October 19, 2024-April 13, 2025
Winter Lodge
3009 Middlefield Road
Palo Alto, CA
$19 + $6 for skate rental, winterlodge.com
Closed November 28, 2024; December 24 & 25, 2024; January 1, 2025. The beautiful Christmas Tree is lit the week after Thanksgiving and it stays up through the first weekend of the new year.
Winter Lodge offers public skating sessions, skating lessons, fireplaces in a cozy lodge atmosphere and in the summer, it functions primarily as a tennis club.
The non-profit Community Skating Inc., 501(c)3 doing business as, and known lovingly by the local community as Winter Lodge, is a seasonal outdoor (and indoor) ice skating rink whose sole purpose is to provide a community ice skating program. Not only does Winter Lodge fulfill its mission, but it has a long tradition of bringing outdoor ice skating to Palo Alto since 1956.
That's the year an engineering professor from San Jose State University introduced his experiment to the public when he created the area's first outdoor ice rink by using refrigerant in strategically placed pipes to create an ice surface in a climate that rarely sees snow. Duncan Williams had lived in Wisconsin, famous for its ice fishing and winter ice sports. On February 15, 1956, The Winter Club opened along Middlefield Road in Palo Alto and became a success.
However, Williams has passed away and the annual ice rink nearly met its demise till years of lobbying and strategizing by enthusiastic locals kept the attraction alive - with a new name and organizational structure to keep it going. Delighting visitors & locals for more than 65 years, Winter Lodge is billed as "the first and only permanent outdoor ice rink west of the Sierras."
For winter holiday junkies, don't forget to check out Palo Alto Christmas Tree Lane (christmastreelane.org) lights and decorations are displayed nightly for two weeks during the Christmas Holidays.
Events are not guaranteed. It is your responsibility to confirm before going.