Bride hikes 3 miles in crocheted dress for mountaintop wedding
"It was amazing and so worth it," Clara Orland told ABC News.
— -- This bride shouted her love from the mountaintops — quite literally — in her homemade wedding gown.
Clara and Ryan Orland, of Columbia, South Carolina, hiked 3 miles in their fancy attire to get married atop Looking Glass Rock in North Carolina.
The beautiful location in the heart of the Appalachian Mountains is special to the couple, making the decision to tie the knot there an easy one.
“Ryan took me to Pisgah Forest a few weeks after we started dating,” Clara, 24, told ABC News. “He proposed at Moore Cove Trail as well. We make it a point to go camping there every year.”
To make the unconventional ceremony even more magical, Clara crocheted her own wedding dress, which took four months and less than $100 to complete.
“I started crocheting about five years ago and when I started looking for a wedding dress I wasn't too happy with what I saw,” the bride explained. “I ended up buying a dress and hating it. February of 2016 I got the idea to make it myself and it stuck. I tried a couple of things before the pattern I ended up with.”
Including the newlyweds, there 15 people that made the hike to watch their “I do’s.”
“Originally it was going to be a smaller group since we assumed not many people would want to hike up but we were wrong,” she laughed. “The hike took about three hours, but we were all sticking together.”
The happy couple and their guests enjoyed dinner afterward in Boone, North Carolina, where they rented a cabin for the weekend to celebrate the woodsy nuptials in style.
“I wouldn't have changed anything,” said Clara. “It was amazing and so worth it.”