Jamie and David Lamb prepare for marriage’s peaks and valleys by first climbing a mountain to tie the knot
By Carlo Wolff
John Lloyd Photography
To hear Jamie and David Lamb evoke their wedding is to hear happiness. To watch the YouTube video of the event and see their wedding pictures is to be dazzled. Call their wedding an “adventure wedding.” Call it an “extreme wedding.” Call it fantastic.
Jamie and David exchanged vows – and rings – last July 22, about 100 feet shy of the peak of The Chief, aka the Squamish Chief. It’s a granite monolith some 2,300 feet high next to the town of Stawamus in British Columbia. The day was overcast but dry. It was very long. The two say it was wonderful.
“It was harder than we thought,” Jamie says of the climb she and David made, tethered to each other over more nine hours.
Scott Alperin
She rhapsodizes about the scenery. “It’s also just beautiful. It overlooks water that is half ocean and half glacial melt, so it’s an incredible color. It’s stunning.”
Jamie is 29, David 33. Jamie grew up in Pepper Pike and graduated from Hawken School in Gates Mills. Until she left the area for Colorado in 2003, she attended Anshe Chesed Fairmount Temple in Beachwood three days a week.
Jamie, the more experienced climber of the pair, is the daughter of Scott and Leslie Alperin of Mayfield Heights, and David, a professional athlete who now works for Edward Jones, is the son of Larry and Becky Lamb of Steamboat Springs, Colo. Getting to their wedding perfectly symbolized the marriage itself. It also augured well for their life together.
“It was the best day ever,” Jamie recalls from Steamboat Springs, where she’s a dietitian and Realtor and David is a financial consultant. “It was just perfect.”
Jamie got the idea from “some friends who created a company based around adventure weddings and they made a fake video of people getting married rock climbing and the video made me cry, I loved it so much.
“Some girls grow up imagining themselves in a white dress, with a big extravagant wedding, and I’ve always been a little bit different. I never wanted that. Never. I knew in my heart that this is the essence of life. We are active, we like to play, we like challenges, and I knew that this would be the most perfect way for us to celebrate our vows. We don’t need a whole audience of people. It’s just about us.”
Jamie wore a makeshift wedding dress, David a makeshift tuxedo. He left the yarmulke Jamie’s cousins made for him behind (he wore it at the more formal recreation of the event the following day at nearby Shannon Falls).
The couple documented the whole process, climbing The Chief with four guides, a videographer, a still photographer, and Pep Fujas, an old skiing buddy of David’s. It was the officiant Pep who smashed the glass at the top; he had shoes on, while the couple was barefoot.
The ascent itself was challenging. So was getting everyone on board. There was never any doubt in Jamie’s mind, however; she always envisioned the climb as the perfect representation of her relationship with David. But there was resistance from both families, and David, less experienced in mountaineering, had to be brought along.
Initially, when Jamie proposed the mountaintop wedding, David balked, saying he preferred a traditional nuptial. But Jamie stood firm, and eventually, everyone went along. While the parents stayed at the foot of the mountain, capturing the action on cameras with telephoto lenses, the joyous atmosphere was all around.
“I think the most beautiful thing was that despite opposition from many interested parties, it was done the way we wanted it,” says David. “It was for us and about us and about the love of people and it wasn’t about the show, about the glitz and the glamour and the friends. It was about us tying the knot, saying ‘I do’ to one another without the headache and distractions of all the little things that come with a wedding.
“Leading up to it, the beauty was that we had to do a sport in which we were outside, active, communicating – and bigger than anything, trusting one another every time we went to climb. When you climb, you have to have full faith in your partner, so what better theme to abide by leading up to a marriage than to do something like that?”
“Had we done it without guides we would have barely seen each other, because I would have climbed a pitch (a length between two points of rope), he would have climbed a pitch, and we wouldn’t really have been together,” says Jamie. “But this way we got to be together all day, just the two of us.”
“It was incredible,” says David, a University of Denver national champion skier whose competitive career ended with concussions as a member of the U.S. Ski Cross Team. “Just accomplishing the climb itself is a big deal; it’s one of the most iconic climbs in the world. Just to go there and do something that was a little bit outside of our wheelhouse was a treat. To top that with saying ‘I do’ 2,000 feet above the ocean was a real treat, the jewel that really capped it all off.
“When you expand your boundaries and live on the outer peripheries of what you’re capable of, you bring to fruition the greatest highs that a person could ever experience but you have to accept the fact that you pay to play and you will very much experience the other end of that spectrum as well,” he adds. “As a result, I will never shy away from something like what we did with our wedding. This was Jamie’s idea, and like I said, I’d never done anything like that, so the idea of doing something like this seemed intimidating, but I was fully willing to tackle it and take it head-on. I wish I could verbalize the emotions at the top of that; just doing that was sensational, and getting to marry my best friend and having that celebration was magical.”
Video: Encompass Films
John Lloyd Photography