They first met in person at a local ice cream shop in Alaska, where he was living at the time and she was visiting her parents. “After a 3-hour ice cream date, I was hooked,” Lindsey recalls. “During ice cream, I knew there was something special with this guy. I was not looking for something serious, but the way he talked and listened and made me smile made me reconsider. After both of us having severely awful dating pasts, it felt like we both saw a friend, life partner, and romantic partner potential. The problem of me not living in Alaska did not matter; we would figure it out.”
The proposal happened in April 2020. They were both living in Alaska by this time and, as you might know, Alaska winters are long so…”It was the first nice sunny day of spring. We had been cooped up in quarantine and wanted to get out for a hike. We had also gotten some bad news that Jeremy was getting deployed in 3 weeks. Normally, you get months of notice, so this was a huge shock and we were trying to adjust to being apart for 9 months. Jeremy and I have completely different ideas of hiking, but I let him pick where we went. He wanted to do this hike called ‘The Butte’ in Palmer, Alaska. This is about a 2-mile hike, where 2/3 of it is straight-up a mountain. Jeremy kept telling me we were almost there (when we definitely weren’t) so I was getting grumpy because it was a difficult hike. He kept telling me he had a surprise at the top. I was pretty sure the surprise was going to be ‘and now you get to go back down.’ So I was not thinking anything of this ‘surprise.’
“We got to the top and I was exhausted. He told me to go sit down and enjoy the view with our Alaskan Malamute, Daisy. A couple of minutes later, he came back (little did I know he was giving a stranger his phone to take pics) and asked if I would like my surprise. So I stood up and turned around and he got down on one knee. I screamed and said ‘Yes!’
“It was very busy on the mountain because it was the first nice day of spring and Alaskans want to get outside at that point after a long winter so a bunch of strangers took pictures of us. Our dog was thoroughly not impressed.”
I met up with Lindsey and Jeremy this past weekend after we had to do a bit of reshuffling because of the incredibly intense winds. We ended up doing a morning shoot, when the wind would be calmer, but the temperatures were chilly! Thankfully, these two Alaskans were great sports and we got so many beautiful shots! They are getting married in just a couple months and I’m so excited to celebrate with them. They’ll have been engaged for over 2 years by that point and Jeremy, for one, is ready “to finally be done with wedding planning.” (For what it’s worth, he is also really “looking forward to finally being married to the girl of my dreams.”)
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