June 21 seemed like the ideal date for a summer wedding in Montana’s Rocky Mountains, well after the typical end of snow season.
But, even in June, winter is never far away when you’re at nearly 7,000 feet.
And that’s how Jamie and Chris DeBruhl found themselves exchanging vows in front of 75 guests in the middle of a snowstorm on the summit of Big Mountain at the Whitefish Mountain Resort last Saturday.
The wintry scene was worthy of a snow globe, with big flakes falling on Ms. DeBruhl’s bare shoulders and the silk skirt of her wedding dress puffing out like a cake.
“When I saw her in that dress, it stopped being cold for me,” Mr. DeBruhl, 26, said.
“It was magical,” Ms. DeBruhl, also 26, said.
Their magical moment would have a far larger audience than just their guests after Ryan Dennis, a television meteorologist in Montana, and others spotted the wedding on the resort’s webcam. Mr. Dennis posted an image on Facebook, where it received thousands of likes, shares and comments, spreading widely across the internet as much of the rest of the country was facing a record-breaking heat wave.
A forecast for nicer weather
Whitefish Mountain is a year-round resort in northwest Montana, about a 45-minute drive from the west entrance of Glacier National Park. In the days leading up to the wedding, the couple, who live in Dallas (where it was 93 degrees on Saturday), were closely watching the weather forecasts for Montana. Forecasts initially showed sun and, closer to the big date, a possibility of rain.
By Wednesday morning, with the expectation that temperatures would keep dropping, the National Weather Service had issued a winter storm warning for nearby areas.
“We were really upset about it,” Ms. DeBruhl said.
On the day before the wedding, the DeBruhls rode a gondola to the summit with the resort’s wedding coordinator, Ann Marie Bolls, in cold, wet weather. Ms. Bolls called it “dreary.”
She had prepared alternate sites at the resort’s base, with both indoor and outdoor options, but the DeBruhls continued to say that they wanted to wed as initially planned on the mountaintop.
“We kept the ball in their court,” Ms. Bolls said.
The next afternoon, the wedding party boarded the gondolas, as rain fell at the mountain’s base, and emerged at the summit to snow dropping from the sky like white confetti.
For the DeBruhls — nonskiers who live in a part of Texas where snow is rare — the shift from dreary rain to snow felt like a gift.
“When we saw people getting to the top, they all had the hugest grins from ear to ear,” Ms. DeBruhl said.
The Rocky Mountains are known for varying weather year-round, but May typically marks the end of snow season, and snow becomes much more uncommon in June. Historical June snowfall data is not available for Big Mountain, but Stahl Peak, just to the north of Whitefish, is a good proxy and gets about four inches of snow in June on average. The storm on Saturday dropped six inches of snow on Big Mountain.
Jennifer Kitsmiller, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service office in Missoula, described the late-June storm as “unusual, but not out of the question.” She recalled a similar storm in June 2022.
Up on the mountain, the ceremony was originally planned to last 30 minutes, but Ms. DeBruhl’s uncle, who officiated, cut it to 20 minutes.
“We could hear the teeth chattering while we were up there,” Mr. DeBruhl said.
Amy Graff is a Times reporter covering weather, wildfires and earthquakes.
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