Park City Proposal | Dog Sledding Details

“So, you know there’s a lot involved in this, right? Not trying to be a buzzkill. Just sayin’.”

V nods, but he can barely contain his enthusiasm. I mean, it’s definitely happening — I know we’re going to do it — but it’s not our usual proposal photography session.

Ordinarily, after some back-and-forth emails with the groom-to-be, we find ourselves waiting at a proposal location maybe 10 minutes before the couple is supposed to arrive. We discretely hide out or pretend to be photographing each other while keeping our eyes on the couple, and when the Proposer makes his move, we fall into place to capture the moment from a variety of perspectives, angles, and compositions. With two of us (myself + Victor) shooting, and each of us with two cameras with different focal length lenses, I feel like we are, at the very least, comprehensive in our coverage. Anyway, 45-60 minutes later, we’ve usually sufficiently photographed the before, during, and after as well as a short portrait session before we leave the couple to enjoy the best part: their private celebration of having just decided to join their lives.

All of that said, this proposal is different. In the middle of holiday season (aka I’m booked nearly every day in December, occasionally twice daily, for family sessions, proposals, and gatherings/parties/events), we were contacted about doing a unique shoot: Kyle was going to pop the question to Jennifer in the middle of a two hour dogsled adventure. While V was ear-to-ear beaming at the very thought, I was mindfully going over our schedule (we’d been asked to do another shoot that midday) as well as the reality of this session lasting much longer than our typical 45-60 minutes. We don’t charge travel fees for our work, but this was going to be at least a four hour commitment during one of my busiest times. Although I didn’t feel right charging them a half day rate despite the time involved, I still wanted to walk through the decision to tackle the shoot at my standard proposal fee and make sure I was aware of and okay with the consequences.

“Like, it’s going to be complicated, my love.”

“But Kyle said they’ll give us a snowmobile to ride out there. So that’s cool.”

“But they won’t, hun. For a dozen reasons. Insurance, etc. Understandably, no business is just going to hand over a snowmobile to people they’ve never met. So, again, I’m just sayin’, there’s gonna be complications.”

I picked apart the shoot in my mind — not because I’m a Debbie Downer but because that’s my job as a professional. We were rolling into a bunch of unknowns (include snow/wetness, which is risky for our tens of thousands of dollars of gear), and while the romantic in me is swooning over a dogsled proposal, the business owner in me has no choice but to consider the reality of such a shoot. Here’s a short list of considerations:

1. We will be departing from a location that’s 50 minutes from our house. That’s nearly two hours roundtrip driving.
2. The proposal will take place at the turnaround spot in the middle of a two hour sledride. Logically, that’s an hour into the ride. Another two hours travel.
3. We were asked to arrive a half hour earlier than the couple was due to arrive, which means the period of time we’re waiting at the proposal spot will be substantial.
4. We’ll be shooting for ~45 minutes.
5. There will be feet of snow on the ground — do we need snowshoes to move around once we’re in the mountains?
6. Is there shelter where we’re waiting if it’s snowing?
7. Is there cell service in the mountains? How do we contact people if we get stuck out there or, if there’s a delay, how do I let my next client know that we’re running late (and hope that they haven’t scheduled their afternoon tightly so that they are able to accommodate a delay)?

My mind raced all night prior to & morning of the session, concerned that we were going to miss our midday shoot if anything went wrong. Plus, I couldn’t figure out how we were going to explain What On Earth we were doing in the middle of nowhere with all this gear when the dogsled carrying Kyle & Jennifer showed up. If we were, indeed, given a snowmobile, we could pass ourselves off as shooting Weber Canyon for a magazine, but if were going to be dropped off out there, the scenario was simply too random & obvious to be discrete or subtle about ourselves.

Day of, the drive out to Weber Canyon was spectacular. The morning was entirely cooperative with weather & traffic & not-getting-lost & all those other concerns that plague the minds of photogs before a shoot. We arrive a half hour earlier than we were supposed to (a full hour before the couple was due to arrive) and absolutely loved meeting the Luna Lobos team and the couple’s sled-driver-to-be, Greg (like, super nice & fascinating people). But, yes, as I expected, we weren’t going to be gifted a snowmobile for the morning. In fact, Greg indicated that the snowmobile only had room for one of us because a driver would be taking ‘the photographer’ out to the turnaround location.

Man, I hate being right about stuff.

“But the couple paid for the two of us to cover the session, so should we go out in shifts?” I’m all for compromise and safety, and ultimately I will defer to Greg’s expertise. But I too have a job to do, and I want to make this work as best I can. V & I both had to go out.

After a little discussion, we luckily figured out all three of us could smush onto the back of the snowmobile if we left a bunch of gear in the car. Which was totally fine, but we were without bells & whistles (like, no macro lens for the uber detail shots of the ring, or no reflector for what was aiming to be a very bright morning). We took what was on our backs and loaded up. Sonia, our driver, turned her head toward me as we three were pelvis-to-pelvis, knee-to-knee, and chest-to-chest. “Are you comfortable?” she hollered. “Cuz it’s a 45 minute ride.”

With that, we were off. It was glorious — breathtaking with the type of amazingness that makes you feel alive. And, also, windy/cold since it was entirely in the shadow of the mountains at 9.30am on one of the shortest days of the year. My knees were locked in the same exact 90 degree angle for the entire ride, so I’m hoping they don’t buckle when the three of us begin the contortionist act that will be getting off the machine.

We were almost at the turning point when Sonia stopped the snowmobile.

“Uh oh.”

I glanced around her. “What, it’s not packed down?” Indeed, at a certain point, the tracks of vehicles we’d been riding on ended, and there were feet of fresh snow ahead. We were heavy on that snowmobile and it looked like we had to approach the path uphill with no chance to catch momentum.

“Yeah. Okay, I’m just going to go.”

“Okay,” I swallowed. And we chugged along.

We got to the turnaround spot and hopped off. Snow mid-calf (deeper if I accidentally walked off the path, which, since you couldn’t see it, happened often), and my cameras (which I was wearing on my Holdfast Moneymaker harness) landed smack in the powder every time I bent down to explore different shooting angles. With that much untouched snow, walking a mere fifteen feet felt like we were wading through quicksand. Sonia got back on the snowmobile, revved the engine, and said she was going to drive around a bit, packing down the snow (at least, that’s what I thought she said). As she peeled off, I looked around. There were sizable animal tracks to my right, nowhere to sit (anywhere), and, to my left, V. For the first time that day, I realized what he was wearing.

“You look kinda ridiculous. Did you wake up & decide to wear all the colors of the rainbow? Plus, with a bright red hat that says ‘Canon,’ you *think* she might suspect that we’re photographers?” We’d gotten various Canon swag at the last Sundance Film Festival, when we shot for Canon, and I know V’s proud of it (the hat, being hired by Canon, etc) but the beanie had to go.

We spent about twenty minutes poking around the area, looking for the best spot to suggest to Kyle for the proposal based on light, when I realized Sonia had never come back.

Another 20 minutes, no Sonia. I’m worried for her, actually. But also wondering if there was a misunderstanding. Had she dropped us off and returned to the launch site? I start wondering how we’re going to get back.

Ten minutes after that, I look at V. We’ve basically been standing in the same spots for 45 minutes each, in silence for the most part, occasionally picking new places for the proposal since the sun was rising in the sky & changing the light in previously selected spots.

“I can’t feel my feet,” I say to V. “I can’t feel my hands or my feet or my face,” he replies. We’re standing about 20ft apart from one another, occasionally glancing in one another’s direction.

Sonia comes bursting through the path about 40 ft away from me. “The snowmobile broke down!”

“Are you okay?” I ask her.

“Yeah, yeah. I just wanted to let you know — I’m going back there to try to get it to work.” And off she goes again.

Hmmmm.

A lot more silence. And, equally concerning, no hint of our clients arriving.

Another 20 minutes of silence, I say to V, “Do you think we’re on Candid Camera? Like, are there cameras in these trees?” In times like these (which, in my line of work, are more frequent than you’d imagine), my mind can lapse into a pseudo-delusional thought process, where I’m wondering if I’ve imagined being hired for this shoot, or if I’d dreamed up this entire situation and am, actually, in a Matrix-esque parallel reality somewhere, at my condo editing yesterday’s family session. It’s like that Twilight Zone episode where that dude was sensory deprived for not too long before he went crazy. Although, maybe a more pressing concern is whether the animal that left those tracks was planning on coming back.

Yet another 20 minutes after that, Sonia rounds the corner gesturing wildly, and we see the dogs, the sled, Kyle, Jennifer, and Greg pulling up. As had been our ‘plan’ (definitely ‘plan’ in quotes, since it’s totally absurd), we pretended at that moment to come out of the woods, like yeti, or like hikers that just *happened* to be backcountry, five miles into the wilderness, without snowshoes or proper winter gear but with crazy expensive cameras. Like, we’d just *happened* to be at that place at that moment despite the unlikelihood of anyone running into anyone else out there. V, in the spirit of the ‘scenario,’ turned to Greg, the sled driver, and asked, ‘oh, hey! Come here often?’ which is something that continues to crack me up every.single.time I think about it.

The rest — the proposal, the part of my job I love the most, the insanely wonderful couple’s celebration — is detailed here. And the snowmobile was okay after all, and we made it back safely (although I had to reschedule a frustrated family’s midday session). But, the nitty gritty? Yeah, that’s what you’re reading right here. We’re so grateful that Kyle found us through the search engine gods, and this shoot is rooted deep in my heart for a million reasons. But when you see the photos, the behind-the-scenes challenges aren’t always obvious. To me, the real story of a moment is in every detail, and the beauty of a memory is the composite of every thought & action that went into creating it.