Cabin

Press play above for the "Disarm" music video by the Smashing Pumpkins from "Siamese Dreams"

It's our own different world...

In 1991, we bought a small second home in the San Bernardino mountains about a hundred miles northeast of our house. It is in a small town called Green Valley Lake at 7300ft elevation. It is resort-like in the summer and snows a lot in the winter (second and third pictures below), giving the family "getaway" experiences we could not have had without it.

For some reason, changing locations changes behavior. When we go to the cabin we do things differently. We play board games, sit in the hot tub for hours in the snow and talk about things that never occur to us at home. Rufus got a taste of what it would be like hiking through St. Bernard Pass in Switzerland (first two pictures below). Leo enjoyed the deck view (third picture below).

Our cabin is surrounded by 100 to 150ft pines with a "foresty" view from the back deck. I am not a camper by nature - roughing it to me is when the air conditioner breaks at the Marriott - so this is as close to "back to nature" as I chose to venture.

After years of heavy snow loads, the old green deck in the back of the cabin began to sag (two pictures above). In July 2002, we removed it and replaced it with a 10' X 32' redwood deck. The three pictures below show the new deck and its view. The corner shown in the first picture below is my favorite quiet thinking spot - "far from the undertow, far from the overload".

In Fall 2003, California wildfires burnt within a half mile of our cabin, destroying thousands of homes and hundreds of acres of forest from Lake Arrowhead to Big Bear Lake. The fires began at the base of the mountain in San Bernardino and swept up Waterman Canyon to the Rim of the World Highway (first picture below, SBD airport in the distance). In December 2003, as part of a high school video project for Ben, we drove to Cedar Glen on the eastern edge of Lake Arrowhead to capture some of what the fires left behind (second and third pictures below).

In Fall 2007, the Slide Fire ripped into town taking about 100 of the 1000 homes in Green Valley Lake, mostly around the periphery of town. Longtime downtown business Fox Lumber was one of the first to burn (first picture below). The lower cul-de-sac overlook to Arrowhead Lake at the end of Juniper Street was completely destroyed (second and third pictures below).

We sold the cabin in 2017 after we purchased The "Winery" as a second home in the Vandenberg Village area of Santa Barbara wine country.