Well, rabid bobcat or no rabid bobcat, Ryan and I finally got around to getting our engagement photos taken.
(There was a rabid bobcat.)
Story time!
Ryan and I drove down the hill last week for our scheduled engagement photo session with our wedding photographer, Maya Papaya.
If you’re looking for a wedding photographer, we can’t recommend her enough!
She’s basically sunshine in human form.
Anyway…
I don’t have Instagram to share these photos anymore, so now I’m dumping them all here, along with my rabid bobcat story.
Ryan and I decided pretty early on that we wanted to have our engagement photos done in the Superstitions. While we’re obviously quite biased in our (correct) opinion that northern Arizona is superior to southern Arizona, we knew that with it being winter, weather conditions were a little too unpredictable up here to schedule engagement photos.
Maya is Phoenix-based, so we ran the risk of either a. having gross snow-less weather where everything is muddy and dead, or b. having beautiful snowy weather that, unfortunately, shuts down all the roads.
We decided to play it safe and schedule our engagement photo session down in the Superstitions — specifically, at the Tonto National Forest’s Peralta Trailhead.
The Superstitions mean a lot to the two of us! We backpack together there just about every winter we’re able.
We booked our weekday sunset session with Maya, took the day off work, and started preparing.
For me, that meant getting a hair cut, picking out outfits, scheduling my makeup trial for a few hours beforehand, getting my nails done, my eyebrows waxed… etc. etc.
For Ryan, that meant gassing up the truck and taking Ochi in for a grooming appointment.
We hit the road for our sunset appointment at about 1 p.m., and we made it to our meeting location with Maya at about 4 p.m.
We pulled up to the trailhead, parked, got out of our vehicles and…
…immediately noticed about eight different law enforcement vehicles from both the Forest Service and Arizona Game & Fish Department.
We immediately kinda started panicking.
I cannot even begin to express how much I did not want to redo all the hair, nails, driving, grooming, etc. to come back and attempt this all another day.
We hesitantly started approaching the trailhead from the parking lot, and one of the law enforcement officers stopped us to ask what we were doing, where we were going, if we were going to keep our dog on leash, etc.
After a quick conversation, we found out that apparently a rabid bobcat attacked three hikers a mile off the trailhead.
What. WHAAAATTTTTT.
Luckily, the officer was really nice. After we assured him we would keep Ochi on his leash (we were holding two leashes — his fancy photo leash and his everyday rugged leash) and wouldn’t venture off the trailhead (we pointed at our footwear), he let us go ahead with our photo session.
Which is great! Because, like I said — I really didn’t want to redo all the makeup/ hair/ packing/ driving.
And I also really didn’t want to be the “well-actually-let-me-see-that-signed-and-posted-forest-order” person.
So, everything ended up working out perfectly! With zero feral bobcats.
We spent about an hour wandering around the trailhead, while Maya snapped a series of both planned and candid photos.
She did a great job giving us conversation prompts to keep things natural.
I’m honestly surprised she got as many decent photos as she got since I feel like we were laughing the entire time.
We actually didn’t even find out until the next day that there had been a closure in place! Ryan’s parents had been at the trailhead with us to bribe Ochi with treats and to hold onto him while we had our photos taken. They were interested in what was going on with the heavy officer presence, so they did some research and texted us about the trailhead closure the next morning.
We had no idea a closure was actually in place, so we’re incredibly grateful to both the Forest Service and Game & Fish officers for letting us proceed with our photos!
We’ll have our full gallery of photos in a few months, but right now we’re so happy with how our little sneak peek turned out.
Thank you so much Maya!
