Four Tabernash houses with a hot tub out back

Four of our Tabernash homes have a private hot tub: Cliff Side Mountain Chalet, Silver Lining Lodge 81, Coyote Creek Luxury Home 1602 and Silver Lining Chateau 374. All four are single-family houses, all four sleep between nine and eleven, and all four list a mountain view. So the hot tub isn't the thing that will decide your booking. What decides it is how many of you there are, whether the dog is coming, and what happens in the house on the afternoon it snows sideways.

Tabernash sits north of Fraser along the valley floor, on the way toward Granby, which is the reason people end up here rather than in the middle of Winter Park. It's quieter, the lots are bigger, and you're pointed the right way for Grand Lake and the western side of Rocky Mountain National Park while still being in easy reach of Winter Park Resort.

Start with the head count, not the hot tub

The capacities are close enough that people gloss over them and then discover the difference on night one.

• Silver Lining Chateau 374 sleeps nine across three bedrooms, with two and a half baths. Three bedrooms, three bathrooms-ish, nine people: this is a family plus a set of grandparents, or two families with small kids.
• Cliff Side Mountain Chalet sleeps ten in three bedrooms and 2,500 square feet, which makes it the tightest square-footage-per-person of the four. It also has the longest review history of any home we run in Tabernash, 92 reviews and a 9.65 rating, so we know exactly how it performs full.
• Coyote Creek Luxury Home 1602 sleeps ten in four bedrooms and 3,500 square feet, with three and a half baths. Same head count as Cliff Side, an extra bedroom and a thousand more feet to put it in.
• Silver Lining Lodge 81 sleeps eleven in four bedrooms, 4,000 square feet, three and a half baths. The master takes a king, two more bedrooms take kings, and the fourth is a bunk room with a full-over-full and a twin trundle.

If you're eleven, the decision is made for you. If you're ten, the interesting comparison is Cliff Side against Coyote Creek: the same number of beds to fill, a very different amount of house around them.

The snow-day test

Anyone who has spent a week in a mountain house knows the hot tub gets used twice a day and the indoor space gets used for fourteen hours. Silver Lining Lodge 81 is built for that: a game room with a pool table, air hockey, board games and an Xbox, plus a gas fireplace and a wood stove in the main space. When the wind comes up the valley and nobody wants to drive, that room is worth more than another bedroom.

Coyote Creek also has a game room, and it has something I've not seen elsewhere in the valley: a built-in humidifier system. That sounds like a footnote until your third night at altitude in January, when everyone in the house wakes up with a nosebleed and a sandpaper throat. Guests mention it. It's a real amenity, not a listing bullet.

Cliff Side goes the other way. No game room, a game console instead, and a wood-burning fireplace rather than gas, which is a slightly more involved pleasure and a much better one. It also has a dedicated workspace, so it survives the trip where one adult has to log on for a morning.

If the dog is coming

Two of the four take dogs: Silver Lining Lodge 81 and Coyote Creek Luxury Home 1602, up to two, at $49 per night, off the furniture and crated if you leave them. Cliff Side Mountain Chalet and Silver Lining Chateau 374 don't accept pets. Given that Tabernash is where you come for the space and the trail access, that narrowing matters more here than it would downtown.

Two things to sort out before you book

Parking, first. At Silver Lining Lodge 81 there's room for two vehicles in the garage and that's the lot in winter: the plows need the rest, so a third car has nowhere to go. Silver Lining Chateau 374 takes one in the garage and two in the driveway, with the caveat that the plow pushes snow past the garage to the left and that lane has to stay clear. If you're arriving in three cars in February, ask us first rather than sorting it out at ten at night in a snowstorm.

Second, and only relevant to one home: there's ongoing construction near Silver Lining Chateau 374, so expect occasional daytime noise. It's a quiet street by mountain standards and the house itself is lovely, 9.82 across eleven reviews, but you should know before you arrive rather than after.

One more piece of local reality: most houses in this valley have no air conditioning, because the nights do the work. Silver Lining Lodge 81 and Silver Lining Chateau 374 both have it, which is worth knowing if you're coming in a hot July week and sleep badly in warm rooms.

What you actually do from here

Winter Park Resort is the anchor, and from Silver Lining Lodge 81 and Silver Lining Chateau 374 there's a free bus to the resort base village. Grand Lake and Rocky Mountain National Park are about half an hour north, which is the argument for Tabernash over a bed closer to the lifts: you can ski Winter Park one day and drive to the park's western entrance the next without repacking.

Closer to hand, the Grand Park Rec Center has swimming pools, a gym, an indoor track and a big climbing wall for an additional fee, and The Foundry next door has a bowling alley, a movie theater and a brick-oven pizza bar. That pair has rescued more than one storm day for our guests. Hideaway Park and the Rendezvous Event Center run concerts and events through the year. Summer is hiking, mountain biking, fishing and golf, and Coyote Creek sits in the Pole Creek area, which puts golf on the doorstep rather than a drive away.

How I'd choose

For eleven people who intend to cook, sprawl and stay in most evenings, Silver Lining Lodge 81 is hard to argue against: four thousand square feet, the game room, the wood stove, dogs allowed. For ten with a wide age range and someone sensitive to dry mountain air, Coyote Creek gives you four bedrooms, three and a half baths and that humidifier. For a smaller group who wants the most proven house in our Tabernash collection, Cliff Side Mountain Chalet has ninety-plus reviews behind it and the wood fire. And Silver Lining Chateau 374 is the one for nine, with a bunk room that works for kids and air conditioning for summer, if the construction note doesn't put you off.

All four are professionally cleaned and maintained, with keyless entry, high-speed Wi-Fi and 24-hour support if something goes wrong at midnight. Book direct with us and there are no reservation fees. Tell us your dates, your head count and whether the dog's in the car, and we'll tell you which of the four fits.