2026 Salem Cruise Lite 26ICE

The Salem Cruise Lite 26ICE is the family bunkhouse in the value twins' ICE series — the 25ICE's comfortable front-bedroom layout stretched to add real kid capacity. The front is a private bedroom with a custom king bed and Versa-Tilt; a large living-area slide carries the Versa-Lounge and a booth dinette; a mirror-front electric fireplace hides a pantry behind it; and the rear adds double-over-double bunks for the kids alongside a full bathroom with a tub/shower. With the bunks plus the convertible Versa-Lounge and dinette, nominal capacity reaches eight. An 18-foot power awning with 4K blade lighting and pass-through storage round out the package. Its twin is the Wildwood X-Lite 26ICE.

It carries the full Cruise Lite value-laminate build — a powder-coated I-beam steel frame, two-inch laminated sidewalls, a walk-on Tufflex™ PVC roof and an enclosed Accessibelly underbelly — and the 26ICE upgrades the standard air conditioner to a 15,000-BTU ducted unit for a longer, taller family trailer, with a 60,000-BTU tankless water heater and a full-size 12-volt refrigerator. As with the rest of the ICE series, the Platinum fiberglass/solar package is not offered here; a 200-watt solar panel is the standalone option.

At 6,288 pounds dry against a 7,785-pound GVWR it leaves roughly 1,497 pounds of cargo capacity — adequate for a family but worth watching once water, gear and a full pantry are aboard, so it rewards deliberate packing and a well-equipped half-ton. The factory record does not break out the refrigerator's cubic footage, so it is flagged. For a family that wants the comfortable ICE front-bedroom layout with real double-over-double bunks, an upgraded air conditioner and a big awning — with the identical Wildwood to shop against — the 26ICE is the value twins' ICE-series family bunkhouse.

Forest River's Salem and Wildwood are near-identical twin lines — the same trailers built on the same factory line, differing mainly in exterior graphics and interior décor. The volume laminate models are the Salem Cruise Lite and its twin the Wildwood X-Lite, which share an identical floorplan roster. The 26ICE on this page is highlighted; each other profiled plan links to its own page. Across both nameplates the family runs to dozens of floorplans; the highest-demand layouts are detailed here and the rest are catalogued on the line hub.

This floorplan carries its water comfortably. A full 44-gallon fresh tank is roughly 25% of the 1,497-pound cargo capacity, leaving the 26ICE with a usable gear budget even when you tow full.

The published dry tongue weight of 785 pounds is 12% of the 6,288-pound dry weight, which sits inside the 10–15% band usually quoted for stable towing. It is still a dry figure: loading the front pass-through and the fresh tank both push it up.

Nothing above changes the ceiling. Loaded to its 7,785-pound GVWR the 26ICE is towing 1,497 pounds more than its 6,288-pound dry figure, and that is the number your vehicle has to be rated for — not the brochure weight.

Tank balance is generous here: 44 gallons of fresh against 60 grey and 30 black, so waste capacity keeps pace with supply and the fresh tank is the constraint that ends a dry stay.

Ranked by GVWR, the 26ICE sits 10 of 12 in the Salem & Wildwood line: 7,785 pounds against a line that runs from 7,520 to 7,830 pounds. That position is the useful thing to know, because the plans immediately either side of it are the real alternatives.

Either side of it in the same line: Salem & Wildwood 25ICE is 85 pounds lighter at 7,700 lb GVWR; and Salem & Wildwood 28VBXL is 5 pounds heavier at 7,790 lb GVWR.

Against the 26ICE: the Airelume 255 is 3 ft shorter. Those are differences in the published numbers only — what they cost, how they are built and how they live are separate questions each of those pages answers on its own terms.

Those are the nearest travel trailers from other lines by weight — one per line, picked by proximity on that figure and nothing else. They are listed so the same tow vehicle can be checked against real alternatives, not because they are equivalent inside; layout, build and price diverge sharply across that group.

For scale, the Salem & Wildwood floorplans profiled here run 3,836 to 6,688 pounds dry and 23 to 34 feet of exterior length across 12 plans. Where a floorplan falls in that spread usually says more about which vehicle can tow it, and which site it fits, than the layout name does.

Every profiled floorplan in this line, with the full weight table, is on the Salem & Wildwood line hub.

This catalog tracks 18 specification fields per floorplan. Named sources publish 16 of them for the 26ICE. The rest are not shown, because the alternative is reading a figure across from a sibling floorplan or from what the segment usually does — and a number nobody published is worth less than an admitted gap.

Not published for this floorplan: interior height, tire specification. If you find one of these in a manufacturer document for this plan, it belongs on this page.

The completeness figure at the foot of this page (90%) measures the same thing on the full field set: it is a measurement of how much this floorplan’s manufacturer publishes, not of how much research went into the page.

Values on this page carrying an asterisk were derived by arithmetic from published figures, or come from a single source, rather than being printed directly by the manufacturer. The flag travels with the number into the downloadable spec sheet.

How every figure here was sourced and checked is set out on the methodology page.