hitting, pitching, and catching skills if they want to dominate the game—a fact that the instructors at Northshore Sports Complex know well. In 1982, Cody Webster earned the title of MVP while playing for the Kirkland Nationals All-Star Team—the first US team to win the Little League World Series. He continued to play throughout high school and college, and went on to coach for Pepsi Baseball. His cohort, Craig Bishop draws on 20 years of coaching experience at high schools and colleges. Together, the duo shares the task of teaching students the fundamentals of the game inside batting and pitching cages.

Surrounded by a chain-link fence and divided by safety nets, their astro-turfed cages shelter machines that launch baseballs and softballs straight down the plate. These projectiles can reach speeds up to 85mph, which would be really scary if the baseballs weren't tranquilized beforehand. Sans the machines, pairs can take to the cages to hone their pitching and catching abilities.

Students at Balance Yoga Studio can bolster mind-body connections during yoga lessons such as the pose-centric Hatha. Drawing from a sextet of core tenets that includes mindfulness, empowerment, and community, the founders and their team of instructors have earned the distinction as Best Yoga Studio from Woodinville KOMO News. The founders emphasize acceptance as one of their studio's most important values and helm a universally accessible class lineup with sessions that may involve props or limbering 85-degree heat. During certain classes, they may meld traditional movements with more modern exercise practices, such as syncing movements to music or reinventing the tree pose as the cellular-tower pose.

Honed by a minimum of 200 hours of yoga teacher training, plus 300 hours of hands-only walking, the seasoned instructors’ expertise ensures that students stretch safely during group courses, workshops, and private lessons.

Mike Dickson plunks his keyboard as he stares into his work computer. But in his mind, he holds a fly rod and looks out onto a river teeming with steelhead. For someone who grew up fly-fishing—including guiding at a river lodge in Alaska and teaching fly-fishing on the weekend—Dickson couldn't endure more than a year at his office job, which he landed out of college. He shuts down his computer one last time and then joins his fisheries biologist dad, Dennis, at Dickson Flyfishing.

Today, the father-son team guides and teaches fly-fishing to all levels of anglers on the waters of the Olympic Peninsula. Conscious of their environmental impact, the Dicksons lead eco-rafting trips throughout the year on the Skagit, Sauk, and Queets Rivers to fish for steelhead, cutthroat trout, and salmon with scales made of gold. For more adventurous clients, Mike and Dennis guide winter fly-fishing trips for tarpon on the flats of the Caribbean and lead three-day campouts on the Grande Ronde River. Additionally, scenic rafting tours bring visitors up close to wildlife such as eagles. The Dicksons also run a virtual fly shop, where they sell their own line of equipment.

Though he once dreamed of becoming an astronaut, Christopher Hagedorn instead found his passion on the Earth; he's worked as a national forest hydrologist, oceanography-engineering consultant, and mountaineering-and-wilderness-leadership instructor. After roaming the country on more than 30 extended wilderness trips, he came to rest in the North Cascade Mountains where he leads adventure day trips and wilderness-skills classes. He and his team of experienced guides lead explorers of all ages on Family Adventure Backpacking trips to secluded and mostly unknown destinations, tackling rocky beaches, mountain hillsides, and coniferous forests.

On mountaineering trips, Get In The Wild shows groups how to traverse North Cascades National Park's rugged peaks, roaring waterfalls, and glaciers without having to arm-wrestle bears for passage. Canyoneering trips explore the Dirty Devil River and Capitol Reef National Park, navigating historic sandstone cliffs, rocky domes, and winding canyons; and give photographers the chance to focus their lenses on the wilderness of Southern Utah. Throughout their adventures, the guides keep their charges fueled with gourmet camp food, preparing vegetarian, vegan, and kosher options upon request.

They also lead classes in hiking, glacier climbing, snow camping, canyoneering, and wilderness navigation to help adventurers blaze their own trails.

If you’ve never stood on top of water, or if you’ve stood on it and want to further defy the laws of viscosity and velocity, then strap in to Northwest Riders’ line of Slingshot Sports boards and bindings, designed to give you a blend of comfort and performance that most only experience during sleeping-bag races. As you’re towed along by a 21-foot Malibu vRide boat, the experienced nautical navigators on board will tame the wake to fit your desired degree of difficulty.

Traxx Indoor Raceway measures out adrenaline in seconds. It takes a go-kart just 23 seconds to careen around the indoor 1/5-mile track once, and 45 seconds for it to crest the 1/4-mile outdoor track's hill and swoop around its smooth turns back to the starting line. Drivers can reach speeds of 35 miles per hour in the SODI GT2 gas-powered karts, so the track provides helmets, jumpsuits, and notes from their mother to keep the racers safe. All contests last 20 laps or up to 15 minutes, except for the Traxx 100, a monthly marathon when 10 drivers rumble around the outdoor track 50 times.

Although drivers on the main track must be at least 14 years old, the team is committed to spreading the excitement around. Kids aged 3–10 gear up and hop into electric cars, zipping around their own four-turn track under the watchful eyes of attendants. Among other carnivalesque distractions, the colorful facility boasts an arcade and a 24-foot climbing wall to thrill jaded teenage thumbs, as well as a checker-themed banquet hall that seats up to 150 people for parties and team-building events.