Lake Placid, NY is my family’s favorite winter wonderland. We’ve traveled there for several winter breaks since Teen Traveler was about 5YO, with friends, with family and on our own.
It’s closer than Canada and less expensive and less crowded than the Vermont ski resorts on the other side of Lake Champlain. Plus, there’s so much to do beyond skiing.
As long as the weather remains cold and snowy, and you pack clothes that will keep you warm, there is a lot of winter-time fun to be had into this Adirondack town, even if your family doesn’t ski.
We usually aim for a five or six-day trip because there is enough to do and it’s a good six-to-seven-hour drive from New York City. But plenty of people do long-weekend getaways, especially if they’re in town for the races, hockey tournaments and ice-skating competitions that happen all winter long.
Here are a dozen things to do in Lake Placid during a winter vacation with kids.
Get ready to go!
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11+ Essential Lake Placid Winter Actitivities For Families
Lake Placid hosted two winter Olympic Games and has remained an important training and competition center for snow and ice sports.
Regular folks like you and me can use the Olympic skating rinks, cross-country trails and ski slopes, which makes for great skiing and skating.
And you can often watch real athletes ski jumping or using the luge/skeleton track. Seeing these sports up close made me appreciate what it takes to pull them off.
In 2023, Lake Placid hosted the World University Games, the largest amateur multi-sport competition after the Olympics.
To prepare for these games, they added long-overdue modern refrigeration to the outdoor skating oval, upgraded the Whiteface’s snow-making and spruced up the lodges at several Olympic sports sites. Visitors are still reaping the benefits of all this work.
Here are some of the best ways to get outdoors in and around Lake Placid
Downhill ski at Whiteface Mountain
Skiing at Whiteface Mountain Ski Resort is a not for sissies. The town plays hoses to so many winter games because of the Adirondacks’ famous high peaks. You’ll find longer, more challenging runs here than at other Northeast resorts and it’s never overly crowded.
However, it’s always ten-degrees colder on the mountain than in town. And it’s known for stiff winds that can make the slopes very icy toward the end of most ski days.
Rich and Teen Traveler always make a point of getting to the slopes by 8:30, and usually call it a day around 3:00.
There is a “junior” side of the mountain that has long easy slopes. The recent mountain upgrades included adding two additional ski runs on this side, one of them cheerfully named the flying squirrel.
Teen Traveler likes to warm up on here before heading for the longer runs. Families with smaller skiers can spend the whole day here.
My best Whiteface tips
Whiteface is about a 20-minute drive from Lake Placid. Give yourself a good 45 minutes to get there, park and get your gear. Make it an hour if it’s a weekend or school break or you’re have a lesson booked first thing in the morning.
• If anyone in your family is taking lessons, using the Bear Den as your base can save you time and stress. Parking is usually easier there, for one thing. Look for the turn-in just past the main entrance when you are coming from town.
My family often reserves their boots and skis there, even when they aren’t taking lessons, because it’s less busy than the main lodge.
If the kids are hungry after their lesson, the bear den has dining, too. It offers fewer and more kid-centric options than the main lodge, but it also has smaller crowds at the peak lunch hour.
• As with most ski hills these days, booking lift tickets and rentals ahead will save you a little money and get you on the slopes more quickly.
An RFID card that you can keep tucked away in your pocket has replaced the old lift ticket stickers. They’re reusable and we save a few dollars by holding on to ours from one year to the next.
Tip for non-skiers: Anyone can buy a gondola ticker to ride to the mountain at any time of year. It’s worth it for the scenery and for the bird’s-eye view of the skiers and snowboarders heading down the slope. When you get cold, step back into the warm gondola to return to the base lodge.
Ski Lessons at Whiteface
Ski lessons for all ages happen at the Bear Den.
All the group lessons are for beginners. If you want intermediate or advanced lessons you’ll need to book a private session. This is more expensive, of course, but it can vary widely what people consider to be “intermediate,” and we had mixed experiences with their intermediate group lessons. So customizable lessons are a good idea.
You can choose a one-hour refresher or a deeper two or three-hour private lesson, and you can have up to five people in your private group.
We booked a three-hour private lesson for Teen Traveler and a friend after neither had skied in a few years and had not gotten past snowplowing. The instructor had both girls confidently doing more advanced turns by lunchtime.
The next year, we booked a two-hour lesson for the two girls and the instructor succeeded at nudging our cautious teen out of her comfort zone.
When she was 5, Tiny Traveler did two morning half-day (90-minute) group beginner classes and they pushed her enough that her skills and confidence noticeably improved.
But even on a day when it was 9º they didn’t take any breaks to warm up. Tiny Traveler was a frowning popsicle when we picked her up at lunchtime. I’m not kidding about the cold. Dress your kids in lots of layers and consider bringing a stash of hand and foot-warmers, which help a lot on those really cold days.
Tip: Even on a day when it was 9º the ski lesson groups didn’t take any until the morning lesson was over. Tiny Traveler, 5YO at the time, was a frowning popsicle when we picked her up at lunchtime.
I’m not kidding about the cold. Dress your family in lots of layers and bring a stash of hand and foot-warmers. They last a good 12 hours and make a huge difference on very cold days.
Go Cross-Country Skiing or Snowshoeing
If there is snow on the ground — and these days this isn’t a certainty, even this far north — Lake Placid has a wealth of great cross-country skiing. Here are four options.
1. We really like Cascade Welcome Center and have returned a half dozen times now. It’s close to town, the trails are scenic and well maintained and we can find enough paths that suit our level for a good couple of hours of skiing.
The Adirondack Mountain Club owns the property and runs it as a not-for-profit club. The staff told me they focus their resources on making the trails as nice as possible. They groom all of the trails daily and routinely trim branches to keep them out of skiers’ faces.
It’s also inexpensive. Full-day trail passes for Rich and me, plus a trail pass and equipment for Teen Traveler cost less than an entree in some Lake Placid restaurants.
They also have snowshoe trails that run through the woods between the ski trails. Our friends used these on our latest trip and loved being on the narrow, quiet inner trails.
Rich and I, Teen Traveler and our friends have all taken cross-country lessons here in different years and they been consistently great. As with downhill skiing, they typically start kids off without poles, and kids take to it pretty quickly and easily.
2. In 2025, we tried Paul Smith’s VIC (visitor interpretive center), a nature preserve managed by Paul Smith’s College, for the first time.
It’s also, well-maintained, inexpensive and not-for-profit. Rich and I and our friends wanted to try something new and we rented snow shoes while our teen girls set off cross-country skiing.
This property has a bigger plot of land than Cascade (one looped trail is 7 miles) and has more varied terrain. We went through dense forest and marshland with thin scrubby forest, and along the side of a lake. Some of the ski and snow-shoe trails overlap but we didn’t run into the girls at all on our 90-minute walk.
We all liked the snowshoeing a lot. It’s easy and a pleasant way to take a walk in the woods in the winter. They provided poles, which are handy for balance but not essential.
The Vic’s Lodge has comfortable chairs and a big picture window, a nice spot to warm up after your outdoor adventure.
3. There is also cross-country skiing at Mt. Hoevenberg, which hosted the Nordic ski races during the Olympics and still hosts competitions and training. We’ve never skied there because it’s further from town and is more expense than Cascade.
Also, I’m kind of intimidated by the idea of skiing trails made for Olympic athletes, though I’m told they have plenty of trails for all levels.
It has snow-making equipment, which means there could be skiing there when other trails have no snow on the ground. And it has a new lodge with a café and nice places to warm up. If you are a cross-country enthusiast, I would say you have to give a go.
4. If you have your own skies or snowshoes there are plenty of other trails in the area. The 30-mile-long Jack Rabbit Trail runs from Keene through Lake Placid to Saranac Lake with several trail heads along the way.
It connects Mt. Van Hoevenberg with Cascade, but you need trail passes for both if you plan to actually ski on both properties.
Weather & Clothes
Cross-country and snowshoe trails are usually in the woods, which block the wind. So it can be warmer on these trails than it is in town.
These are both aerobic activities that heat your core quickly. But your fingers and toes still get cold. Where several light layers, warm, waterproof gloves and warm socks that are not bulky.
I don’t own proper cross-country gear so for both sports I wear winter-weight hiking socks and hiking pants that are fleece-lined and water resistant. I add thermals if it’s very cold and hand-warmers.
In the cold weather it’s easy to forget water but Nordic skiing will dehydrate you. Stick a water bottle in your coat if you can, or keep one in the lodge with your shoes.
Ice Skate in the footsteps of Olympians
There’s no winter activity that I like better in Lake Placid than gliding down the long stretches on the 400-meter speed-skating oval. You have mountain views ahead of you and the Olympic Center behind you. It’s fantastic.
It’s so big it took Tiny Traveler almost an hour to scoot around twice when she was 5. Now she zips around and laps me.
The oval’s recent make-over includes an indoor hut for changing in and out of your skates, heat lamps around the edge of the lake, and a waffle truck that emits heavenly aromas when you skate past.
There is indoor skating too, but the rink feels and looks like any hiking/figure-skating rink. So in spite of its history, we’ve never skated there. It’s an option if you have kids too small to last long outside.
See The Olympic Sights
Tourism, like everything else in Lake Placid, centers on the Olympic Games it hosted in 1932 and 1980. You can enjoy these sites even if you aren’t all that sporty. The first time you visit you should see everything, though tween and teens who have seen the Winter Olympics on tv will be more impressed than younger kids.
1. Start at the relatively new Museum at the Olympic Center next to the Oval. It’s small but well done and very much worth an hour or so.
The highlight for me was getting to see the torches from about 15 Olympics, starting with the 1936 Berlin games. It was interesting to see how each country put its unique stamp on them, from Germany’s sleek art-deco design, to Norway’s, which resembles a Viking long bow.
There’s a short documentary about the 1980 “Miracle on Ice,” which happened steps away in the Herb Brooks Hockey Arena (named for the Miracle team’s coach).
To sum it up: The U.S. hockey team, comprised of college kids who weren’t even expected to place, won the gold medal over a dominating USSR team that had won it in the previous four Olympics. It’s one of the best underdog stories in sports.
You can see the team’s uniforms and equipment. They also have a silver medal, apparently left behind by a disappointed USSR team member.
There’s an interactive area that kids were excited about when we visited (fine, adults were excited, too). You can experience a simulated bobsled run, get a skier’s view of the ski jump, and try to move your feet fast enough to keep up with a medal-winning speedskater.
The bobsled is especially well done, and you realize how hard it is to maintain your focus and keep control for the length of a 1.5-mile-long track.
2. Next, head to the ski-jumping center. You can take a gondola to the base of the tower, then an elevator to the top of the jump. From here you can see just how high the ski jump is and appreciate how much fortitude the sport requires. There’s also a nice view of the countryside
3. Mount Hoevenberg is also the center for all the sliding sports: bobsled, skeleton and luge. If you’re lucky, you’ll catch some of the athletes doing practice runs, or even competing, while you’re there. It’s amazing how loud and rumbling the sleds are on the ice and how fast they whiz past you.
Seeing a skeleton rider shoot by, high up on the track wall like Spiderman on a sled gave me new and profound appreciation for how crazy
Tip: You can an awful lot of fun at Mt. Van Hoevenberg—and spend an awful lot of money.
The Bobsled and Skeleton Experiences have you careening down a much-shortened runs. You have actual athletes acting as your driver and brakeman on the bobsled; you’re on your own with the skeleton.
The rides are short, fast and expensive, but in some years the Olympic Sites Passport offers a discount on tickets.
There’s also an indoor climbing wall, which we haven’t had a chance to try but is a good plan B if you get a bad weather day.
Explore High Falls Gorge
High Falls Gorge is a mile before Whiteface when coming from Lake Placid. The entry fee is higher in winter than summer but it includes entry to the Gorge, micro-spikes to attach to your boots if its icy, marshmallows to roast over their outdoor fire and a hot drink after your walk.
It’s all ice if you visit during a cold snap, but the micro-spikes work really well. The half-hour walk across trails, steps and bridges is impressive with ice formations, icicle curtains and waterfalls frozen mid-tumble creating an exotic landscape.
After the walk our kids make a beeline for the campfire with marshmallows in their pockets for toasting. Then we head inside for cocoa, tea and lattes. It’s usually quiet and easy to snag a café seat near both the iron wood stove and the windows.
The admission fee can seem a little steep, but it’s a nice way to spend a morning when you need a break from skiing and skating. And in the winter most other gorges and chasms aren’t open, making it a unique experience.
Saranac side trip
The Paul Smith’s VIC is 20 minutes from both Lake Placid and Saranac Lake. After our outdoor activities we headed to the town of Saranac Lake for lunch.
On a winter Sunday afternoon the town was largely shuttered, but we had a good upscale pub food in a warm and sunny room at Campfire Bar & Grill inside the historic Hotel Saranac. Burgers, grilled cheese, and hot-chicken sandwiches came from thick, crunchy fries and were all good.
On a quick stroll through town we saw a cute bookshop, a local coffee bar and a few other restaurants that could be worth checking out on a day when the town is busier.
Leaving town, we saw the enormous ice castle they were building next to the lake for Saranac’s annual Winter Carnival that was happening the following weekend. The festival also features live music, a parade, winter activities and fireworks. If you’re in the area when it’s happening, it’s probably worth checking out for the ice structures alone.
Take some time out with a spa treatment
Since I don’t ski I sometimes drop the family at the mountain and come back to town for some spa time.
Take Some Mom Time with Spa Treatments
My girlfriend and I, both non-skiers, have taken to booking a spa day on the day our families ski.
1. I’ve had three blissful afternoons at the spa at the Whiteface Lodge.
Before or after our treatments we’ve spent a good 45 minutes lounging in fluffy robes, drinking cucumber-infused water and using the sauna and steam room that are complementary with spa services. This kind of extra makes a spa experience feel extra indulgent and worth the splurge.
Twice, we’ve their basic facial, which is supposed to repair damage from the elements and undo signs of aging. It’s the most relaxing facial I’ve had. And the esthetician explains what she’s doing as she goes along so it’s a good introduction if you’ve never had a facial before.
Inside the treatment room I nestle under a warm blanket on a heated treatment bed. The esthetician starts with a short head massage and aroma therapy. The first time I visited I was so blissed out, when she asked if I wanted to add a hydration treatment I just thought, Why not? My friend said the same thing happened to her.
We both have bought products afterward, too, which is rare for us.
On a previous solo visit, I had a 50-minute massage. I often find 50 minutes is just enough to leave you wanting more. But the massage therapist was thorough and worked out the kinks from my cross-country adventures the day before.
2. One winter we checked into the ADK Foot Sanctuary, located next to the Golden Arrow Hotel on Main Street. Sanctuary is the right word.
Our “simplicity” treatment started with us settling into a comfortable love seat in a warm room, with heated neck wraps and fuzzy blankets over us, which was enough to make us feel like taking a nap.
Then the massage therapist did some aromatherapy and put our feet in aromatic soaking baths with hot stones on the bottom. After our feet were loosened up a bit by the soak we received very thorough and soothing foot massages, followed by more aromatherapy.
You can add on more aromatherapy, foot soaks and scrubs, moisturizing treatments and scalp massages. But “simplicity” was enough to make me feel like a whole new person after subjecting my feet to ice skates, cross-country ski boots, snow boots and freezing weather.
3. If you want a good massage that isn’t too much of a splurge, I’ve had two good experiences at Balanced Body Work at the very start of Main Street. It doesn’t look like much from the outside. But the staff gives excellent mixed-style massages in a homey space.
Tip: Between all the tourists visiting and athletes training and competing, all the town’s spas, from the basic to the high-end, book up on weekends and school-break weeks. We’ve learned to book a treatment a few weeks before we arrive.
Make Mirror Lake your winter playground
If you’re lucky, Mirror Lake, which is the lake the town actually sits along, will freeze while you’re there, becoming a public backyard for snow forts, ice skating, hockey and paid amusements.
Even though they’ll plow a trail, skating on the lake is nothing like being on a zambonied rink. At ages 7 and 9 Tiny Traveler didn’t like having to navigate all the bumps and cracks in the ice. At 14 she thought it was great to have the whole lake to skate on in any direction she wanted, for free.
There is a toboggan run that shoots screaming kids onto the ice. Teen Travel has not yet worked up the nerve to try it but our friend’s teen has and thinks it’s a blast. There’s often a line on weekends but it moves quickly. You’ll find the hours posted in hotels and around town.
Whether or not the lake is frozen, take a walk entirely around it. It’s about a mile and easy to do with kids. There are great views of the lake, the town and the houses that sit on the shore.
At dusk you get nice views of the lit-up town from the far side. And it’s a way to get exercise without having to strap equipment onto your feet.
Take a stroll around town
Lake Placid’s Main Street is good for a stroll. Teen Traveler loves exploring the town on her own or with a friend, browsing the book stores and souvenir shops, sampling fudge and selecting chocolates in the various sweet shops.
Just Bead It!, at the far end of Main Street, sells all kinds of funky hand-made jewelry and offers “jewelry making with a lake view,” which we did on a recent visit.
The main bead bar draws adult shoppers, who make surprisingly sophisticated earrings, bracelets, necklaces and keyring charms. Crafty tweens and teens will get into it; Teen Traveler spent the most time among three of us choosing and arranging beads for earrings.
It’s $5 for the basic materials and then we paid for the individual beads, stones and charms we chose. Some semi-precious stones cost upwards of $25 apiece. But Teen Traveler and I stuck with glass, ceramic and metal and our two pairs of earrings came to less than $25 total. We were quite thrilled with them and both still wear what we made.
They have a separate room for younger kids, with colorful, cheaper, less fragile beads.
Stop into Locker Room 5 to get your skates sharpened or buy hockey gear. There & Back Again, Adirondack Decorative Arts & Crafts and Critters are great for Christmas ornaments, flannel moose-patterned pajamas, artisan jewelry, maple products and other items you don’t need but can’t resist.
There & Back Again, by the skating oval, is the most eclectic and most fun for browsing.
We almost pop into EMS and the Bass Outlet Store. We always manage to find a sale on wool socks, thermals, jogging bras or other essential gear. In a particularly good year, Rich got hiking boots and a crazy-warm puffy coat from Bass for $55 total.
We left town feeling even more satisfied than usual that year.
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All photos by FamiliesGo! except ADK Foot Sanctuary, courtesy of the spa.