A Quiet Elopement Above the Clouds

Emma and James never talked about having a wedding. Not once in four years of dating did either of them use the phrase "our big day" or start a sentence with "when we get married." They're not anti-wedding. They've been to friends' weddings and had a good time. But when James proposed on a backpacking trip in the North Cascades, sitting on a rock above a glacial lake at 6,000 feet with nobody else around, they both knew immediately that the ceremony should look a lot more like that moment than a ballroom with 200 chairs.

Emma emailed us about five months before their date. The message was three sentences: "We want to elope on Maui. Just the two of us. Can you help us find somewhere incredible?" We wrote back with a list of options. When you're planning an elopement, venue selection works differently than it does for a large wedding. You're not constrained by guest capacity or catering minimums or parking logistics. You can go places that a group of 80 can't. Cliff edges. Hidden coves. Ridgelines above the clouds. The whole island opens up.

We suggested five locations. Emma and James picked Kapalua Bay almost immediately, specifically the stretch of the Kapalua Coastal Trail where the path climbs above the bay and opens onto a dramatic overlook. Volcanic rock drops away beneath you. The ocean is so clear at that point you can see reef structures thirty feet below the surface. On a calm morning, there's no sound except the waves and the wind moving through the ironwood trees behind you. "That's it," Emma wrote back. "That's exactly right."

November is an interesting time to get married on Maui. It's the transition between dry and wet season, so you can get scattered showers, but you also get some of the most dramatic skies of the year. The light in November has a different quality than summer light. It's softer. The sun sits lower in the sky, which means golden hour starts earlier and lasts longer. Morning light, especially on the west side of the island where Kapalua sits, has a clarity that photographers love. Water temperatures are still in the high 70s. The air is warm but not heavy. If you're thinking about the best time to marry on Maui, November deserves serious consideration, especially for elopements and small ceremonies where you have more flexibility with weather.

We set the ceremony for eight o'clock in the morning. Early enough to beat any hikers on the trail, late enough for the sun to be fully up and casting warm light across the water. Emma and James were staying at a hotel in Kapalua, and they walked to the trailhead together. No limousine. No bridal suite. They got ready in their hotel room, walked out the door, and hiked to their own wedding. That detail tells you pretty much everything about who they are.

The hike to the overlook is about twenty minutes. It's not difficult, but it's not flat either, and Emma was doing it in a silk slip dress and sandals while carrying a small bouquet that our florist had delivered to their hotel room that morning. The bouquet was simple: white dendrobium orchids, a few sprigs of greenery, and a single protea bud at the center, wrapped in raw silk ribbon. She wore a haku lei on her head, a crown woven from tiny white orchids and ti leaf, made fresh that morning. By the time she reached the overlook, the orchids had warmed in the sun and released a faint, sweet scent that mixed with the salt air coming off the water below.

James wore a vintage aloha shirt. Not a reproduction. An actual 1960s rayon shirt in a faded red and cream print that had belonged to his grandfather, who honeymooned on Maui in 1962. His grandmother had kept it in a cedar chest for decades and gave it to James when he told her about the elopement. It fit him almost perfectly. He paired it with tan linen pants and no shoes. His feet were on volcanic rock for the entire ceremony.

Their officiant was a local woman named Aunty Lani who has performed elopement ceremonies across Maui for over fifteen years. She met them at the overlook with a small koa wood bowl of ocean water and a strand of maile lei. The ceremony opened with a conch shell blown three times, the sound carrying out over the water and echoing off the cliff face. In Hawaiian tradition, the conch shell, or pu, announces the beginning of a sacred event. On a quiet morning with no other people around, the sound is enormous. It fills the space completely and then fades into the waves.

Aunty Lani performed a simple blessing, mixing Hawaiian and English, asking the aina (land) and moana (ocean) to witness the union. She sprinkled ocean water on their hands from the koa bowl. Then Emma and James read their vows. They'd written them separately and hadn't shared them beforehand, which is always a gamble at an elopement because there's no crowd noise to mask a silence if someone gets emotional and can't speak. James went first. He talked about the hiking trip where they met, how Emma had been leading the group and he'd spent three days trying to keep up with her, and how he eventually realized that trying to keep up with her was exactly what he wanted to do for the rest of his life. He got through it without breaking down, but barely.

Emma's vows were different. Shorter. More direct. She didn't tell a story. She made a series of specific promises. She promised to always be honest with him, even when it was easier not to be. She promised to keep hiking with him even when her knees gave out. She promised to never let a fight last longer than a day. And she promised to remind him, whenever he forgot, that choosing each other was the bravest thing either of them had ever done. It lasted maybe ninety seconds. Their photographer, who was the only other person present, later told us she had to lower her camera for a moment because she couldn't see through the viewfinder.

The ceremony was over in twenty minutes. No recessional. No receiving line. Emma and James kissed, Aunty Lani blessed them one more time, and then the three of them stood at the overlook and watched a pod of spinner dolphins moving through the bay below. The dolphins weren't planned. They were just there, surfacing and spinning in the morning light, as if the ocean had decided to send its own wedding gift.

After the ceremony, Emma and James spent two hours with their photographer exploring the coastline around Kapalua. They climbed over lava rock formations, waded into tide pools, walked through groves of ironwood trees where the light filtered down in long golden shafts, and stood on the edge of a blowhole while waves crashed below them. Elopement photography is different from traditional wedding photography because there's no schedule to keep, no family group shots, no cocktail hour to get to. You just walk and explore and let the landscape tell you where to go. The images they got that morning are raw and windblown and completely real. Emma's hair is messy. James's shirt is untucked. They look like two people who just got married and can't quite believe it.

That evening, they had a private sunset dinner for two at a restaurant on the cliffs above Kapalua. A table at the railing, overlooking the same water where they'd said their vows that morning. They ordered local fish and drank champagne and watched the sky turn orange and pink and violet. No speeches. No cake cutting. No DJ asking everyone to clear the dance floor. Just the two of them, the ocean, and the sound of the waves against the rocks below.

Emma sent us a note a few weeks later. "People keep asking me if I regret not having a 'real' wedding," she wrote. "I don't know how to explain to them that what we had was more real than anything I've ever experienced. We didn't need 200 guests to validate our love. We just needed each other, this island, and someone to make sure it all happened the way it was supposed to." If you're considering something similar, our guide to eloping on Maui covers everything from permits to timing to what to expect on the day itself.