Ashley & Michael

Mike and I grew up about eight miles apart in southeastern Washington, but we went to different high schools and played different sports growing up, so our paths didn’t cross until 2016. Mike had already graduated college and I was entering my senior year of college, but we were both working on getting experience hours to apply to physical therapy school. The day we met, I immediately went home and told my mom there was a cute guy at the physical therapy clinic. Fast forward to New Years Eve of that year, we had our first date where we went skiing, which resulted in me taking Mike into the backcountry and both of us falling into a tree (LOL). Luckily that didn’t scare Mike at all, and we’ve talked to each other every day since then. We made it through three years of having a long-distance relationship during physical therapy school as Mike went to school in California and I was Virginia. We finished graduate school in 2020, and have been working in Montana since then. After 4.5 years of dating, Mike proposed in Glacier National Park, and we got married a year later!

None of our family is local to Montana, so our wedding, in a way, turned into a destination wedding for most of our guests. Our families were able to turn the wedding into a mini-vacation and see the area that we are absolutely in love with.

My advice to other brides planning their wedding is to be yourself and make decisions based on what is important to you. There’s nothing better than getting married in Big Sky Country!