Multi-Day Alaska Helicopter, Glacier, Horseback and Dogsled Elopement!
Elopements

Multi-Day Alaska Helicopter, Glacier, Horseback and Dogsled Elopement!

What’s more epic than deciding to elope in Alaska? Having a multi-day Alaska adventure with a helicopter rider, glacier exploring, horseback riding, and dog sledding! Shelby and Jeff had the best adventure elopement we have seen yet. Get all the details from both the couple and photographer below to help you start planning.

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About This Multi-Day Elopement in Alaska

Photography by Sam Starns LLC

Sam, the photographer, tells us Shelby and Jeff came from Indiana with their parents and siblings to have the most amazing epic experience in Alaska. It was an adventure complete with glaciers, dog sledding, and horseback rides. They included so many activities during their elopement, which we love to see! After the glacier, they flew to a mountain top for the ceremony, and the family came in a separate helicopter. They also hung out among the lupines and alpine lakes overlooking the glacier where they got some great photos.

“Multi-day elopements are such an amazing experience! My best advice is to work with your photographer to have your timeline be as efficient as possible. That way you can space in buffer time in case things go wrong and slow down if you’re wanting a breather. This elopement happened over 3 days, which was originally supposed to be 2. I had flexibility in my schedule to work with Shelby and Jeff on a third day to get their dogsled adventure in.” [Sam, the photographer]

Explore the best places to elope. 

Deciding to Elope

“We chose to plan an adventure elopement instead of a formal wedding mainly because neither of us loved the expectation of publicly sharing our deepest and truest feelings about the other in front of a large audience. While there are ways to circumvent that in a traditional wedding, our choice to elope was also fueled by the desire to plan an experience that was going to be for us and about us; something that abolished the traditions and expectations that accompany formal weddings and allowed us to better represent both who we are and embody how we wanted to live our future life as a married couple.

Choosing to elope is about more than just one day, as Sam instills in you through her book Elope your Life, it can be a catalyst in your life and how you choose to live going forward…A lot of the courage and strength it takes to move away from the familiar and comfortable to try something new can be attributed to our elopement experience because it exercises the same courage and strength that it takes to choose a non-traditional approach to marriage.” [The Couple]

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Deciding to Elope in Alaska

“When we chose to elope, we had NO IDEA what that looked like or where we wanted to go, all we knew was that we liked the idea of it. It was during our first consultation call with Sam (our adventure elopement photographer) that our eyes were opened to the truly limitless possibilities there are when planning an elopement…We ended up selecting the last frontier, Alaska, to host our first adventure in married life because it was so different from anywhere we had ever been before and we felt it truly emulated us as a couple (think opposites attract) with its vastly different landscapes that you wouldn’t necessarily expect to see in the same place.” [The Couple]

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How did you decide what type of activities to do and that you wanted to do a multi-day experience?

“Once we chose to elope in Alaska, we knew we had to do a multi-day experience just because there’s so much to see and do and we wanted Sam’s omnipotent camera lens to capture everything: all of our adventures, all of the unexpected beauty Alaska had to offer, all of the moments we would’ve otherwise missed. We filled those days with activities that would allow us to experience Alaska in various ways and made sure those activities were fast paced and animal-centric, things we typically gravitate towards and would best represent us. This ended up including things you MUST do when visiting Alaska, like dog sledding on a glacier, obtaining a completely different view of much greener pastures from horseback in the mountains and perhaps our favorite, flightseeing in a helicopter.” [The Couple]

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LNT and Permit Information For This Elopement Adventure in Alaska

“When you’re photographing via helicopter, fortunately, you don’t have to worry about the heavy foot traffic aspect of LNT. Because we land in places that most people can’t get to and where there’s no trail, make sure you travel on durable surfaces as much as possible (I kept to exposed rocks when I could). If that isn’t possible, spread out to avoid making trails (which happens by walking single file and repeatedly trampling the same area).” [Sam, the photographer]

Memorable Moments

Photographer’s Memorable Moment:

“The fact that when you do a more private, customized helicopter tour, you’re often calling the shots of where you want to land instead of the pilot is wild! It never gets old: you get up in the air and start heading out and the pilot turns to you and your photographer and asks, ‘So, where do you want to go?’. On top of some great suggestions from our pilot, we got to point out spots that looked amazing and he (our pilot) worked his magic. We got to take our time searching for moose from the air as well!”

Couple’s memorable moment:

“Our favorite part of the experience was the never-ending excitement, we woke up every day looking forward to what we had planned, there was no worrying about things being perfect, most of the time we really had no idea what we were in for or expectations because it was all new experiences and there certainly wasn’t the anxiety or stress that we would’ve felt in a formal wedding situation.”

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Vendors

Photography | Sam Starns LLC

Floral | The Teal Door 

MUA | Megan at Fleurt Beauty Company

Alaska Adventures |  Alpine Air AlaskaSunderland Ranch| Seward Helicopter Tours

Photos From This Multi Day Alaska Elopement

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