A Big Sur Cliffside Elopement for Just the Two of Them

Cliffside Vows Above the Pacific at China Point

They married right at the edge. The ceremony spot at China Point is a narrow shelf of headland with the ocean falling away on three sides — dark rock, white surf, sea stacks standing offshore, and the Big Sur mountains running north up the coast in the haze. Ken Robins stood between them with his notes in hand, an older man in a dark blazer and tan trousers, and read the ceremony out over the sound of the water.

There was no crowd to face and no distance to cross. Jenny held her bouquet while Chris held her free hand, and they said their vows to each other as the waves broke below and the wind came straight off the water. It is about as stripped-down as a ceremony gets: two people, one officiant, and a coastline doing everything a room full of flowers usually tries to do.

“Jenny and Chris alone on the cliff, the Pacific breaking on the rocks below, reading their vows to each other.”

Portraits in the Big Sur Woodland

With the vows behind them, they left the exposed coast and moved into the trees. There is a stretch of old oak-and-olive woodland back off the highway, the trunks bent and mossy and low, a dirt trail winding through it and a small wooden footbridge crossing a dry creek. It is a completely different world from the cliff — sheltered, green, still.

Jenny and Chris walked the trail together, stopped on the log stairway under a canopy of twisted oaks, and stood close on the little bridge for a while. The blush of her dress and the navy of his suit read soft against all that green. After the wide-open drama of the headland, the woodland gave them somewhere quiet to just be two people who had gotten married an hour before.

The Coast, the Light, and the Two of Them

There was no reception hall and no head table. The day belonged to the coast, and they gave it right back — they stayed out as the afternoon light stretched long and gold across the water. The surf kept rolling in below, set after set, with no timeline running and nowhere they needed to be.

They finished where the day had pointed all along: back near the water's edge as the Pacific went from blue to gold to a flat wide grey, the coastline running south toward the Big Sur headlands in one direction and north toward the mountains in the other. Nothing built anywhere in the view. The day closed the way it had opened — the two of them, the ocean, and the whole coast to themselves.