It began as many good stories often do: with Mark being an idiot. In August, 2021 Mark had just gotten back to Duluth after a five month road trip and resolved to put some effort into dating. He created a Bumble profile and started swiping. Leah was on Bumble because it seemed like the least creepy of the online dating apps. It didn’t take long for them to come across each other’s profiles. Since they knew of each other, having some mutual friends and interests, they each swiped right but the timing was a little off. Mark, being an idiot, realized he was leaving the next day for a BWCA trip (Saganaga to Lake Superior) and was going to be off the grid for 5 days. Bumble’s rules are that if you ‘match’, the lady gets to initiate the conversation, and the guy only has 24 hours to respond or you are never able to contact her again. Ever. No exceptions. When Mark realized this, he actually tried to delete and deactivate his profile hoping to avoid the now obvious mess he had created for himself. But, she got a notification that they matched. So she sent the best pick-up line in history and got… crickets. Assuming he had just ghosted her, she moved on. (Jerk!) Coming out of the Boundary Waters, Mark had an email notification that Leah had sent him a message and to log in to Bumble to see it. When he did, he just got a notice that the message had expired and he could never ever, ever contact her again. The story could have ended there, but thanks to the wonders of the internet, they had already followed each other on Instagram some months earlier. So he apologetically slid into her DMs on Instagram the old fashioned way. She very generously gave him a pass and they started chatting. The conversation went well, covering important points such as canoe trips and foster dogs. About a week later they agreed to meet at Caribou Falls and go for a hike. The Greenwood fire was burning near Isabella at the time and smoking out the North Shore so it was strangely vacant, but the wind cooperated for a hike and they ended up having the North Shore to themselves. While chatting and throwing sticks for Sig to fetch beneath the falls, Mark told Leah he had one more paycheck before being unemployed (again) and was planning to head to Alaska in a few months. Ignoring all the red flags, she instead invited herself to tag along on the Alaska trip in the spring, which she certainly did.