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Highway 88 · Kirkwood, California

Forty acres.One lake.No one else.

A privately owned estate in the high Sierra — a hand-built lodge on its own alpine lake, let whole, to one party at a time, for five days.

Check a dateWalk the property
40
acres
1
private lake
7
bedrooms
220
guests
5
days
0
other bookings

The Proposition

You are not renting a room with a view.You are renting the mountain.

The Hoover family felled the trees standing on this land, peeled the logs by hand, and milled the siding, the doors and the saloon bar on site. It took eight summers before anyone could live here. Forty acres, a private lake, and thousands of acres of national forest on every side of it.

Nothing about that is repeatable, and none of it is shared. There is one booking on the property at a time. When yours is on, there is no other wedding, no other guests, no front desk, and no one to tell you the music has to stop.

How it was built
A bride in the lodge doorway, the lake behind her.
The heated granite hot tub cut into the rock above the lake.
The saloon lit up after dark.
A couple on the polished granite above the private lake.

The Survey · Sheet 01

Ten places on
one private mountain.

Not a room with a view. A whole basin — lodge, saloon, dance hall, lake, granite, camping meadow — and for the length of your booking, every one of them is yours alone.

Hand-painted survey map of The Hideout at Kirkwood, showing the lodge, saloon, lake, hot tub, reception ground, camping area and wedding site.
Hideout Road, off Highway 8840 acres · not to scale

The Booking · Five Days

Everyone else sells you
an afternoon.

A wedding venue usually means a six-hour window on a property you share with strangers. Here, the gate closes on Thursday and opens on Monday. What happens in between is the reason people book this place.

  1. IThursday16:00
    The gate closes behind you

    The gate closes behind you

    Fifteen minutes of dirt road, then the basin opens up and that is the last of the outside world for five days. Sixteen people move into the lodge. Nobody has to leave to change clothes, find a bathroom, or check out of anywhere.

  2. IIFridayall day
    You build it yourself, without a clock

    You build it yourself, without a clock

    Florists, caterers, a band, a bell-tent outfitter — everyone comes in and works a full day instead of a frantic four-hour window. You walk the ceremony sites and pick one. Then everybody swims, and the welcome party runs as long as it runs.

  3. IIISaturdaythe day
    The wedding

    The wedding

    Coffee cabin in the morning. Ceremony on granite or in the meadow. Two hundred and twenty at the reception ground if you want them. A dance hall thirty feet away, no noise ordinance, no last call, and a granite hot tub still warm at two in the morning.

  4. IVSundayslowly
    Nobody is asked to leave

    Nobody is asked to leave

    The day almost every other venue takes away from you. Breakfast on the deck, the canoes out on the lake, the last of the guests drifting off the mountain in their own time. This is the day people actually remember.

  5. VMonday11:00
    Out by eleven

    Out by eleven

    Rubbish is ours to deal with. You drive down Puckerbutt Hill, hit Highway 88, and the basin goes quiet again until the next booking — which is not for another week.

Five days of exclusive use — for less per day than most Tahoe venues charge for one afternoon.

See what it costs

House Rules

What we don’t do.

The restrictions that shape every other venue you are looking at simply do not exist here. That is not a marketing line. It is a consequence of owning the whole mountain.

  • 01

    Curfew

    The music stops when you stop it. There is no noise ordinance out here to enforce, and no neighbour to enforce it.

  • 02

    Shared dates

    One booking at a time. Nobody is getting married on the other side of the property while you eat.

  • 03

    Required caterer

    Bring whoever you want. There is a caterer’s kitchen in the bunkhouse waiting for them.

  • 04

    Corkage

    Bring your own alcohol — all of it. No bar minimum, no per-head markup, no house pour.

  • 05

    Last call

    Two PA systems, eight outdoor heaters, two fire pits and a hot tub that stays hot until you get out of it.

  • 06

    Four-hour window

    Five days and four nights. Set up in your own time. We handle the rubbish on the way out.

Reel · 00:52

One summer, one property.

Shot on the property across a single season. No stock, no other location, no borrowed sky.

Still from the film — the lodge reflected in the private lake at first light.

Photographs

Every picture on this site was taken here.
Nothing has been borrowed.

A veil caught by the wind on the granite above the lake.
The granite site
Long tables laid under the pines on the reception ground.
Reception ground
A canoe named The Hideout on the private lake.
The lake
Dancing in the covered dance hall.
Dance hall
The lodge deck sitting directly on the water.
The lodge
Furnished bell tents set in the camping meadow.
The camp
The saloon lit at night with guests on the boardwalk.
The saloon
A couple on the granite dome at sunset.
Above the basin

Drag, scroll or swipe →

“The scenery is something out of a fairytale.”

Ben & Melissa Ward — married at The Hideout

Amador County Awards
“Best of” Wedding Venues

Owned and run by the family that built it. Someone from The Hideout is on the property at all times — this is off-grid, on solar and generator, and it is looked after.

Availability

Two hundred people can come.
Only one booking can.

Dates go a year to eighteen months out. Tell us roughly when, roughly how many, and we will tell you what is still open.

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