2/3 – “I hurt myself on Denali. And everything I wanted to do beyond Denali was more time away from him. It took me 50 years to find him, and I wasn’t willing to do that anymore. So, we have a rule…no more than 8 miles round trip and because of my injury, I can’t do more than about 20 pounds. So, we can’t backpack anymore, but we hike.” –Stephanie, Montana
Photo by Jessica Morgan
1/3 – “We met on the internet in 2004 and at the time, I had just gone through a divorce and was going to a counselor, and I was in the process of re-inventing myself. I met her, she was a great fit for my reinvention…When I met her, she was headed for Elbrus…Elbrus is the tallest mountain in Europe. And then, shortly after that, she climbed Denali. She already did Kilimanjaro. So that was pretty exciting for me because I’d never met a woman like [her] before.” –Michael, Montana
Photo by Jessica Morgan
“I felt a rush of energy go through me, almost as if time was standing still and it was just us two on the planet. Looking into the woman’s eyes of whom I grew to love so much, meeting her as an adolescent boy to being a young man and understanding how far we have come as well as changed. It’s crazy, a paragraph I couldn’t put into words… Her soul is beautiful and it’s contagious. Just being able to look at her, hold her hands and tell her how much I love her,and how we most definitely will grow old together was a rare, special moment. Society is different nowadays but her and I will stay true to the origins of marriage because we won’t conform to what the statistics say about marriage. I understood that as I asked her to marry me.” – Topher, Spokane
Photo by Clare Pursch
“They said, ‘We love you. We can’t see you keep doing this. You know, you’re going to end up in the grave.’ And my wife…we’ve been married 25 years, she kept hanging on, hoping for the man she married to come back.” – Steve, Men’s Recovery