Planning Your Waterfall Wedding

Welcome, and congratulations. Right now the only job is to get oriented and put a few dates in your calendar. Nothing is due yet, so read through once and then go celebrate. You are getting married at a waterfall.

• Read through this page once, start to finish. It takes about ten minutes and it will save you hours later.
• Grab your one-page checklist. Check the boxes right in the file, or print it and put it somewhere you will see it. There is real satisfaction in checking a box with an actual pen.
• Save your payment tracker. It is your own private copy, with a row for every vendor category, so deposits and balances live in one place.
• Skim the preferred vendor list. These are vendors who have delivered beautifully here before, which makes it a lovely place to start.

One ask: share your payment tracker, your cabin planning spreadsheet, and your questionnaire responses with weddings@waterfallsantacruz.com and hello@waterfallsantacruz.com. We will not manage these or chase anything for you, but a second set of eyes catches gaps while they are still easy to fix.

Caterer, photographer, florals, and music book the furthest out and shape everything else, so this is where the fun starts.

You are welcome to hire anyone you like. For nearly every role we are happy to bring in someone new, walk them through our guidelines, and set them up to succeed here. Because the role is such an important one, caterers who have not worked at Waterfall before make a site visit first, so build in a little extra time if you are bringing in a new caterer.

Share our venue guidelines with everyone you hire. There is a guide for each vendor category covering arrival, setup, our road, sound, and load-out. Sending it at contract signing saves everyone a round of questions later.

Every vendor you hire will need to provide a certificate of insurance, due to us 30 days before your wedding. Worth mentioning when you sign contracts so it is never a surprise.

Build your wedding website first, then send save-the-dates that point to it. Doing it in that order means guests can find every answer in one place instead of emailing you.

We recommend Joy (withjoy.com). It handles RSVPs, travel details, and guest questions well, and its RSVP responses are exactly what you will use to plan cabin assignments a few months from now.

To make this easy, we wrote you a set of wedding website blurbs: ready-to-paste copy about Waterfall, the cabins, getting here, and what to expect. Use it word for word or make it your own.

Your guests are traveling to a mountain and dreaming about cabins in the redwoods, so give them a head start.

The big four are handled. Now everyone else, while the good ones are still open for your date.

• Your bar. Bartending service or a mobile bar, whichever fits the night you want.
• Shuttles. Worth sorting early. Only 14-passenger vans fit our mountain road, so the pool of options is smaller than you would expect.
• The fun ones. A photo booth, late-night bites, a coffee cart, a yoga class the morning of, casino tables, trivia for the welcome party. A live poet, if that is your kind of thing. It usually is somebody's.

Our preferred vendor list has options in every one of these categories, and they already know our road, our sound limits, and our load-out.

Your first real check-in with us, and it is a short one. Rough answers are completely fine, that is what "draft" means. It exists so we can spot gaps early while there is still plenty of runway.

• Your draft vendor list, even if a few slots are still open
• Your best guest count estimate

Start your cabin assignments now. As RSVPs come in through your wedding website, use the cabin planning spreadsheet to sort out who is staying where. It is much easier to do this in pieces over a few months than in one panicked week.

Keep the cabin-by-cabin worksheet open next to it. It lists every cabin with its beds, how many it sleeps, and how hard the walk is, rated easy, moderate, or hard. That last column matters more than people expect. Put grandparents and anyone with mobility concerns in an easy-access cabin, and check the notes, because a few cabins are an easy walk but sit above a steep hill to the nearest shuttle stop.

Parking, only if you need it. The church lot is for day-use cars, meaning guests who drive in and park for the day. If everyone is staying onsite, or your overflow guests are at a hotel where a shuttle can pick up directly, you can skip the church lot entirely. If you do need it, request it now. Replies can take a while.

Our parking and shuttle guide walks through how this works here: who to contact, how many vans you are likely to need, and how pickups run.

Order now, mail at 90 days. That gap is on purpose. Printing and calligraphy both take longer than anyone expects, and addressing a stack of envelopes is a much bigger evening than it sounds. Ask anyone who has done it.

Point guests to your wedding website on the invitation itself. It saves you from answering the same travel and lodging questions one text at a time.

Open our floorplan library, sorted into folders by guest count. These are the layouts we know work on our patio and grounds, tested over many weddings. Pick a favorite. Minor tweaks and your final chair count are accepted later, so you do not have to be final yet. We just want to know the direction so we can plan furniture and rentals around it. Patio fit is only guaranteed for layouts from the library, which is exactly why we built it.

Your cabin booking link goes live. We will share it in your client portal this month. Send that link, along with your cabin assignments, to every guest staying onsite. The easiest way to do this is to put both on your wedding website so nobody has to dig through an old email to find it.

The big logistics push, and the last heavy stretch before we take over. Everything you lock in now makes the 60-day handoff feel effortless.

• Questionnaire 2: full vendor contacts, including phone, email, and how many cars each one brings
• Confirm your shuttles and parking. You booked these months ago, so this is a quick check that times and pickup points are still right
• Book your site visit or video call for around 30 days out, by emailing us. It lands after your kickoff call on purpose, so you have your draft timeline in hand

Questionnaire 2 also asks your rain plan preference, so read Your Waterfall Rain Plan before you answer it. If your guest count is over 70, that page is the one to read carefully. The Lodge seats 70, so above that a tent is the wet-weather option, and it is a real line item worth setting money aside for now rather than deciding about in your last week.

This is the handoff, and it starts ten days early. At 70 days out we send you two things: the master questionnaire, due one week later, and a link to book this call. That order is deliberate. It gives you a full week for the questionnaire and gives us a few days to read your answers properly before we talk, so the call is a conversation rather than us reading in front of you.

The master questionnaire is the single most important form in this whole process. It covers ceremony details, your full vendor list, rentals, furniture, personal items, off-site events, garbage removal, and your rain plan preference.

Fill it out carefully and completely and you will almost never hear from us with follow-up questions. Everything we need to build your wedding lives in that form.

Before you answer the ceremony questions, go play with Picture Your Ceremony. Straight rows or curved, how wide the aisle should be, whether you want our arch or your own. It draws the whole thing to scale in seconds, which makes those questions much easier to answer than they are in the abstract. Print what you like and bring it to the call.

Your rain plan is confirmed on this call, and both versions of your day go into your timeline.

Not everyone lives close enough to visit, and that is completely fine. You have two good options here, and neither one is the consolation prize.

• Come walk the property with your draft timeline in hand. We stand in the spots, talk through the flow, and answer the questions that only come up when you are actually standing there.
• Or book a video coordination call. We walk the same ground with you over video, screen-share your floorplan and timeline, and cover exactly the same checklist. Plenty of our couples plan this way and their weddings run beautifully.

Either way, email weddings@waterfallsantacruz.com to book it. Whatever we decide together feeds straight into your final floorplan and timeline, so bring your questions and your opinions.

Also around now: get your marriage license. California licenses are valid for 90 days, so this window is right on time.

We run your rehearsal, and there is more than one way to do it. We will land on the right one together at your takeover kickoff.

• During your rental period. The simplest option. If your booking includes the day before, we run the rehearsal then.
• Scheduled around other events. If your rental does not include the day before, we can often book an onsite rehearsal around whatever else is on the calendar. Ask early, since availability depends on other bookings.
• A run-through on the wedding day. Effective, and the right call for a lot of couples. We walk your party through the processional the morning of.

If you would like us to run a rehearsal offsite at another location, we are happy to. That is billed at an additional rate, so just ask and we will quote it for you.

This one is quicker than it sounds, we promise. You and every one of your vendors send us an insurance certificate 30 days before the wedding, naming all three of these as additionally insured:

• Waterfall Lodge INC
• Waterfall Retreat LLC
• Spring Lodge LLC

All at 325 Hidden Falls Trail, Ben Lomond, CA 95005. Copy that whole block straight into an email to your vendors.

For your own event insurance, we set up a page just for Waterfall couples: get your policy at Nuptial Risk. It is already matched to our venue requirements, so there is nothing to cross-check.

Your vendors carry their own policies. Just tell them the deadline when you book and it never becomes a problem. One heads up: a friend or family member working in a vendor role, say doing your flowers or running music, counts as a vendor and needs coverage too.

All of this is yours, already here, at no extra cost. You can see photos of every piece before you rent a single thing.

Lodge and reception

• 20 farmhouse tables, 8ft x 40in, and 150 x-back chairs
• 12 plastic tables, 8ft x 29in. These need rented linens
• 2 sweetheart tables, 4ft wood, with your choice of cream or navy captain's chairs, 2 of each
• Wood bar, 6ft 5in, with a matching barback, plus 8 wine barrel cocktail tables
• Two lounge setups: a green sofa with 2 brown leather side chairs, and a grey set of sofa plus 2 chairs, with a wood coffee table and 2 side tables
• Bistro lighting on both sides of the Lodge, and 6 lanterns. Bring your own LED candles
• 4 highchairs, 3 large garbage cans, and yes, cornhole and Giant Jenga

Ceremony area

• 150 folding chairs, brown with ivory cushions
• Rectangular arch with squared posts, 70.5in W x 84in H x 5.5in D
• 2 plastic tables, rented linens needed, and a garbage can

Two rules worth knowing before you plan around it. Furniture stays in its own area of the property, so ceremony pieces and Lodge pieces never trade places. And our staff can move at most 3 farmhouse tables from the reception patio to the cocktail patio, for a buffet or a dessert display. Beyond that, the plastic tables are your cocktail-patio workhorses.