Gallery

The photos below are a selection of the very many taken throughout the day by https://www.dawnkellyphotography.com/. Dawn is one of the few photographers working Yosemite to exclusively use film, both colour and black & white stock, and even with the reduced resolution of the images below, I think the real film stock really shines through. Dawn was one of the first people we hired, and her extensive local knowledge of providers and how things work locally was a lifesaver.

Accommodation for all the guests, and the reception venue, was provided by https://redwoodsinyosemite.com/. The generators attached to the reception venue, and some of the cabins, proved very useful when mains power was cut for much of the weekend. The healthy piles of firewood supplied meant a roaring fire in each cabin provided plenty of heat for the guests. And thank god for the torch built into most of today’s phones!

Food for the reception was provided by https://www.thesmokinburrito.com/. Aaronn and his team provided food and plates, serving of cake, and serving of alcohol (we bought the alcohol in bulk, it was free to guests throughout the night). All the meat was freshly smoked and slow cooked that day, and my main memory of it was surprise that after one plate I was full! About half the guests went back for seconds, and nobody was left hungry.

The cake and reception decorations were provided by http://www.sweetdreamscakery.com/. American cakes tend to be on the overly sweet side compared to European cakes, however they did a great job on toning it down a bit for what was a sumptuous and tasty red velvet cake.

Megan’s bouquet, Niall & Henry’s boutonnieres and Clara’s flower crown were made by https://flowercrush.co/. She did a lovely job putting together a custom Scottish-themed look which I didn’t initially realise were not live plants (Yosemite does not permit introduction of flowering plants from outside to protect its ecosystem).

Finally, Adrienne and her team at Aramark, the official concessionaire for the Yosemite National Park who run all the hotels and most of the venues, arranged what everybody agreed was a superb bus tour for the guests around the park whilst we got the photographs below taken. They also arranged the farewell brunch at Wawona Hotel before we departed, which was expensive but exactly what was described, and they kindly gave us a small rebate because our numbers were under expectation due to some attendees cancelling late.

In case you are reading this because you are researching doing your own Yosemite wedding like ours, you might like to know how much all this cost us! For about fifty guests, with us providing all food, accommodation and alcohol for two days and nights, the reception, marriage licence, cake, decorations, flowers, bus tour, and with a professional photographer and including cash tips and sales taxes, the total bill came in at just under $24,000, or $480/head. We easily could have got that below $18,000 if we replaced the Wawona Hotel brunch with a cabin-based brunch, and didn’t rent out the most expensive cabins which the Redwoods had (that said, the El Capitan cabin rental was also our backup wedding location if the weather was very bad on the day, and we wouldn’t have chosen differently on that with hindsight). As much as that is still expensive, we got two full days of intimate personal time with all our family and friends in a very beautiful part of the world, instead of a few rushed hours in yet another impersonal noisy hotel wedding.

If you are also coming in from Europe, be aware the total cost including wedding clothes, rings, car rental, fuel, food, flights and accommodation in California either side of the wedding is approximately 50% more than what we spent on the wedding itself. For paying the many US vendors in US dollars both long before, and during the event, we used the multi-currency account and Mastercard debit card from https://transferwise.com/, and it worked a treat (plus was very cheap on exchange fees).

Good luck from us with your wedding planning! A Yosemite wedding like ours nobody attending will ever forget!