Hiking base camps in Tannersville for a big group

The short answer first: we don't have a five-bedroom house in Tannersville. We have one home there, and it's bigger. Spa-Style Luxury Lodge w/ Sauna, Hot Tub & Games has seven bedrooms and sleeps up to twenty-four, on a wooded lot in Pocono Township with mountain views. If your group is the size that usually searches "5 bedroom," you'll be renting more room than you strictly need, which is either a problem or the solution, depending on how much you like sharing a bathroom after a cold hike.

Most groups who come here for hiking find it's the solution. Seven bedrooms across a single-family house means the early risers who want to be at the trailhead by eight can sleep on a different floor from the people who intend to play pool until one in the morning.

What's actually within reach of the house

Tannersville sits right below Camelback Mountain, and the summit of that mountain is a state park. Big Pocono State Park covers the top and the slopes, with a trail network threading across the summit and the ski runs, and a view that takes in three states. You reach it from PA 715, off Exit 299 of I-80, the same exit that drops you into town.

The one everybody does is the Indian Trail, a short out-and-back of under two miles that ends at the eastern cliffs. Those cliffs are the rock face you can see from I-80 as you drive in. Give it an hour, less if nobody stops to take pictures, which nobody manages. If you want a morning rather than an hour, the South and North Trail loop runs about three and a half miles around the summit and takes a couple of hours at a walking pace. And if someone in the party isn't hiking at all, there's a paved road of a mile and a half to the top: you can drive the non-hikers up, hand them the view, and walk back down to meet them.

Below the mountain, Pocono Creek runs through the Tannersville Woods Nature Preserve, where a very short trail, a few hundred yards out and back, follows the creek under mature forest. It's the sort of walk you do before breakfast or with a toddler in a carrier. The Tannersville Cranberry Bog Preserve is the other local oddity worth asking about, a boreal bog this far south.

Drive a little further and the trails get longer. Tobyhanna State Park, north of town, wraps a lake of about a hundred and seventy acres with the Lakeside Trail, five miles of easy walking that goes all the way around, passing the beach and the campground. It's flat, it's blue-blazed, and it suits a group with mixed fitness levels, because nobody gets dropped. Gouldsboro State Park sits immediately next door. Southwest, out toward Blakeslee and Lake Harmony, Hickory Run State Park is the big one, roughly twenty miles from Tannersville, with waterfalls and the boulder field.

The lodge, and why hikers end up liking it

What makes a house work after a day outdoors isn't the square footage. It's what's waiting when you come back cold. This one has a sauna and a hot tub, an unusual pairing to find in the same house and a genuinely good one in November, when the wind on the Camelback summit cuts through whatever you thought was a warm jacket. There's exercise equipment too, which sounds superfluous in a house ten minutes from a mountain until it's raining sideways on day three.

The setting is quiet and semi-rural, wooded lots and mountain views, the kind of road where you hear your own car. Outside there's a garden, outdoor seating and a fire pit. Inside, a meditation room, which is not a phrase I'd normally lean on, except that in a house sleeping twenty-four it functions as the one room where somebody can go and not be talked to.

The game room carries the evenings: pool table, ping-pong, a games console, board games on the shelf. Four bathrooms for twenty-four people is the number to think about if you're a group of hikers all coming back muddy at the same hour. Stagger the showers. We say the same thing in the house notes, because Pocono water systems get temperamental when every tap in a big house runs at once, and spacing things out by an hour sorts it.

A few practical things that decide bookings:

• Pets are welcome, as long as they're on the reservation. They can't be left outside unattended, front yard or back.
• Parking is free, and capped at five to six cars on the property. No street parking. Arriving as four couples in four cars is fine. Eight cars isn't.
• The booking guest must be at least twenty-one.
• No parties, no events, no smoking or vaping, no fireworks. These are enforced with fines, not raised eyebrows. It's a family house on a quiet road and we keep it that way.
• Bring hot tub towels. Bath towels are provided; the tub eats them, and they're not meant for it.
• There's an EV charger, which matters more here than it sounds, because this is car country and charging isn't on your way back from a trailhead.

Cooking for a crowd after a day on the trail

You will cook here. Tannersville's restaurants cluster along Route 611 and the commercial strips, and after a full day on Camelback or around Tobyhanna Lake, most groups decide that getting twenty people out the door again isn't happening.

The kitchen is set up for it: full stove and oven, dishwasher, freezer, blender, kettle, the cooking basics, wine glasses, and a dining table big enough to be the point of the room. BBQ utensils for the grilling, and children's dinnerware, a high chair and a crib for the youngest end of the group, which is the detail that usually settles things for an extended family travelling with a baby. Washer and dryer on site, plus a laundromat nearby, which matters on a hiking trip in a way it doesn't on a beach one.

Shop before you reach the house. The Crossings Premium Outlets and the main commercial stretch are on the way in from I-80, and the road to the house is low-density: once you're settled, a forgotten bag of coffee is a trip, not an errand.

If your group really is five bedrooms' worth

Then think about it in beds rather than rooms. Twenty-four is the ceiling, not the expectation, and a group of ten or twelve in this house gets a bedroom each, plus the sauna, plus a game room nobody has to queue for. The trade is that you're paying for a house built for a reunion.

If that's more house than you want, our other homes sit in Tobyhanna, Coolbaugh Township, Pocono Lake, Blakeslee and Lake Harmony, all within the same stretch of the Poconos and all a drive from the same parks, several with indoor pools and theaters. Tobyhanna puts you close to the lake loop. Tannersville puts you under Camelback.

Booking it

East Coast Escape is family-run and manages these homes ourselves, so when you message about dates, bed configuration, or whether your group of fourteen and two dogs works, you're talking to the people who look after the house rather than a call centre. Book direct at the lodge's page, and ask us about the sleeping layout before you commit: with seven bedrooms and fourteen beds, how you split a group of twelve is worth a two-minute conversation.