Nick and I had a mini vacation over the weekend at my grandparents’ beautiful log cabin about an hour away. The cabin is on a lake and it’s quiet and pretty isolated; Nick and I don’t even get phone service up there, so we were off the grid all weekend. We invited Amanda and our friend, Sean, to join us. We played games and got Amanda caught up through season 3 of Game of Thrones. 😛

Big Four Ice Caves Trailhead in the Cascade Mountains. Click the image for an interactive version!

On Sunday, we went to the Big Four Ice Caves in the Cascade Mountains with Grandma. It’s a short (2-3 mile roundtrip) hiking trail that I’ve been doing since I was little. Growing up, it was tradition to go to the ice caves for my birthday every few years with my friends. When you get to the end of the trail, you see a glacier on the mountain that remains year round. During the summer, some of the snow melts and streams cause caves to form in the ice (hence, the ice caves). It feels really nice on a hot summer day to walk around on the snow and feel the cold air blowing toward you from the caves.

I took the picture above from the trailhead while we were eating our picnic lunch after the hike. If you click the picture, it’ll take you to Google+, where you can get the full 360 degree experience. 🙂 Unfortunately, I didn’t think to take one of the ice caves until it was too late. D’oh!

The pictures below are of some of my trips to the ice caves throughout the years. The wooden bridge you see in the earlier pictures was destroyed during a flood in 2006 and they rebuilt it as an aluminum bridge.

26th Birthday (taken on Sunday)

22nd Birthday

16th Birthday

12th Birthday

11th Birthday