All images are by Alchemy Creative and use without written permission and notification is prohibited. 

A few weeks back, C and I had ourselves a small wedding/elopement in Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park. While this is typically a food and wellness blog, sharing some of the exciting moments in my life has got to be a part of it, so just bear with me if you’re just here for the food.

Toward the end of 2016, C and I finally decided to make things legal and start planning the wedding that was right for us. Maybe someone is wondering, why now? Why didn’t you tell anyone? Why didn’t you want all the pomp that goes into celebrating a wedding and beginning of a marriage? For the why – basically I finally got over my marriage issues and C eventually convinced me with his explanations of all of the legal benefits to it. (…I know, we’re super romantic.) So once I was convinced, knowing he would NEVER ask outright, I asked him one evening if we should set a date to get married and make everything legal – and he said “sure”. (The stuff of fairy tales, right?) I didn’t want an engagement ring, just a wedding band, so it worked well with our plans of doing an elopement and not really telling anyone outside of our small group of attendees.

When we talked about getting married, we always pictured something small – maybe even eloping just the two of us. We decided to do a small casual ceremony in which we married/officiated ourselves (something you can do in Colorado) and since the location was remote with restrictions on number of guests, decided to include our immediate families and a few close long time friends. While I have no problem speaking in front of a couple hundred people, C is much the extrovert, and we both love hosting a good party, the decision to get married and how was very personal and intimate to us. We wanted to keep as close as possible to what we needed from the day. Any party later!

BUT, I am very excited to share pictures and talk about all the wonderful people who helped make things happen.

C and I arrived in Boulder on a rainy Tuesday evening, quickly changed and went for a nice dinner at The Kitchen. Wednesday was still raining, so we spent the day exploring some of Boulder’s breweries and getting our marriage license. That evening we ate at Bramble and Hare (highly recommend!) before hitting the road to arrive in Estes Park for the evening. Thursday we explored the park and did some hiking and by evening everyone was starting to arrive. We spent Friday enjoying time with people and then went to dinner at Cascades Restaurant at The Stanley. To make everything easy, everyone stayed at Mary’s Lake Lodge in Estes Park for the long weekend.

We woke up bright and early Saturday to get ready for our morning nuptials. Our fantastic photographer, Brittany from Alchemy Creative, arrived at 6am along with my mom and older sister to help with a few last details.

Since C and I got ready together except for my dress, which he hadn’t seen yet, we didn’t have far to go for our first look.

We went down to Mary’s Lake, right next to the lodge before we would set out to the park.

As we drove into the park, the view kept becoming more and more amazing. Early May still had all of the snow on the mountains and we really lucked out with fantastic weather! (It was supposed to rain all weekend. And the following weekend they got 31″ of snow!)

We went over for some pictures at Sheep’s Lakes first – despite all of the rain earlier in the week, the ground wasn’t wet and the water was still enough to capture these gorgeous reflections.

(I’m holding off on completely overwhelming y’all with pictures – trying to pick just one or two from each location.  It’s so difficult!).

Around about 9am we were back over at Sprague Lake for our vow exchange and to meet up with everyone else. All total we were a group of 24.

We said our vows (which, btw, I completely cried through all of mine) and did our exchange of rings. We did a self uniting ceremony, which was completely perfect for us, but also meant we couldn’t just repeat after someone and needed some scripts. 🙂

A huge thank you to both of our families for traveling to the mountains to share in our day!

After one last smooch…

it was time to get some food in our bellies!

We did coffee, tea, and hot chocolate. And instead of a cake, did a cinnamon roll tower!

After everything at the park, we headed back to the lodge for some brunch-y foods hosted at the condo rented by my family. Then in the early afternoon we had our official wedding lunch at Tavern 1929 – the food was great and so were the views! Since we’re doing a couple “receptions” later with the rest of our family and friends, we wanted a low key lunch where we didn’t need to decorate anything, no gifts were expected, and everyone could order whatever they wanted off the menu. The Tavern didn’t push us into anything or make any comments once we arrived – me dressed in a white dress. It was the perfect day.

Vendors:

• Photography – Alchemy Creative (one incredibly talented photographer and perfect person to capture our elopement)
• Dress – Dreamers and Lovers, Natalie Gown
• Blanket – Kilim Throw from Turkish T
• My ring – Waylon Rhoads Jewelry (Seriously gushing over this ring – he custom made everything, even the mountains where carved off of three picture I gave him. Serious talent and highly, recommended if you’re looking for any piece of custom jewelry.)
• Flowers – Boulder Blooms
• Cinnamon Rolls – Cinnamon Cafe (she even put sprinkles on them after telling her they were for our wedding cake! and probably the best rolls I’ve ever had.)
• Jewelry – mixed from two stores off Etsy – jacket from Tosh Jewelry and pearls from Pearl Kissed.
• His ring – Ring Paradise, custom mountain etched
• His suit – custom from Final Stitch in Albuquerque

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Ok, totally lied. Here are a few others I absolutely love!