The Wedding
I wanted to share a non-camping (but certainly hiking) related experience for just a moment: our elopement!
Expensive, stressful, a lot of work and planning…
Those are just a few of the words and phrases that I automatically associate with weddings. Not my cup of tea. But standing in front of a justice of the peace in flip flops and blue jeans isn’t how I’d imagined my big day either. My wife and I wanted to come up with a wedding solution that we felt would be special, easy to pull off, and picturesque. Oh, and affordable… Let’s not forget that one.
So, off to the google I went. My search finally led me to the new trend of destination elopement ceremonies. Turns out, I could travel to my dream destination - Torres del Paine in Patagonia - and be married to the love of my life in front of a beautiful glacial pool, with giant peaks piercing a fiery sky in the background. Perfect! Except for one thing, and that was the price tag. The overall trip - airfare, accommodations, food, car rental and wedding package - would have tipped the $17k threshold. With the average American wedding costing $28,000, a $17,000 dream wedding might sound pretty good. However, with elopement ceremonies, you don’t generally have guests, wedding parties, catering or anything else that $28k gets you. Sooo, no, not for us.
After I admitted to myself that Patagonia wasn’t in the cards, we moved on to find something similar with a price tag we could stomach. Simply Eloped is where we landed. They have several packages, but the Wild Flower package ended up being our choice. Our destination would be Silver Dollar Lake out in Guanella Pass, CO in mid-October when the Aspens still had their leaves. Our final price tag for the wedding package was $4300. This included two hair and makeup sessions, two hours of photography, our officiant and a consultant who coordinated the moving parts, solidified dates and acted as the middle man between us and the vendors. (Before I move forward, I want to let you know that the photographer/officiant/trail guide combo we got was worth every penny. Check out Alana and Glen’s (Forged from the Wild) work here. They were phenomenal in every way and I highly recommend them.)
Not a bad deal! But we didn’t want this wedding to cost more than 10k total, so we had to do our best to cut back on the details. We went with dried bouquets, one for each of us totaling $250, dresses from Hebeos.com for a combined total of $460, and shoes from Rack Room for $15 a pair. I found a super cute, super cozy studio airbnb in Georgetown right at the base of Guanella Pass! Our five day stay came to $647. The rental car came in around $700 and our airfare came in just under a $1000. So, for a grand total of around $7372 we had a great vacation, the hike of a lifetime and got the pics to prove it!
No, we did not do the 1000 ft ascent in wedding dresses - we saved the photography for the ceremony and the descent during sunset, heeding the advice of our guides. Though, I did wear my spanx on the hike up under my hiking pants and I have to say that was pretty uncomfortable. Hair and makeup was completed a few hours before the hike (airbrush makeup is a must) and our dresses, shoes, bouquets and jackets were packed in our bags. The ascent took around 1.5 hours and we actually ended up stopping before reaching Silver Dollar Lake to avoid missing the sunset photos. The lake in the pictures is actually Lake Murray. Our guide/photographer/officiant extraordinaires found the perfect ceremony spot and held up a blanket while we changed into our dresses. Because of the time of day, the trail wasn’t crowded and the changing situation wasn’t as awkward as I expected it to be. After a real tear-jerker of a ceremony, we headed down and that’s when nature put on the show. The sunset was unlike anything either of us had ever seen and watching it from 12,000 feet up in the alpine zone made it even more jaw-dropping.
Could you do it cheaper? Yes. Hire your own vendors, research your own destinations and coordinate it all to happen at a specific date and time in a place that you’ve never been to, and possibly know very little about. For us, we just didn’t have the time to invest to make it happen alone.
Could you do it with guests? Yes. Simply Eloped and other companies offer destination weddings at venues with small wedding party and guest options. In our case, our marriage isn’t supported by my family and my wife’s family are all widely dispersed along the east coast, so an intimate elopement worked great for us.
And no, folks… none of the companies mentioned paid me to say any of this.
