Preparations for Elopement Day

There wasn’t much coordinating we had to do for our elopement since it would be just us two plus Sarah. Over the course of a few months leading up to the elopement, Chris and I created a playlist that we would play throughout the entirety of our day to make it feel that much more special. One important thing to us was that we really wanted to use as many local vendors as we could to support small businesses in Anchorage. I had already picked up my dress from Bateau Bridal Boutique a few weeks before, and Chris would be picking up his tux rental from Men’s Wearhouse on the way to the Airbnb. For our wedding cake, I ordered a single tier carrot cake (our favorite) from Fire Island Rustic Bakeshop and ordered a “Mr and Mrs Soto” cake topper from Etsy.

I had this grand idea of hauling a large rug to the waterfall of where we were doing our vow ceremony, so I bought a cheap rug on Facebook Marketplace. This grand idea also included scattering colorful flowers around us, so we picked up a variety of flowers and colors from Cedar’s Flower Wholesale. I had my bouquet and Chris’ boutonniere made by Paper Peony – which were absolutely stunning and so uniquely made for us. Lastly, we would need some food during this long day, so we created a charcuterie board at Fromagio’s Artisan Cheese – best charcuterie board we have ever had! Sarah brought knick-knacks and trinkets to set up our picnic, so we didn’t have to worry about that!

Elopement Day

Girdwood is about an hour from Anchorage, so we went up the night before to stay at our Airbnb with everything in tow – the gown, tux, cake, charcuterie board, and flowers. We woke up to a blue-bird sky and sunshine after days and weeks of gloomy rain. **It was 35 degrees, but we powered through just fine** My hair and makeup artist, Liz Embry, was coming at 9am, but we had already done a trial run of my hair and makeup for our engagement photos the month before, so she already knew what I wanted done. Sarah met us at our Airbnb around 11am to get our elopement session started! Chris left the Airbnb after putting on his tux to meet us at Moose Meadow for the “first look”; it has a perfect view of snowcapped mountains in the distance.

After spending some time at Moose Meadow, we made our way to the Alyeska Resort to take the tram up to the top of the mountain to pop champagne in the fresh snow above. We have taken this tram many times before, so it was really neat going up in our wedding attire this time, compared to when we would go on the tram after hiking or for snowboarding/skiing.

Once we got back from the tram, we went to a nearby creek bank to set up for our picnic. As I mentioned before, Sarah had everything we needed to make this a picture-perfect picnic, we just provided the food and champagne. We spent a good amount of time eating and drinking on the creek, and did the obligatory “feed each other cake” photo. We chatted about how amazing of a day it had been so far and how the weather was perfect for us after weeks of terrible weather.

After the picnic, we went to Virgin Creek Falls to do our vow ceremony. This is a very short trail that takes you to a stunning waterfall among the trees. This is also one of the first places Chris took me before we started dating. Chris carried the rug and I carried the flowers to a flat spot where we could exchange vows with minimal foot traffic and ability to still hear each other because the waterfall was pretty loud. We set it up perfectly and shared our hand-written vows to one another. It was as perfect as I could have imagined it to be, just us two sharing our vows.

The last part of our elopement day was a 3-mile roundtrip hike on Winner Creek Trail. This is the exact trail Chris asked me to be his girlfriend in June 2020, so we thought it was only fitting we hike it again on our elopement day. We etched our initials on the bridge the first time we did the hike, and found them again when we got there! We found the most magical golden hour sunset peaking through the trees- we had never seen anything more perfect. We shared a first dance down by the water, cheers’d some Alaskan ciders, and made memories of the most perfect elopement we could’ve dreamt.