On Top of a Mountain

For those of you wondering how I proposed to my beautiful fiancé, here is how the story goes...

I bought the ring at the end of April. It was laborious process, one that every man should have to go through so that they appreciate the fact that they only have to do this once as long as they faithfully honor the commitment behind this incredibly expensive purchase. I was seeking many different ideas of ways to propose to Jacqueline, when finally I figured the best way would be to go to a place that was very important to the two of us, Great Basin. We had spent an amazing weekend there a year previous, so we decided to head on up again.

This time I picked a more remote section of the park hoping to get away from any sort of crowds. I was successful. When I got up to the trailhead in the Snake Creek section of the park, we were the only ones there.
We started our extremely difficult hike to a lake far, far away. Actually it was only 3.7 miles away, but 2400 feet uphill. I was not exactly in what you would call the best shape of my life. I was still recovering from my bad ankle injury. This was actually the first trip I was able to take on my ankle other than for work. We were both rather winded the entire hike up. Eventually we made it to our destination, which was Johnson Lake for the night. 

The lake was beautiful, resting peacefully under Pyramid Peak rising with its boulder sized scree slopes above. We spent the afternoon doing various activies: sleeping, cribbage, taking dips in the lake, as you can see the small scale silhouette of Jacqueline in the photo above. I was proud of Jacqueline as it took some coaxing to get her into the lake, for as my face shows, it was not the warmest of lakes. The history of the lake makes it even more interesting as there was a rather productive tungsten mine above the lake until the cable works, still visibly in shambles, were destroyed by an avalanche. We spent the evening, eating, playing hangman, playing cards, and then eventually sleeping and enjoying the cool mountain air away from our hot desert home.
The next day we awoke with the rising sun. I got Jacqueline going pretty quickly and we headed up the "trail" to the pass between Johnson Lake and Baker Lake we visited last year. The trail became steeper and rougher the higher we climbed. Finally near the end, it got a bit sketchy. There was snow over the trail in the only safe place to go. I had to blaze a trail and lure Jacqueline to attempt the same way. Soon we had reached the pass.

From there I could see that the summit was only a boulder hopping climb away. We continued our way up and both of us did well considering how winded we could have been heading to our eventual elevation of 11,926 feet. Meanwhile little does Jacqueline know that as I am walking up to the summit I am thinking, well, I hope I can pull this off. Inside my pack, hidden for the duration of the time out in Utah and then on the backpack is the beautiful diamond ring I bought for Jacqueline. I had my strategy planned out and now it was time for me to execute it.
This is the picture I took of Jacqueline right before I proposed.

 I said stand over there and I will take your picture. After the picture, I said that she should take my picture. In the camera case, instead of a camera, I got the ring case. When she opened it up, the largest smile appeared on her face. I walked back to her, told her how much I was in love with her and how happy I would be if she would spend the rest of her life with me. She said yes and thus the next step began. We still had to continue our way down the mountain to make sure that the happily ever after had its opportunity. We scrambled down to the pass which was the easy part. There was a couple there that we chatted with, but did not tell them we just got engaged. It would have been hard to tell someone who did not know us first the incredible news. As we came off the pass, the lake below us looked so small.

We still had to make the traverse across the snowed out trail. We did well, as Jacqueline seems to be willing to do just about anything if I do it first. I even took a side trip up to see the mine (not very impressive). We made it back to camp where I took one more good dip in the freezing lake. Then we headed down the hill and back to the truck where home meant sharing the wonderfully exciting news with our family and friends.