The waterpark at Great Wolf Lodge in Manteca, California is the biggest room I can even recall entering. At 95,000 square feet and several stories high, it’s a gargantuan space–an entire amusement park’s worth of water activities contained in a single, cozily warm room.
There’s something pleasant about a space that stays 84 degrees year-round (that’s the constant temperature of the water at Great Wolf Lodge), no matter what the weather is doing outside.
When I visited, it was a gloomy, stormy November day outdoors. Inside, it was brightly lit, tropically humid, and filled with the din of thousands of people playing and sliding, and the rushing of hundreds of thousands of gallons of water.
Inside this gargantuan room, you’ll find multiple water slides, tube slides, body slides, a full lazy river with inner tubes, a large wave pool, a “fort” with water canons, a kids’ splash pad, a snack stand, a bar, water basketball play areas, rentable cabanas, and more.
Great Wolf Lodge hosted me for my visit so I could check the whole thing out with my three kids. The water slides were definitely a highlight for us. Again, they’re shockingly big, given that you can ride them while staying entirely indoors.
Great Wolf Lodge achieves this by having the actual tubes of the slides extend outside the building, and then jut back in for the finish. You slide down hundreds of vertical feet, yet you’re never exposed or chilly.
We enjoyed the Otter Run and Totem Towers slide. Wolf Tail involves stepping into a chamber that drops you straight down for about 2 stories. Too scary for us!
Rapid Racer, a tube slide, was fun. But the biggest and coolest slide was Sequoia Splash. For this one, you ride in a giant, family-sized tube through a massive tunnel with hills and drops. Naturally, I ended up facing backwards for the ride.
The wave pool is also a super fun place to float and play. The waves switch on and off about every 5 minutes, and you can bob up and down as if you’re at a tropical beach–except again, you haven’t actually left the building.
My little kids (2 and 3 years old) enjoyed the splash pad and extremely gentle Whooping Hollow slides. You only need to be 36 inches tall for this one, so toddlers can enjoy it, and it’s very tame.
We stayed overnight (you can read my full review here), but Great Wolf Lodge is only about 1 hour from San Francisco with good traffic, so you could conceivably do it as a day trip.
If you’re feeling the rainy season gloom (or you just want to visit a waterpark in the Summer with your littles without worrying about sunscreen and bees) you should definitely check Great Wolf Lodge Manteca out.
