Mountainside Engagement Session // Shenandoah National Park // Morgan + Servando
Morgan and Servando (aka Vando) recently moved to Wilson, North Carolina from Iowa so that Vando could coach at a local college and Morgan could start her career as an occupational therapist. Morgan and Vando met while attending college in Iowa at St. Ambrose University while Morgan was playing basketball and Vando was playing football for the university. They started dating in 2016 and have been together for over 5 years!
Vando proposed to Morgan on May 8, 2021. Not too much after their 5 year anniversary in February. Vando took Morgan down to the Centennial Bridge in Davenport, Iowa to view the bridge at sunset and to take some photos when he surprised her by getting on one knee and popping the question! Vando even brought along a videographer to catch the whole thing! You can check out their proposal video on YouTube by Mark Beno of Lightning Productions Co. by clicking here: Morgan + Servando's Proposal Video. It’s definitely a tear jerker!
Morgan found me on Google and reached out to me back in July for their engagement session. We were originally planning their engagement session for around Raleigh, but Shenandoah National Park has been on my bucket list so I slid it in the list of location recommendations hoping that they’d be down for a little weekend trip out to the park and they were! I always give my clients a little deal if they choose one of my bucket list locations, so check out all of the places that I’m dying to shoot here: Bucket List Locations.
I sent Morgan and Vando a list of several locations in Shenandoah with some absolutely INSANE views! We decided on one of the more popular hikes in the park - Bearfence Rock Scramble. It’s a little over a half mile to the view point and took us about 25 minutes to reach it and once we made it to the top with a minor rock climbing experience on the way up, the view was absolutely INCREDIBLE. Pictures of this place absolutely don’t do it justice. If you’re ever in the park, I highly recommend this hike to be on your list!
I do have to do a bit of backtracking now though. Before getting into the park, Morgan texted me letting me know that she and Vando ran into some car trouble not far from their hotel and needed a ride into the park. Vando had run over a piece of a tire on the interstate and a piece of Morgan’s car was scraping the ground that needed to be re-attached. Since we didn’t have much time before the shoot for them to fix it, we made a little detour to go pick them up so they wouldn’t have to catch an Uber from their hotel to their session. As an avid Crime Junkies listener, you always have those scenarios in the back of your mind. Which, of course we all made jokes about in the car on the way to the park as well as discussing all of our troubles with cars, life in North Carolina, and just getting to know one another!
We spent our time at the viewpoint of the trail just taking in the amazing scenery and capturing Morgan and Vando’s unconditional love! At the end of our session, we could see some dark clouds rolling in so we made our way back to the car. And just in time too! Once we were out of the park, it started to downpour! It was definitely a quiet ride back while we were all listening to the rain hit our windshield and the thunder rolling through the clouds, watching the lighting strike across the sky and the insane winds blowing the trees every which way.
It was such an eventful evening, that’s for sure! But, we all made it back safely and some absolutely GORGEOUS photos came out of the trip!
