You never know what you will get when you have a wedding at the top of a mountain in Colorado.  On this September wedding day in Aspen, we were engulfed in clouds, we had rain and we had full sunshine.

This was the perfect recipe for incredible pictures and a memorable wedding day for all.

Congratulations Andrea and Paul!  September 14, 2013

From Andrea:  We decided on the ceremony location because of the incredible scenery!  Aspen was the perfect destination wedding spot for us. It gave us the beautiful mountain scenery that we really wanted, experienced and talented vendors, and amazing hotels and restaurants that everyone could walk to.

I think our wedding combined a lot of different elements. We really wanted to use some natural elements from the surrounding area so we incorporated birch bark vases and our guests threw aspen leaves around us as we left the reception. We got married in September so we also pulled in amazing fall colors in red, orange, and yellow. Our ceremony and reception had a lot of really bright colors, our runner was bright orange, our flowers a combination of red and orange, and we had our florist cut off the heads of sunflowers to lay on all of our reception tables. We really tried to make our choices meaningful and unique to us!

Andrea’s favorite memories:

Watching Paul get tears in his eyes as I walked down the aisle toward him.
Saying our vows! (We wrote our own)
Dancing with my mom at the reception.

Paul’s favorite memories:

Watching our guests in awe at the view from the top of Aspen mountain.
Tourists taking their own pictures of the beautiful bride as she stood by the edge of the mountain.
The first dance!

Any advice for a bride planning a destination wedding?

Book early! If you fall in love with ceremony or reception location, book it as early as you can. We booked our locations a year and a half in advance to make sure that we could get the vendors that we really liked. We also chose to focus most of our money on a few key pieces and save money on others. For example, photography was really important to us so we used a big part of our budget on that. To save money we hooked up an iPod to the sound system rather then hiring a DJ or band.

Wedding Coordinator: Creative Weddings / Flowers and Decor: Aspen Branch / Wedding Officiant: Jill Pidcock / Ceremony Music: Silver City Strings / Hair and Makeup: Full Circle / Photographer: Robin Proctor Photography