A courthouse elopement in Fort Collins
Fifteen minutes inside, an afternoon in Old Town, and a reminder that the smallest weddings are very often the best ones.
They booked the eleven o’clock slot at the Larimer County courthouse, brought two friends as witnesses, and were married before most people had finished their coffee.
Then we spent three hours walking around Old Town, and that’s where the wedding actually happened.
Fifteen minutes is the whole ceremony
The civil ceremony itself is short and unfussy. A clerk, a small room, a handful of sentences, a signature. If you’ve been to a big wedding you’ll be surprised how quickly the actual legal part goes by.
Which is why I always tell couples eloping: book the rest of the day too. The ceremony is fifteen minutes. The day is what you do with the other six hours.
The best part was the walk
We got lunch. We found an alley with good light. They kept stopping to look at each other like they couldn’t quite believe they’d done it. That look is the whole job — you can’t direct it and you can’t fake it, you can only be nearby with the right lens on when it happens.
Nobody was watching them, which is exactly why they looked like themselves.
If you’re thinking about eloping
- It is not a lesser wedding. I have photographed both and I can tell you the feeling in the room is identical.
- Tell the people who’d be hurt, before rather than after. That’s the only part that’s genuinely hard.
- Book somewhere for dinner. Somewhere nice. It’s still your wedding day and you should still be fussed over.
