Blake Barclay Hogge was nearly a decade into his career as a wedding photographer in 2021 when despondence came for him.
“I wouldn’t say ‘envy’ is the right word,” he said, for the feeling that tugged at him while shooting couples who looked deliriously in love. But “it was getting to the point where I was just, like, there’s so many factors not working in my favor. What if this doesn’t happen for me?”
Five years later, when he married Trystan Michael Nickovich in the backyard of his parents’ home in Alpine, Utah, factors once again were not in his favor. But the heartache this time was of a less lonely variety. On their wedding day, “we all took a deep breath,” Nickovich said. “A minute to take in all that had happened.”
Hogge and Nickovich matched on Tinder in September 2021. Less than two weeks later, Hogge, then living in Pleasant Grove, Utah, was aiming his Mazda toward Salt Lake City for their first date.
Both were nervous as Hogge made the 45-minute drive past mountain peaks and desert lakes — Hogge because Nickovich’s attentiveness on the app had given him real hope a relationship might materialize, and Nickovich because of Hogge’s professional reputation. “He had quite the big name in photography,” Nickovich said.
A hug at Nickovich’s front door in downtown Salt Lake City put both at ease, and their conversation about their experiences coming out as gay on their walk to Copper Common, a bar and restaurant, helped. “I turned 18, graduated high school, moved out and came out,” Nickovich said.
Things were more complicated for Hogge. His family is Mormon; acting on same-sex attraction goes against the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
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A religious mission in Tampa, Fla., from 2011 to 2013, had led to some soul searching. “Right when you come back, you’re supposed to find a wife and settle down,” Hogge said. “I had been trying to make it work, because I was told my whole life that this is what you’re supposed to do.”
By 2020, he felt backed into a corner. He was 29 when he distanced himself from the church and started dating men, a decision that took his family some time to fully accept. “At first there were still things they were trying to understand,” he said. “I needed to give them grace, because it took me almost 30 years to accept myself.”
Hogge, now 34, grew up in Alpine, Utah, with two brothers and two sisters and their parents, Daren and Lisa Hogge. Holidays and vacations were spent at the family cabin in Beaver, Utah, where he developed a passion for nature photography. He studied sociology for two years at Southern Utah University, but in 2016, when a friend asked Hogge to shoot his wedding, he found his calling.
Nickovich, 30, grew up in Reno, Nev., with two older brothers and their parents, Merci and Thomas Nickovich. When he was 16, his family moved to Idaho Falls, Idaho, for his father’s job. “That was a culture shock,” he said. “Reno was a progressive, diverse place.”
A large Mormon population in Idaho Falls familiarized him with the conservative lifestyle in which Hogge grew up. After high school, Nickovich moved to Big Sky, Mont., to work seasonal jobs at restaurants and bakeries. A series of server jobs afforded him a glimpse at the back-of-house side of hospitality. In 2020, he moved to Salt Lake City to open a cafe. Three years later, he sold it and became a baker at Tulie Bakery, where his specialty is cakes.
Nickovich’s first date with Hogge, in September 2021, coincided with a stressful moment in his short run as a cafe entrepreneur. “I didn’t have much time off back then,” he said. At the restaurant, they sat at the bar. “I said, ‘Listen, this is my only day off for a while, so I’m going to have a couple of drinks.’” Hogge, who had little experience with alcohol, joined him. Neither was sober when they left.
A last-minute plan to take public transportation back to Nickovich’s apartment got scrubbed when they missed the final train. But their walk home, and the kiss good night that followed was, for Hogge, a sign the stars were aligning.
He found out they were painfully askew when Nickovich abruptly stopped responding to his texts in early October.
Their first date had been followed by what he thought was a successful second one, a late September picnic. “I was freshly out and trying to navigate dating in an environment I still wasn’t fully comfortable in,” Hogge said. “I was devastated. I felt like I was experiencing high school first love grief. I was really, really sad.”
Friends told him he should stop reaching out to Nickovich. And he was wary of being “pushy or annoying,” he said. But he was also sure he and Nickovich had connected. After a few days of silence, “I was like, ‘You know what? Screw this. I really like him.’ So I texted him again, and he was honest with me.’”
For weeks, Nickovich had been preoccupied by chaos at the cafe. A freezer had broken, a refrigerator was leaking and a computer system was malfunctioning. He also disliked texting and preferred communicating by phone. But when he registered the hurt in Hogge’s message, “I stopped and thought, we had a great time together,” he said. “I care about him.”
By the end of October, they were commuting to each other’s apartment every few days. In November, Nickovich asked, “Are we boyfriends?” Hogge confirmed they were. They sat in bed together, deleting their dating apps that same night.
Hogge moved to Salt Lake City to be closer to Nickovich in the summer of 2022. In April 2024, they found a new apartment in the city and moved in together. Later that year, a sushi picnic in September at the nearby Emigration Canyon became an engagement party for two when Nickovich proposed in a grassy field under a wide open sky.
For Hogge, the only thing easier than saying yes was deciding where the two should be married: Utah’s Beaver Canyon. “My family has been going there for generations,” he said. “Even when I was little, we’d drive by a certain spot and I would think, a wedding would be perfect there.” His parents — who now love Nickovich so much, Hogge said, that they’ve been asking for several years when the couple would marry — thought so, too.
Planning an outdoor ceremony for 100, given Hogge’s contacts in the Utah wedding industry, was not a heavy lift. But five days before their June 26 wedding, while the Hogges were making arrangements for the three-hour drive to Beaver, Hogge’s father got an alert from the City of Beaver. A 50-acre fire had broken out near the family cabin. No one worried at the time.
“We’re pretty experienced with wildfires,” Hogge said. This one seemed relatively small. But days later, the flames had devoured 59,000 acres, and Hogge and Nickovich knew the wedding they envisioned was not going to happen. “For a moment I thought about how long I had been planning, how many logistics had already gone into it to make sure it would be incredible.” It was a fleeting moment.
On June 23, the couple told their vendors and guests they still planned to be married on June 26, but that the wedding would be moved to the Hogge family’s Alpine backyard. A queasy sense of uncertainty accompanied the announcement. “We were thinking, would it still be worth it?” Hogge said. “Would people be able to come?”
A June 25 hot dog roast at the Hogges’ house, the couple’s rehearsal dinner, answered both questions. “We only gave them 72 hours’ notice before the wedding, but almost everyone showed up for us,” Hogge said.
That night, the Hogge family got word that their cabin had been destroyed in what is now known as the Cottonwood fire.
Nickovich’s brother Kyle Nickovich was ordained by the Universal Life Church to officiate the backyard wedding. As the grooms read handwritten vows, a flurry of orange ash filtered through the mountain air, dusting their hair and clothing. A remnant of the still-burning fire several hours away, and the field where they initially planned to marry, had found them just before they were pronounced married.
“The place that we love made it to the wedding,” Hogge said. “It made me cry.”
On This Day
When June 26, 2026
Where Alpine, Utah
No Capes Required The kindness and deftness of Hogge’s wedding industry colleagues saved the day, the couple said. “Our planner, florist, rental company, caterer, photographer, musicians and every other vendor immediately went into problem-solving mode” when they got word of the venue change, Hogge said. The vendors “became our advocates, our support system and, in many ways, our superheroes.”
Tasteful At the reception, the grooms danced to Linda Ronstadt’s “Long Long Time.” For dinner, guests served themselves from a pasta buffet catered by the Pizza Factory, a last-minute swap for a similar menu they had planned with a Beaver caterer. The Beaver caterer, which suffered fire-related losses, was among the few who weren’t able to make it to Alpine.
Fashionable Hogge, who wore a white velvet Tanner Fletcher suit, met Nickovich, wearing a plum-colored Alexandra Grecco suit with a pleated silk chiffon blouse, on a round platform draped in fabric.
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