It started with a facebook post on a roommate housing group for Salt Lake City. Anna and Leah were both moving there in June of 2021 to start new jobs. Leah sent Anna the following message "Hey! I saw your post and I think we'd be a great fit!" Turns out, they were right. All it took was one beer, trivia, and "The Imaginary Team". The rest is history...

We went camping in the Grand Tetons for our anniversary. We had everything planned: yummy campfire dinners, gorgeous hikes, how to effectively deploy bear spray. You know, the essentials. With our bear spray, bear horn, and Anna's opera voice we were ready for anything (well, mainly bear encounters). We arrived at the campsite and started setting up our home for the weekend. Leah looked at Anna and said, "Hey, where are the tent poles, they're not in the bag!" Uh oh. Anna had forgotten to pack the tent poles. After a very uncomfortable night sleeping in the car, we were prepared to leave it in the past and embark on our hikes for the day. Yeah right. Then...Anna's car battery died. Instead of a morning hike, we jumped Anna's car, drove into town, got a new battery and bought a new tent at REI. Ok - we were ready for our hikes! Mother nature had different plans: Rain, rain, and more rain. There was one 4-hour period without rain the whole weekend and we went on our only hike of the weekend to Bradley lake. Leah got down on one knee and proposed to Anna and, of course, Anna said yes through lots of happy tears.

So we're in the Grand Tetons on what should have been a weekend filled with hiking and quality nature time. But it won't stop raining. We decided to spend our last day in Jackson Hole, Wyoming to take shelter and see if we could find any cool engagement rings. We headed into town, grabbed a coffee, and discovered that there are approximately 25 jewelry stores in this tiny park town. We went from one to the next, to the next, to the next, finding lots of beautiful rings, but none that were really *us*. We were getting tired and decided to call it quits after one final shop. Enter Dan Shelley. An elderly man who graduated from Marquette University and moved to Jackson Hole Wyoming 40 years ago with $800. He had dreams of opening a jewelry store, found a store front to rent for $400, and he's been there ever since. We walked into his shop and Anna saw her dream ring. Literally the ring that she had put on her Pinterest board years ago. While Anna was trying hers on, Leah spotted the coolest ring with intricate carvings made to look like an Aspen tree (which just happened to pave the trail on our proposal hike). The perfect souvenirs!