Tag Archive for: climbing wall

Westerville Community Center

Westerville Community Center

Year-round, indoor playground

Catch this idea about the Westerville Community Center, put it in your pocket and save it for a rainy day.

The Westerville Community Center, at 350 N. Cleveland Ave. in Westerville, is a great place to take young children when our Ohio weather isn’t cooperating. Daily passes allow use of the indoor offerings including a gym, climbing wall, pool and playground.

Westerville Parks and Recreation operates the 96,000-square-foot facility, which opened to residents and outsiders, like me, in November 2001.

Like many moms around central Ohio, I discovered the center while attending a birthday party. The pool and climbing wall are available for party rentals.

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The indoor pool is called the Watering Hole and includes a shallow area with fountains and a slide. There’s also a lazy river and swirling slide for tube rides. Daily resident rates for a child to swim in the pool is $7.50 and $2 charge to observe.

The concrete wall, called the Zenith Climbing Wall, measures 27 feet. It’s designed for beginners and experts alike. Daily rates for a non-resident child is $5.25. Children must weigh 40 pounds.

A great way to check out the facility is to visit the indoor playground, which is free. Children aged two and younger are admitted for free to all activities.

For more information, visit www.westerville.org.

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Scioto Audubon

Metro park pleases families and birds

Whittier Peninsula was never a place to take your kids. For decades, the 160-acre tract of land located south of downtown Columbus was a mangled mess of junked cars, buried trash and sewer water.

But things are different now – thanks in part to the birds that annually migrate through the Scioto River headland.

Nesting herons and dozens of other species of native Ohio birds inspired Columbus, Franklin County Metro Parks and the Ohio chapter of the National Audubon Society to reclaim the land that was once a city dump. They transformed it into the Scioto Audubon Metro Park, a 72-acre urban playground with walking trails, a picnic area and bird-watching decks, and a 35-foot outdoor climbing wall.

The park’s centerpiece is the Grange Insurance Audubon Center, which opened this summer at 505 W. Whittier St. The state-of-the-art building, made possible by a $4 million gift from Grange Insurance, features a 200-seat auditorium, classrooms for nature-based learning and an observation room with birding books and binoculars for viewing birds. The 18,000 square-foot center also meets LEED certification, so it’s ecologically sustainable, too.

The center offers hands-on educational programs, said to be a valuable resource for the nearby urban schools. Students will learn bird banding, data collection and mathematical analysis while observing the weather, plants and wildlife.

The center also offers a variety of public programs based on community suggestions such as urban stargazing, bat watching, nature photography, canoe trips and family movie nights.

For more information, visit www.grange.audubon.org.

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