DSC_0368+copy.jpg — The short story is that Blake and I eloped on Mt. Rainier.
But the long story is much better.

Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, Blake and I made the decision to go to the University of Hawaii for college. Yeah, we were two crazy kids in love who just wanted to experience something different. Emphasis on the crazy. Because we traveled 2,500 miles to a place we had never been before on a whim, with the intent that it would be our home for the next four years.

We learned a lot - and living on Oahu helped me grow and learn in ways I never could have imagined. But I missed home. As a mountain girl who prefers rain to sun and cold to hot, I don’t think I really comprehended how long four years can be.

Being homesick so often is how I found photography.

I found the Pacific Northwest ‘niche’ photos on Instagram in their infancy. You know, the ones with all the vibes, dark forests and foggy hills. cold oceans and rainy pavement. When the Hawaii humidity felt suffocating, when all I wanted was an over-sized sweatshirt and a steaming cup of coffee, I drank in those PNW Instagram photos like they were oxygen. It’s what pushed me to enjoy the Hawaii moments as best I could, knowing I would find my way back home.

After four years of extremely hard work and few days to ourselves between work and school, we took a mini-vacay to Maui. It was one of the best trips we’ve ever taken (despite being totally broke), and I really got to bathe in how much I appreciated and respected the islands and their culture. I learned how privileged I was to have this deep knowledge that I am very much an outsider to the Hawaiian culture and how lucky I am to have been greeted with nothing but love and aloha while experiencing their raw beauty and mana.

Our Maui trip is when I finally saw and felt the beauty of the islands without being hindered by my discomfort or wishing I was back home. I wanted a camera SO BADLY as I was channeling those Pacific Northwest vibey photos and saw it in my Hawaiian surroundings for the first time, but I couldn’t afford one.

Photography is also how I found the idea of eloping.

Blake and I had been engaged for a couple of years. As we started to prepare for the move back home, we also started thinking about wedding preparations. It was on one of those days when I just couldn’t take the stress of school/work and the heat in our tiny studio apartment that I was scrolling on Instagram, chancing on a photo of a couple in wedding attire on a cliff-side that I knew in Washington. And the gears started to turn.

Being home felt like the end of a marathon. We had completed living together in a new place 2,500 miles away. We had survived scraping by financially and making hard decisions and having arguments rooted in stress and navigating college life as an engaged couple. As much as we love the islands, we were so. happy. to. be. home. It felt like I could finally take a full breath after four years.

I had grown up camping and hiking and riding dirt bikes in Washington and Oregon, but after moving back home is when I started hiking by myself with my dog Sonny. It was kind of like navigating a relationship with someone you haven’t seen in years. How do I want to explore and learn to love the place that I have chosen to be home as an adult, by myself? I picked up an old camera that was Blake’s in high school to accompany my hikes, just for fun. I started figuring out how to use manual mode, and photography was becoming a hobby without even realizing it.

Planning a wedding was stressful

We both didn’t have jobs for quite a few months after graduation but we had 20/20 vision for the life we wanted. We went through the motions of planning a wedding, but nothing was really clicking in place. I went to a traditional wedding dress store and awkwardly tried on dresses with the help of a random employee, each one feeling like a ton of fabric weighing me down. We toured venues that were ‘pretty’, but that’s it. I had tons of pins on Pinterest that slowly degraded into just ‘stuff’ that we would use once because it would be cute for the day, and then it would be precious money down the drain.

The image of the couple on the cliff-side was still in my head, and it kept coming back with greater force. I was too scared to bring up the idea of eloping, thinking we had too many people expecting a wedding and not really knowing what Blake’s thoughts were on it. It was an idea that I had pushed down inside me, with tradition sitting like a giant plate on top. As wedding decisions were getting more difficult to make and that feeling of unease grew, I gained the courage to bring up my elopement idea.

Now I’m notorious for beginning sentences as, “So… what are your thoughts on…” when I am already hell-bent, bright-eyed, and bushy-tailed over an idea that Blake doesn’t even know about yet. This one was probably the first. Blake had no idea this would be a passion he’d be feeding still years later. “So… what are your thoughts on eloping?”

It turns out that I had no reason to be scared of the idea. After thoughts and discussions were had, it finally clicked into place that this was what the universe had in store for us. At the time, adventurous elopements were very new, they’re still new. Breaking it to the family was nerve-wrecking, but so much easier than I ever expected. Those we were close with understood and wholeheartedly agreed that this was very much ‘us’. As the saying goes, those who matter don’t mind, and those who mind don’t matter.

My photographer was my first priority.

Photos were what encompassed the feeling of home for me. They’re what got me through incredibly tough days and feeling lost and feeling hopeless at times. They couldn’t be ‘just photos’. They needed to have the feel and energy of the Pacific Northwest which represented so much of who I am and what I love, so the majority of our elopement budget went to our elopement photographer. After finding our Ellie, we planned out the rest of our elopement from scratch.

It was kind of a backward surreal moment. Deciding to elope was a huge weight off my shoulders and was something that sparked excitement. But, now what? Realizing that this was completely a blank slate was almost more overwhelming than planning a wedding! I had all of these thoughts, feelings, and emotions of what I knew I wanted my wedding day to be but I had no idea where to start. I didn’t know anybody who had done something like this, and resources for eloping (back then) was almost nonexistent.

We thought of things that were important to us. A cabin. A cabin with a wood-burning fireplace surrounded by trees in a private space. Family. Our closest loved ones who have shaped us into the human beings we are today. And one day it clicked that it was Rainier. Rainier, who is always in our rear-view mirror, the towering landmark that orients us, that threatens to destroy life as we know it, that signifies a beautiful day when ‘the mountain is out’. She is the landmark that ultimately signifies ‘home’, and the rest of the pieces fell in place.

I knew I wanted moody, dark, weather-ridden photos, because the rain was what I had surprisingly missed most while living in Hawaii.

We eloped on our original anniversary date - October 21, 2017.

I think I just expected everything to work itself out, and I am lucky enough that it did. A couple of weeks before our intended elopement, I found out you need a permit to get married in this national park, and permits were expected to take 4 weeks to process. The nice ranger lady probably felt the panic in my voice as I explained the need for an expedited permit. And we got it.

We arrived at our cabin the day before on October 20th. We made a fire, we listened to our favorite songs and drank wine, we talked about all we had been through in the span of our relationship and how much we had left to accomplish. We prepared for the day ahead of us, and went to bed nervous. I don’t even think I checked the weather report, thinking that the universe would take care of us.

The morning of.

We made a pot of coffee and relaxed by the fireplace as our photographer Ellie and her husband Bryce made the trip extra early to take care of us and relax with us. We got ready in the dim light of the cabin with mostly butterflies to keep us company.

As we headed toward the Nisqually park entrance, we were greeted with rangers standing in the road and gates blocking the way. They were closed due to ice and stormy weather conditions. Two weeks earlier, I had scouted out the location I knew I wanted for our elopement ceremony - in sunny and 60 degree weather. I’ve always heard the ‘weather can change at any moment on the mountain’ mantra, but never truly experienced it like this. We waited for about an hour until they opened the gates and we carefully made our way through the windy roads to our elopement ceremony.

The same roads that had been clear and dry and warm two weeks earlier were now snowed in. My dad shoveled ice and snow along the walkway I had planned to use as my aisle and for Blake’s grandma to walk down. Needless to say, this was not the start to my elopement that I had imagined.

We took a few shots of fireball to calm the nerves and walked down the icy path.

And the patter of raindrops was the backdrop to our vows.

Afterwards, we took an adventure with our photographer along the icy roads to a few of our favorite spots. They looked so different in the new snow and the rain. We were FREEZING, as the mountain’s weather weighed down my dress. But we learned to love the mountain as we always have, even though our elopement did not go according to plan.

This was US. We had faced everything we needed to over the years of our relationship, and the mountain was manifesting all the pain, love, and happiness in one day.

A day full of unexpected love and adventure ended with a comfortable fire and cozy cabin in the middle of the woods. We drank wine. We played scrabble. We cooked an amazing meal because we were so freakin used to doing everything ourselves. Not a single complaint over the weather conditions from our family because they knew this was meant to be. And we were fulfilled. We were married. And we were ready for what the rest of life had to throw at us.

Rainier gave us everything she had. From rain, hail, and snow, to 30 degree weather in the middle of October. But we loved every minute of it. It represented the struggles we had overcome and the place we had chosen as home. It represented our story, while giving us quite the story to tell.

I learned so much about what an elopement is and what it means.

It inspired me to keep following through with my photography passion and to never lose sight of home, even if it’s 2,500 miles away. In the end, ‘home’ is your partner, home is what you choose in life. And believing in home will take you to the amazing places you’ve always dreamed of, no matter how far-fetched.

Our Elopement on Mt. Rainier

The short story is that Blake and I eloped on Mt. Rainier.

But the long story is much better.