Weekend at the Cabin

Our good friends the Beauforts own a cabin up in the mountains near Donnelley, Idaho (about 90 miles north of where we live), and their cabin sits right on the shore of Cascade Lake. The photo above is a panoramic view (stitched together from four photos I shot) from their deck overlooking Cascake Lake and Tamarack Ski Resort. Since Monday (yesterday) was a holiday, we drove up to their cabin after church on Sunday for some fun in the snow!

We arrived there in the evening and after a delicious dinner (Mark making a lovely face at the dining room table, at the right), we sat around and watched "Iron Man" by the nice warm fire (the Beauforts hadn't ever seen that flick). When we arrived, the outside temperature at their place (about 6,000 feet elevation) was a cozy 14 degrees, so hot chocolate and a nice fire in the fireplace were the order of the day!

Their cabin has this great (heated) bunkhouse right next to it, and all the kids slept in there while the adults were in the cabin. When we awoke in the morning, the lake just out their front (back?) door was completely flat - not a wake nor ripple in the water. Of course, that was because the lake was completely frozen and covered in snow (this third picture is of a bunch of us standing in the lake), but otherwise it would have been great water skiing conditions! :-)

We had a great time going down the hill from their cabin down to the lake (about a 30-foot vertical drop), and sliding right out on to the ice on inner tubes. We had some pretty spectacular crashes, but nobody got (seriously) hurt.

After tubing in the snow, we went out riding their ATV. Christopher has ridden ATVs quite a bit, and he had fun teaching his younger siblings how to ride/drive the ATV. I love this picture here of he and Steven; are they having fun, or what?! Brianna, whom just got her driver's permit this past Saturday, was a bit crazy at first, but eventually got the hang of it. Her throttle thumb was at first in digital mode, meaning it was either all the way on, or all the way off. Eventually, though, she found her analog thumb, and her driving became much smoother. Everybody enjoyed doing power slides on the packed-snow-and-ice on the street out in front of their cabin!

Does the look here on Andrew's face say it all, or what?! We had a really great time, and I have posted 100 photos from the weekend online. Click here for the photos on Flickr, or for Facebook, here or here (albums 1 and 2, respectively).