A Micro Wedding in Sequoia National Park, Among the Giant Sequoias

Family Among the Giant Trees

Afterward came portraits and family photos among the trees. Trista stood between her mother, in burgundy lace, and her father, in a blue suit, at the base of a trunk that ran wider than the three of them together. Then the couple wandered off for a run of their own — the two of them small against the sequoias, arms out on a shelf of granite ringed by the fallen logs, the trunks rising so far overhead that the tops disappeared into the canopy above them.

Sequoia is home to the giant sequoias, the largest living trees on earth by volume, some of them well over two thousand years old, their reddish, fire-scarred bark rising straight up out of the mountain slope. Standing at the base of one shrinks a wedding party right down to scale, which is exactly the kind of setting Trista and Jonathan had come up here for. An older couple among the family tucked into the hollow at the foot of one tree for a photo of their own, dwarfed by the opening in the trunk.

Dinner at the Gateway Lodge on the Kaweah River

As the afternoon wore on, the celebration moved down out of the high forest to The Gateway Restaurant & Lodge, at the southern edge of the park along the Kaweah River. The view from the deck ran straight out over the water — grey boulders and shallow green pools in the riverbed, a stone bridge downstream, the far hillside gone rust and gold with the turning fall brush. Dinner was close and easy, the river running just beyond the rail and the mountain air settling in for the evening.

Toasts went around the table from the people who knew them best. They cut a cake from Sweet Creations by Gigi, shared a first dance out on the wooden deck, and stayed on the floor with their family — a small crowd, a big place, and a day that felt like exactly what they'd driven up the mountain for.