The Garrettsville area offers residents and visitors of all ages many opportunities for exploring the natural world via hiking trails, state & local parks, and picnic pavilions.

The Garrettsville Village Parks contain five baseball/softball fields, soccer fields, basketball courts, a skateboard course and playground. The park also contains outdoor pavillion available for weddings, reunions and parties. 

Pixley Park located on SR 305 in Nelson Township features a baseball field, and playground equipment perfect for younger children.

Headwaters Trail has a trailhead located at the rear of Garrettsville Village Park, and is great for hikers, bicyclists and horse riders.Headwaters Trail is an eight-mile limestone-paved trail built on the railbed of the former Cleveland-Erie Railroad line between Mantua and Garrettsville.

The Portage Park District recently purchased property adjacent to the trail on Freedom Street to enable easier parking of hikers and bikers.

Eagle Creek State Nature Preserve features a 6-mile trail system, including a boardwalk, wildlife observation tower, and small parking lot. Eagle Creek meanders through a wide floodplain dotted with beaver dams, marshlands, small bogs and button-bush swamps.

The James H. Barrow Field Station consists of a 360-acre parcel of land, with more than 200 acres of beech-maple forest, and a two-mile interpretive nature trail, a waterfowl observation building and meeting center, a lab building with student research areas and natural history displays, experimental agricultural fields and an aquatics building. A prairie environ was planted in 2008 and is representative of the tall grass prairie that covered parts of Ohio from 8000 to 5000 years BP. It consists of native plants, mostly perennials that provide food for insects, reptiles, mammals and birds.

Although a small park, 167-acre Nelson-Kennedy Ledges State Park provides a thrilling experience to visitors, with its rugged cliffs and diverse plant life typical of a more northern climate. The spectacular rock formations at Nelson-Kennedy Ledges have become trademarks of the park.