Ride Island Park All Day. Then Keep The Party Going All Evening.

Island Park in winter is a beautiful snowy day of groomed snowmobiling trails, four hundred miles of it. The shape of the day is simple. You ride until the light goes. The machines are loud and then they go quiet. Someone is always a little farther ahead than they meant to be, and someone is waiting at a junction with a better story than they had at breakfast. If you have experienced Island Park in the winter, you know the longing that comes for this kind of tired. It is why people clear a week in February and come back every year.

For the less adventurous, there is a quieter day: Yellowstone under snow, steam off the basins, bison in the white. Or when the trails themselves are the wrong call, Grand Targhee gets about five hundred inches a year. Most crews are thrilled for the track in front of the sled and an afternoon that does not require them to be anywhere else.

The Snag For Big Groups Happens In The Evening

Island Park will rent you a row of cabins, and for small groups that is fine. A large crew that fills more than one cabin gets a very different evening. The heater in one of the units quit working. Not enough room for all of your trailers. And you’re either eating out or cooking a big meal in a very small cabin kitchen trying to decide where everyone will fit to eat dinner.

Most Winter Crews Discover Three Peaks Lodge In The Summer

Three Peaks Lodge is half an hour south of the Island Park trails, in Saint Anthony. Most people who stay here in the winter found it by accident. They had come for a family reunion, or a wedding, or a group retreat. They remembered the comfortable living rooms, the amazing kitchen, the bunk room that sleeps 16 kids, or that the kids vanished into the indoor castle, the tunnels and playrooms. Months later when they were doing the winter retreat math, they realized how great the lodge is for winter excursions. Three Peaks Lodge sleeps forty people. Plus there is plenty of room for everyone’s trailers. You can spend your days at Island Park and come back to enjoy another level of togetherness in the evenings. And you never have to share the hot tub with any other group because you have the entire 9,600 sq ft lodge to yourselves!

Dinner can be prepared in the commercial kitchen big enough that the cooks can cook at the same time without bumping into each other. The kids are not stuck in a back bedroom with a television. There is a castle, multiple playrooms, slides and tunnels, pool table, ping pong, foosball, and a stage and theater screen for evening movies, plays or karaoke. Adults end up in the hot tub or in one of three living rooms, still talking, because nobody has to go back out into the cold to hop to other units to join a different conversation.

The riding is the day you came for. Staying together is the part people are still describing in June: the meals, the noise, the kids who disappeared into the slides and came back hungry, the whole crew in the building when the day ended.

Island Park → The trails, from the Saint Anthony side.

Winter at the lodge → From fall through spring the lodge is $900 on a weeknight and $1,100 on a weekend night.