Gina and Chris at the Spruce Valley Lodge in Beaver Creek
As someone who moved to Colorado for the mountains, I’m partial to these mountain wedding decks for ceremony sites. One of the weddings on my main page was held at the Vail wedding deck. But that was in summer.
Gina and Chris’s wedding was a relatively modest affair; a ceremony at the Spruce Valley Lodge above Beaver Creek followed by dinner in the Out of Bounds dining room at the Four Seasons Vail. It was a little rainy and dreary that morning at Beaver Creek Village, but a gondola ride could take you above all that, right? As we rode up the mountain, we escaped the rain and landed in a near white-out.
Chris enjoys a brief break in the rain while awaiting guests at a Beaver Creek Village restaurant.
The weather in Beaver Creek was pretty sloppy on the morning of the wedding, but the rain in the village gave way to something much more appealing higher up.
Gina rides up in the gondola. It was getting a bit chilly as we went up the mountain.
The snow-covered forest at the top was such a direct contrast to the rain below that it gave one the sense of having travelled to a very different place, white, silent, suspended in time.
The white world outside the Spruce Saddle Lodge windows were a beautiful, silent backdrop for the ceremony.
Gina’s daughter speaks during the ceremony at the Beaver Creek wedding.
Gina’s sister and brother-in-law have a couple albums to their credit. Their contribution to the ceremony was memorable.
I always hear that rain is good luck on a wedding day, which makes no sense to me, aside from trying to make people feel better. But the snow actually felt like good luck, or at least it made the event seem removed from the ordinary world and a bit magical.
You want to keep an eye on that one.
Gina signs the license in the Remedy Bar of the Four Seasons Vail.
No one gets left behind.
People ask me how long I’ll be at the reception, and the answer is basically until there is no reception. “Till the bitter end” doesn’t sound right. But the truth is that sometimes great moments happen when things are officially over and the guests have disappeared. I pack my things up, yes, but keep my cameras out, lingering (loitering?) just in case.
