Michael & Cayla's Biltmore Lagoon Proposal

The Biltmore Lagoon might be the best kept secret on the whole Biltmore Estate. While the crowds gather on the esplanade, the lagoon sits quietly on the far side of the property, a still sheet of water on the French Broad side with Biltmore House floating above the treeline like something out of a storybook. It is one of my favorite proposal spots in all of Asheville, and last night it delivered one of my favorite sessions of the year.

Michael and Cayla are both in the Air Force, currently serving on opposite sides of the country. He is stationed in Idaho and she is here in North Carolina, so their relationship runs on time zones, phone calls, and the kind of commitment that distance cannot touch. He told me one of his favorite memories is flying over Yellowstone. She told me her favorite part of her work is taking care of people. When Michael got the chance to be in the mountains with her, he was not going to waste it.

This was one of our mini proposal sessions, which means everything happens right around the proposal spot itself, no touring the whole estate. But this evening came with two surprises I have to tell you about. One of them waddled straight into the session, and I promise you have never seen anything like it in a proposal gallery before. The other one was a field of gold waiting for us at the end.

Julie handled the coordination with Michael ahead of time, and the plan worked like it always does. A quiet stretch of the lagoon trail, Biltmore House standing watch across the water, and me pretending to photograph the scenery until the exact right moment. When Michael went down on one knee, Cayla's hands went straight to her face, and everything after that was pure celebration.

The beauty of a mini session at the lagoon is that you do not need to go anywhere. The wooded trail, the water's edge, and the gravel path gave us everything: lifts, dips, twirls, and that ring held up to the light about a dozen different ways. These two have an ease with each other that you only see in couples who have done the hard work of loving someone from far away.

Now for the party crashers I promised. Halfway through the session, two large goslings came marching up the bank and joined us like they had been on the shot list all along. Julie and I have spent our whole lives as naturalists, so I recognized them immediately, and I had to do a double take. These are swan goose goslings, a species that is endangered in its native range on the other side of the planet. You should not see them on a lagoon in North Carolina. The best theory is that they escaped from a private collection somewhere, because they were astonishingly tame, walking right up to us and posing beside the couple like seasoned professionals. In 750 plus proposals, I have never had a rarer pair of witnesses.