Lake Tahoe Summer Camp Destination Wedding

We are so excited to see Maggie & Nick’s destination wedding featured in California Wedding Day! Check out the feature below along with some exclusive images that were not included in print! You can also see their online feature here.

Excerpted from California Wedding Day:

Maggie and Nick Shepard gathered their friends and family for a summer-camp-style wedding on the shore of Silver Lake in the Sierra Nevada. The Kit Carson Lodge served as the perfect property for guests to access canoes, paddleboards, and hiking trails, and their assigned cabins added to the atmosphere of a summer camp for grown-ups. Maggie’s lace gown perfectly matched the woodsy setting and she and Nick exchanged vows surrounded by towering trees. After the ceremony, while the guests headed to the reception, Maggie and Nick spent some time alone on the lake before making a grand entrance by canoe. To make that entrance, they had Maggie’s stepfather, brother, best friend, and two of Nick’s closest friends push their canoe into the lake. “The metaphor of being launched into the water by these people we had selected was not long on us,” says Maggie. “It was one my favorite memories of the wedding.”

Pick up a print copy of California Wedding Day to see their full feature with more details!

From the Bride & Groom:

Nick and I wanted our wedding to be in a place where our friends and family from all over the country could come and spend time together. Nick is from the East Coast, and I’m from the midwest. We met at Penland School of Craft near Asheville, North Carolina in January 2016 when we were both there for photography residencies. Though Penland was covered in snow, we found ourselves finding excuses to take walks together whenever we could. After our residences ended, several months of texting, emailing,and the occasional phone call ensued. We were reunited in June 2016, while I visited my brother in Olympia, Washington, Nick drove up from a visit with his parents in Portland, Oregon. We shared our first kiss as he was about to head back. After about a year of long-distance dating, I packed up my things and took a road trip across the country with my dog, Maizey. We arrived in Sacramento late on August 21,2017 after watching the total solar eclipse in Salem, Oregon.

We are lucky to have friends and family who wanted to be helpful to us planning our wedding, and they took on their tasks with aplomb.

Our communities were part of many pieces of our wedding: we designed our wedding invitation with a friend of Maggie’s from her time at school in Boston, Alex Simpson; our flowers were done by a friend of Nick’s from his frisbee community in Sacramento, Ali Main; our photographer, Todd Danforth, is a friend of Maggie’s from school in Boston; our wedding bands were designed and made for us by Nick’s friend from graduate school, Allyson Ross; a family friend, Lisa Miller gathered vintage glasses and bud vases for our tables; Maggie’s mom and stepdad harvested, jarred, and drove honey from their farm in Kansas all the way to the wedding; Maggie’s aunts collected over 75 plaid flannel shirts to have on hand for guests who got chilly as the temperature dropped at our mountainous location.

“For the wedding, Nick found Kit Carson Lodge and we were immediately enamored. The lodge fit our desire to provide a gathering place for recreation for our guests, and it was large enough to accommodate many of our guests on site. We loved the quirky style of the cabins, which were comfortable but not fussy, and the focus on the outdoors (all the cabins and rooms have a deck with chairs and a table to enjoy the views). Guests would have access to beautiful Silver Lake, canoes, paddle boards, and boats, plus a myriad of hiking trails in the area. We assigned groups of friends and family to cabins for a grown-up summer camp vibe.”

“Because of the location on Silver Lake, our idea of a weekend away at camp, our general nerves about being the center of attention, and our love for wordplay, we quickly started talking about “canoodling.” For us, “canoodling” was shorthand for recessing post ceremony to a canoe out on the lake for some alone time, which then became a method for a grand entrance into the cocktail hour as well. We asked five people from our wedding party to come with us to help us get into the canoe and push us off onto the lake: my stepfather, my brother, my best friend, and two of Nick’s closest friends. The metaphor of being launched into the water by these people we had selected was not lost on us, and is one of my favorite memories of the wedding. We were so excited to see our guests at the cocktail party we hardly spent anytime on the lake, instead rushing to the beach area where the cocktail hour was being held. The wind was at our backs and we had fair waters—a good omen for our wedding day.”

“Maggie was a Girl Scout and one of the only songs she remembers all the words to is ‘A Boy and a Girl in a Little Canoe.’ Of course this song came back to her frequently as we planned our canoodling, and she shared this idea briefly with her aunts and mom who took on learning the song on their various instruments so they could play it at the campfire after the rehearsal dinner. They didn’t know we were going to be canoeing into the cocktail hour the next day!”

“Maggie loves vintage glassware and she had looked into renting some for our wedding. A family friend who runs a vintage shop asked what she could do to help with our wedding, we mentioned this idea, and she took it and ran with it! She even collected over 150 bud vases for us to use on the tables.”

“There were small jars of honey at each place setting from Maggie’s mom and stepdad’s farm in Lecompton, Kansas. They offered to jar honey and drive it out for our wedding. All the jars were tagged with our names, and the phrase ‘...meant to bee.’ Obviously the penchant for word play runs in the family.”

“Nick’s childhood friends started a tradition as each of them got married that they would take a well known song and rewrite to the lyrics to tell the story of the couple getting hitched. Nick is the last of the five to get married, so by now they’ve got it down well.”

Some of our favorite lyrics to the song they wrote, to the tune of “The Space Cowboy” by The Steve Miller Band:

He was bashful, down in Asheville,
she was smitten, they got a kitten,
living the good life in Sac town,
She’s a Hall, he’s not tall,
as a couple they’ve got it all,
now let’s get this party on
Our advice is don’t fight,
she may be wrong, but she’s still right,
count your blessings our dear friend

“We knew that given the elevation (7300 ft) the temperature would drop when the sun did, and we thought we could probably get plaids/flannels to have on a coat rack for our guests who might need to add a layer. Maggie’s aunts collected over 75 shirts for us from thrift stores in their areas!Our guests were invited to take them with them, and everyone looked great with them on the dance floor over their finery.”

This Sierra Nevada destination wedding was photographed at the Kit Carson Lodge near Lake Tahoe, California. This wedding was featured in print in the Spring 2021 issue of California Wedding Day.

Photography: Todd Danforth Photography | @toddthephotographer
Venue: Kit Carson Lodge
Catering: Kit Carson Lodge
Hair: Alyssa Martin, Solstice Salon | @solsticesalontruckee
Makeup: Emma Furth, Solstice Salon | @solsticesalontruckee
Florist: The Garden at Good Humus | @good_humus
Rentals: Theoni Collection | @theonicollection
Rentals: Camelot Party Rentals | @camelotpartyrentals
DJ: Napa Valley DJ, Tony Sparks
Pies: Real Pie Company | @realpiecompany
Invitation: Alex Rose Simpson | @asimpson14

Palm Springs wedding photographer Todd Danforth Photography is an LGBTQ+ and POC-owned wedding photography team specializing in capturing joyful and candid moments. As storytellers and craftspeople, we believe in the power of visual narratives. Our mission is to create honest and authentic photographs you can share with your loved ones for generations to come.