Rula + Brandon's Helicopter Engagement Session | Adventure Portraits in Alaska
Alaska Helicopter Engagement Session | The Hearnes
Glacier Landing + Mountain Overlook + Iceberg Beach
Brandon and Rula’s session was a long time coming, but it ended up being so much fun and absolutely worth waiting (and postponing, and re-scheduling) for! They had originally booked us for their elopement in Yosemite in 2020, but when COVID took everyone by surprise, we made sure to communicate a lot of different options with our booked couples so they didn’t feel like they’d be screwed over due to travel restrictions, or even like they were being forced to go through with something they didn’t feel safe going through with. Brandon and Rula made the decision to postpone their elopement to a later date when their families could safely get together, and instead opted to change their booking with us to an adventure session! We all ended up waiting for a little bit to nail down a date/location for their session until travel was more stable, and in the end they decided to meet us out in Alaska this year once we were all vaccinated and felt comfortable with all the details. It’s wild to me how much has changed since our original e-mails, but the way this day together ended up truly feels like how it was meant to be all along.
By the time we met up, we felt like old friends (especially after communicating and following each other on social media for almost two years!!) and they even surprised us with an adorable fleece Patagonia jacket as a gift for our baby coming in December ❤️ So dang sweet. We chose to charter a helicopter for their session so they could get the full Alaskan experience and a variety of landscapes in just one afternoon. It was honestly mind-blowing how much we’d seen and experienced by the time we landed back at the airport that evening. Our first landing was on a huge glacier surrounded by mountains. We landed by a big moulin that had been a deep pool just a few weeks before, but had since drained out of a new crevasse that opened up in the side. One of the things we love most about glaciers is how dynamic they are, no two visits are the same even if you go back to the same spots! It’s incredible to see how much the landscape changes seasonally, and especially when we get to visit the same areas over multiple years. After exploring the glacier, we flew up to a gorgeous high alpine ridge overlooking the bay (you can actually see the toe of our glacier in some of the photos!). This area was completely surrounded by waterfalls, mountains, reflective ponds, and the soft tundra was so incredible to explore.
For our last stop, we flew over a huge pass to one of the biggest glaciers in the area. This last glacier is a tide water glacier and its terminus is over a mile of 200+ foot walls of ice that are constantly calving giant icebergs into the bay. Some of the bergs are bigger than houses! But what we love about this unique spot is that when the tide gets low, the bay is surrounded by these small black sand beaches and some of the floating bergs end up beached up on the land! It’s pretty much only accessible by helicopter or boat, and only like this for a couple of hours each day, so it’s such a treat to get to land and explore this temporary landscape. We got super lucky with a golden, hazy sunset while we walked around the muddy beach looking at all the icebergs. The small section of glacier closest to us even had a pretty significant calving event while we were there, it was so cool to see up close in a safe vantage point!
Rula and Brandon had never been anywhere like this before, and it was so fun to have them trust us completely with the plan and then see them fall in love with these landscapes and experiences too!
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The Hearnes Adventure Photography is run by Abbi and Callen Hearne, a husband & wife elopement wedding photography (and planning!) team with a major emphasis on adventure.
We’ve completely built our life around adventures in beautiful places, and one of our greatest joys is sharing the adventure with our couples. We lived on the road full time for a few years and then fell in love with a cozy house in the desert of Moab, Utah; our favorite place throughout all of our travels. We still spend about half of the year living on the road, traveling to more favorites like Alaska, throughout the American West, and beyond.
We use our extensive experience and expertise in the outdoors to plan unforgettable custom elopement days for every couple. We usually work with couples to plan everything from their elopement location down to the vendors they’ll work with and the timeline of the day(s) we’ll spend together. We always shoot together and we have kept things intentionally small, working with a limited amount of couples each year such that we can bring our full value to every single planning email, phone call, and of course, elopement day!
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