SATURDAY NIGHT, THE FLOOR is almost dry, and the half-dozen kegs of PBR have been delivered. Charlotte is fretting over last-minute party details. "What if the whole town comes?" she says. Is the floor spec'd to hold 300 drunken dancers? "I'll ask Balo," she says. "He'll know."

She's found a high school kid to drive a shuttle van from the Wilson public lot; the band Mandatory Air, featuring the redneck-wild Miller Sisters on vocals and Mark Longfield on keyboards, is setting up; and the boys have built a sweet kicker jump next to a pile of scrap wood destined for the bonfire. The idea is for Patrick to tow skiers behind his snowmobile off the jump and over the blazing fire.

There is a costume theme: Come as anything but yourself. Charlotte is wearing a vampy skirt and a platinum-blond wig. The UPS man is here, sporting an Afro. Patrick is in a gorilla costume, bucking kegs like Donkey Kong. About an hour in, he fires up the Ski-Doo and starts looping people around the house and over the fire. The landing is a bit flat, but the buzzing skiers don't seem to mind. Then a collective howl goes up. Skiing behind the sled is Jeff, buck naked, slinging toward the crowd at 25 miles an hour. He hits the kicker at speed and spread-eagles over the fire, eggs to the flame, lands clean, and speeds off into the dark, his moon to the throng.

Inside, a kid who just arrived in town tries to talk Charlotte into renting him the windowless closet off the great room. "Let me think about it," she says. Mandatory Air kicks into "Movin' On Up," from The Jeffersons, a fitting theme for the housewarming. The place smells of funky polypropylene, and the dancers are getting shellacked.

The new floor holds. The next morning, it's stained and sticky with beer. Todd Jones, one of the TGR founders, is still asleep on the couch, rolled up in his down parka like a mountain gnome. The house itself seems a little hungover.

The SKI House's days are numbered. Before the snow flies again, Balo will put in a new kitchen and a proper concrete foundation, and Charlotte will haul out those lodgepole stumps. Hopefully, by next spring, the place will be closer to resembling a single-family residence, with six bedrooms and a bathroom for each one. It may finally even make code.

It's nearing noon, and the place isn't going to clean itself. Charlotte begins to pick up beer cups, yawning as Onyx wanders through the debris field. "When the the kitchen is finished," she says, "I think I'm gonna have a quiet dinner party.