The lake is right there.
Seventeen suites, seven cabins and a supper club on the water in Lakewood, Wisconsin. Trails at the door, docks out front, and the kitchen open seven days.
01 The lodge
Six miles out of Lakewood, at the end of Waubee Park Lane.
Waubee Lake Lodge sits on the shore of a 116-acre lake inside the Chequamegon–Nicolet National Forest, six miles from Lakewood and about as far into the Northwoods as you can get and still have someone cook your dinner. The building is full log, three storeys, with balconies on the lake side and a covered deck below where most of the eating happens between May and October.
There are seventeen suites in the lodge and seven cabins and lake houses spread through the trees behind it. Guests get the docks, the fire pit and the water. Everyone else gets the restaurant and the bar, which is the point — this has been the place people around here eat on a Friday night for a long time, and it still is.
The Oconto County ATV and snowmobile trails run past the property. In February the parking lot is sleds.
Where you are
- On Waubee Lake, six miles from Lakewood
- Inside the Chequamegon–Nicolet National Forest
- Directly on the Oconto County ATV and snowmobile trails
- Waterfront, docks and a communal fire pit
18398 Waubee Park Lane
Lakewood, WI 54138
02 Stay
A room in the lodge, or a cabin of your own.
The seventeen lodge suites run from a single room to a three-bedroom, two-bath layout that sleeps eight. Every one has at least a kitchenette; some have full kitchens, jacuzzi tubs, lofts or a balcony over the water.
Behind the lodge there are four cabins and three lake houses, one to three bedrooms each, every one with its own fire pit and grill. The three lake houses sit on the waterfront with private docks. Pets are welcome in the cabins.
03 The restaurant & bar
You do not have to be staying here to eat here.
The dining room is full log with a vaulted pine ceiling, and in season the covered deck over the lake is where everyone would rather sit. Steaks, walleye, burgers and sandwiches from eleven, a Sunday chicken special, and a full bar that opens at nine every morning.
Reservations are recommended and not required. Walk-ins are welcome, which is a sentence the lodge has been saying for decades and means it.
- Sunday – Thursday 11:00 am – 8:00 pm
- Friday – Saturday 11:00 am – 9:00 pm
04 Four seasons, four lodges
The same building, four different businesses.
Open water, fall colour, snow, thaw. What people come for changes completely across the year, and so should the page they land on.
May – September
Open water
Docks in, boats out. Musky, walleye, northern and smallmouth in 116 acres of water. Dinner on the deck with the lake twenty feet away.
On now
Fall colour
The maples turn along County F and the lake goes quiet. Best two weeks of the year for a cabin with a fire pit and nobody else on the water.
September – October
November – March
Snow and ice
Sleds off the trail and straight to the door. Ice fishing, groomed miles in every direction, and a warm bar at the end of it.
March – May
Thaw
Ice out, mud season, the first warm weekend. Turkey hunters, early ATV runs and the quietest rates of the year.
05 Weddings & banquets
A ceremony on the lawn, dinner through the French doors.
The banquet hall looks out on Waubee Lake through a wall of French doors, and the ceremony usually happens on the grass between the building and the water, with the docks behind it. Then everybody walks twenty yards to dinner, and the ones who booked a cabin walk another hundred to bed.
Weddings, receptions, rehearsal dinners, family reunions, funerals, meetings and corporate days. Off-site catering as well.
06 The area
130 miles of trail start at the parking lot.
Oconto County has more than a thousand square miles of it — ATV and snowmobile trail, national forest, waterfalls, a fire tower you can still climb, and a candy shop that has been there since 1991.