I walked towards a round table in the simple, wood-paneled employee dining hall. Through the large windows, newly green aspen leaves trembled in the wind and the rocky overlook of Mt. Healy stood proudly against the swirling gray sky. A light misty drizzle dotted the glass. Earlier in the day, a mother moose had been seen just outside this building, her young calf scooting along after her as they navigated the employee housing area just a half mile away from the Denali Park Visitor Center. I slid my plastic plate onto the table and sat down. A trio of young bus drivers in the park had invited me to sit with them as I’d scanned the dining hall for any familiar faces, only having been in the park for three days. Truthfully, I didn’t remember meeting Danny in my short time in the park, but I appreciated the offer as he shouted “Lindsey!” from across the room and beckoned me over to the table with a waving hand.

I don’t remember what we talked about, my college-kid-self and the three 30-something bus drivers, but I do remember that we joked and talked together easily, and I started to feel more at home. It wasn’t long before Danny invited another new employee to our table and the chair to my right was pulled out. I looked up to see a tall young man with a full head of brown hair and bright blue eyes. He had a scruff of a beard and a quick smile. He introduced himself as John.

John had not been in the park long before me, only three weeks into his first summer in Denali. I shared with the table that I had plans to head next door to a scientific talk about bird migration at the Murie Science and Learning Center where I worked during the day. John said he’d like to join me. We walked over together after dinner, settling into the small classroom filled with researchers, local guides, and park bus drivers. We learned about the amazing journeys that birds take to travel to the subarctic ecosystems we now found ourselves in and how the park researchers were learning more about them. John and I spent the hours afterwards in the midnight sun walking the front country trails and talking until our throats were dry and our eyes were heavy. It had been some time since I’d been able to talk to someone new so effortlessly.

We saw each other in passing as the days slipped by. A few weeks later, after another science lecture, we stood outside my cabin, still stuck mid-conversation. John looked around and asked, “Do you want to walk while we talk?”

We headed south past the bus yard, up a gravel road and onto a grown-in service road we discovered. We talked about school and future dreams. He told me I was good at asking questions.

The farther up we began to climb, the more moose scat I began to see, piles of small brown nuggets on the ground, and we joked about a moose living nearby. Suddenly John stopped and grabbed my arm, pulling me closer. As we peered through the trees, a moose cow and calf were enjoying their willow leaf dinner less than 30 feet away, stripping the leaves from the branches as they worked vertically up and down the shrubs. We watched in silent awe for a few minutes before turning around and heading back the way we came.

“For the first time in my life,” I wrote in my journal a few weeks later, “I think I’m in love.”

John later told me that it’d been hard not to kiss me that day.

Our relationship hasn’t always been easy, but in the beginning, it was the kind of love you read stories about. Passionate, honest, adventurous, and goofy, it was everything I’d hoped for in a love founded by friendship. Late nights enjoying the midnight sun, hands held under the bar’s high top tables, long walks with my adopted park sled dog, Lucor. He told me only half jokingly that my blue eyes looked like glacial pools. I thought it might be the best summer of my life.

At the end of that first summer, an initial parting as friends in Alaska soon turned into nine months of long distance while I returned to Minnesota to finish my college degree. Late nights hunched over my phone screen on video calls in our apartment hallway and mentally adjusting to a two-hour time difference was the norm. Visits to California, one in October and another in November, introduced me to his family, and he to mine when he came to Minnesota in December and January. I remember that the months apart felt like agony, like my heart was living outside of my chest. While I was in Tanzania on a college safari in January, we weren’t able to speak for 3 weeks.

In the spring we didn’t see each other for four months, until he picked me up at the Anchorage airport for our second Denali summer. Reunions with mutual friends in the park made the start of the summer even sweeter, and it ended with us taking our first long road trip together from Alaska to California. John taught me how to drive a stick shift car so I could contribute to the miles of Canadian wilderness that swept by us each day.

Our lives and our relationship continued to flow, twisting and turning but always continuing forward. We spent six weeks on the road in the fall of 2017, exploring the Yukon, Banff, Montana, Yellowstone, Idaho, Oregon, and California; moved to Aspen, Colorado that same winter; journeyed north of the Arctic Circle to Utqiagvik, Alaska to jump in the Arctic Ocean on John’s 30th birthday; and spent another off-season traveling to New Zealand for 10 weeks and Hawaii, too. Constant motion was our only constant.

It’s easy for me to forget that though these years were easy, and in many ways magical, they also tested us. We oscillated between spending weeks and months 2,000 miles apart, to having zero personal space for weeks on end in a 2000 Subaru outback that was packed to the ceiling. All of the extremes were tested, and occasionally, tensions did run high. I’ll never forget one of our arguments in New Zealand, a twelve round boxing match while we drove through beautiful mountain scenery. It was then that I learned that car rides are great for conversations and discussions, but arguments… not so much.

That particular trip progressed, and we worked through our conflicts. We had to—we were stuck in a mini-van converted camper van in another country together. As the days passed we laughed more and sat in silence less. By the end of the trip it was like we were reliving our first summer together. Since I was staying a week later than him, I dropped John off at the airport, and on my ride back to the hotel he texted me: “Even though it’s had its ups and downs, this is the most daring trip I’ve ever taken and I’m so glad I did it with you.”

When I got home to Duluth, we had a phone call and talked about all of the things we felt went wrong, how we could fix them in the future, and how we each promised to improve. I’m a little in awe of my 24-year-old self, not realizing at the time the intention that I was putting into our relationship to make it stronger. It was the foundation we needed, and I still have the notes we shared, tucked into whatever journal I was working through at the time.

We finally landed in Denali again for our fourth and final summer. It was another season full of scenic hikes, wildlife sightings, backcountry campsites, and front-country adventures with our friends. Leaving in September without plans to return the following summer was a challenging decision for us both, and one I was grateful John was willing to embark with me on—a move to the Midwest so I could attend graduate school in environmental conservation.

Three months after moving, a global pandemic shut down our new and exciting world in the city. I worked long days at the grocery co-op while we struggled to stay afloat emotionally and financially. I started graduate school, and therapy. Though we’d traveled together endlessly, sharing the same apartment for months on end—with the added pressure cooker that was COVID-19—proved to be challenging still. Many more conversations pushed us to grow for and with each other as we learned about our own preferences for cleanliness, quality time, decorating, and decision making. We were still learning each other’s languages.

Once I finished school and the pandemic lessened, we started to talk about our future more, and we found ways to continue to travel. We camped in the summer and winter in the Boundary Waters, reunited with friends in Idaho, snorkeled with family in St. Lucia, went whale watching in Massachusetts, and journeyed back to Alaska. Traveling back to Denali in the summer of 2022 (for the first time since we lived there in 2019) helped me realize that while Denali was and would always be special to me—special to us—it was not my home. John was my home. As much as I hold Denali in my heart as a place that has shaped the person that I am today—and it has done so—it dawned on me that I’d only ever experienced three days in Denali without knowing John. Three days after I arrived in the park, he sat down next to me in that dining hall and the path that I now believe we were meant to take together blazed in front of us as clearly as the Denali Park Road.

Seven years to the day later, John pulled out a ring on our camping trip to Point Beach State Forest on the sandy shores of Lake Michigan. Our engagement may not come as a surprise to many—we’ve been together seven years, for goodness’ sake!—but it is something that we have been intentionally working toward for some time. In January we attended a full weekend relationship workshop featuring the research by Drs. Julie & John Gottman, and we gained even more tools for connection and conflict resolution. Even after so much time together, it has changed the way we look at and treat our relationship. The Gottmans tell us it is not the grand gestures and expensive vacations, but rather the small moments every day, that keep love going.

To John and I, our story—with so much of that story being written in Denali—serves as a reminder for who we are and what we want to be together. It’s no wonder we had the skyline of Denali and the Alaska range, as viewed from Wonder Lake, engraved into my ring. During our time in Denali, we went on many backpacking trips in the park, traversing glaciers and brushy mountainsides, fording glacial rivers and facing down grizzly bears and mother moose. We’ve gazed up at the dancing northern lights in wonder, spent more nights in a tent together than I can count, and have driven more than 25,000 miles in the car together. We’ve seen and done too many wonderful things to be contained here on a single page.

While we may not be living in Alaska right now, I won’t say that we never will again, and the magic and power that it holds over us will stay in our hearts forever.

To John: may we never forget or take for granted the things we’ve experienced, the sights we’ve seen, or the challenges we have overcome. Let them guide us as we continue navigating this beautiful and confusing world, together. I love you.