Ride Till Dark. Come Home To All Forty Of You.

What a Tuesday looks like

Somebody’s cooking eggs for forty by 7:00 am.

The eight-burner range gets going early, because somebody always wakes up first and decides to feed everyone. Trailers are staged outside where you left them. You’re on the trail by nine.

Island Park runs four hundred miles of groomed trail, and you can ride until the light goes flat without repeating yourself. Or it’s Targhee, or Kelly Canyon an hour out, where your ski/snowboarding crew splits off after breakfast.

Everyone’s back by dusk. Wet gear gets hung to dry or through the laundry. There’s stew on the stove, a steaming hot tub on the back deck for relaxing. Plus, the kids who stayed behind have been in the tunnels and building forts all day and haven’t asked for a screen once.

Then it’s dinner in the grand dining area, somebody telling the story about that epic jump, the fire going in one of three living rooms, and the people who want to be up until two doing Karaoke and the people who want to be asleep by nine both getting exactly what they want. And you haven't had to share any spaces with strangers. ever!

Nobody has to load up and drive anywhere at bed time. Tomorrow you do it again.

When the weather has other ideas

A stormy day is one of the better days at Three Peaks Lodge.

There’s a theater room, a pool table, ping pong, air hockey, foosball, a bouldering wall, a 36×36 playroom, and a castle with slides and secret passageways running through it. There are three living rooms and a dining area that seats everybody at once.

A group of forty can lose an entire afternoon in this building and come out the other side in a better mood than they went in. Dave spent twenty-three years making sure of it — most of it with his own hands, and a fair amount of it added just because he knew the kids would love it.

You can bring cards, but you probably won’t need them.