Summer Wedding In Big Sky | Jessica + John

Read on for Jessica + John's pandemic fairytale and to see their beautiful Big Sky day at Rainbow Ranch Lodge. Photography by Capture Now Studios.

"Our story is a pandemic fairytale. We met at a wedding in New York in December of 2019. The whole night we danced and drank and had the best time. But, John lived in California and I was back in town after living in Australia and was about to move to Colombia, South America, in a week. We kept in touch sporadically but we lived too far away. Then the Pandemic hit. As borders closed I moved back to New Jersey to wait it out until travel was safe again. John and I started talking again and our sporadic text messages turned into daily messages, then phone calls, then Facetime. We occupied our time during lockdown by getting to know each other and slowly falling in love over calls and messages. After six months of pandemic lockdown, I had had enough and bought a car and started driving across the country. I visited John in California. After a weekend together camping, I continued on my road trip unsure if I'd ever see him again. When I got to Montana, I called John and convinced him to fly out and meet me in Big Sky. I got to Big Sky a day before he arrived and instantly fell in love with the town. Then John arrived and I instantly fell more in love with him, too. We never left each other after that trip and quickly made Big Sky our home. Seven months later, we headed out on a weekend trip to the Sawtooth Mountains in Idaho for some hiking and camping. Our long alpine lake hike turned into a disaster as we got lost and then stuck in snowpack and had to turn around. Finally, back at the campsite with the sun setting and the fire going, John got down on one knee and proposed.

There were two things that were really important to us about our wedding: (1) All of our guests would be traveling far to get here and we wanted it to be the most fun weekend for them. (2) We didn't want to get lost in the chaos of wedding planning. We wanted to keep things simple, forgo anything unnecessary, and focus on having fun planning the wedding and having fun the night of.

Most of our guests arrived Thursday and we all went to the Music in the Mountains in Big Sky. Our friends all quickly became friends and took on the task of organizing a group trip ... the next day over 40 of us went floating down the Madison river (the day before the wedding!) It was so much fun and everything we wanted in having our wedding in Montana. We will be forever grateful that during our wedding planning process we never lost sight of what was important; we were so excited to get married, so excited to have all of our friends in our beautiful state and just wanted to have fun." – Jessica, the bride