Josie Harriet Arnold and Matthew Aza Augustus Sigel were up before dawn during the summer of 2023, working as seasonal wranglers and horse packers with Pendergraft Outfitters in Wyoming’s Teton Wilderness.
They saddled up, hobbled and led pack strings of horses and mules through the wilderness for days at a time for the outfitter, Peter Linn, a longtime friend of Sigel’s family.
“I was enamored with her over breakfast,” in Linn’s kitchen the morning they met in July 2023, said Sigel, who goes by Gus.
Sigel, 24, grew up on a cattle ranch in Centennial, Wyo., (population 283), and from age 15 until 2023 competed on the Aspen Valley Ski & Snowboard Club (AVSC) freestyle snowboard team in Colorado. He spent fall semesters at Laramie High School in Wyoming and was home-schooled during the spring.
Arnold, 26, who grew up in a modernist house in Los Angeles, loved English riding, and was “hellbent,” she said, on getting back on a horse after graduating from Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass.
“I fell in love with the Western riding tradition, mountains and culture,” said Arnold, who spent two summers on a Montana dude ranch after high school, and then joined Pendergraft Outfitters in 2021.
But while she worked there the first two summers, Sigel stuck to elk hunting seasons in the autumn those first two years, angling to become a hunting guide like his father and maternal grandfather. He and Arnold never crossed paths.
But in 2023, the two got off to a good start grocery shopping together, “like the beginning of all my greatest friendships,” she said. They both worked on multiple seven- to 10-day trips that summer, separately and together.
In late summer, they witnessed a brutal side of nature at hunting camp when Whiskey, a beloved mustang with severe colic, collapsed.
“I walked the horse in hundreds of circles,” said Sigel, but the gelding was ultimately shot and pulled upriver from camp to keep grizzly bears away. “There were tears, and given his name, lots of whiskey.”
Arnold graduated with a degree in international relations and Middle East studies with first class honors from the University of St Andrews in Scotland, and received a law degree from the University of Edinburgh Law School. She currently works as a fellow responsible for fund-raising and project development, focusing on regenerative agriculture at South North Nexus, a nonprofit organization promoting local and global sustainability and social justice.
“The rest of the days were fun and cheerful,” Sigel said. The two went swimming in the river and played many games of cribbage in the tent in the rain.
They had their first kiss in the middle of a meadow under a tree.
“I asked her to be my girlfriend, and not run off after the season was over,” said Sigel, who then gave her wildflowers he had gathered.
During hunting season, in September, he worked as a licensed hunting guide, and she as a wrangler. “She’s adventurous, strong, hardheaded,” he said, “incredibly intelligent and loving.”
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After the last summer trip of 2024, she began law school in Scotland. Once hunting season ended, he joined her there, and they rented a flat in Old Town, Edinburgh, where he received a private pilot’s license from ACS Flight Training in Perth, Scotland, in 2025.
This year, he received a private U.S. license from Ridgeline Aviation in Belgrade, Mont., and is now pursuing a commercial license at Summit Aviation, also in Belgrade.
In January 2025, he proposed in their tiny Scottish kitchen while she was finishing a paper. “It was magical,” she said.
In September 2025, she adopted Wadi, a Great Pyrenees and red heeler mix in Bozeman, while Sigel spent a couple of months in Centennial to begin transferring his U.K. pilot’s license into a U.S. one.
In February, they bought a fixer-upper house in downtown Bozeman and got another dog, Beans, a Catahoula Leopard dog mixed with Australian kelpie, as an engagement gift from a close friend.
On Oct. 17, the couple were married by the Rev. Virginia Army, an Episcopal priest at St. Andrew’s by-the-Sea in Little Compton, R.I., at the former St. Mark’s Church in Warren, R.I. Among the 120 guests in attendance were the groom’s parents, Harmony Hendricks and Edward Sigel, and his maternal grandmother, Jane Hendricks, who brought sagebrush from Colorado for the groom’s and groomsmen’s boutonnieres.
The bride’s parents, Hadley and Peter Arnold, both architects, had turned the former church into a second home and community gathering place. Her mother grew up across the river in Barrington, R.I., and spent more time there as the bride’s grandmother was aging.
The bride walked down the aisle to an original composition by a family acquaintance, accompanied by a violinist and cellist. Clams, mussels and lobster were served for dinner on candlelit tables, and guests enjoyed a pistachio cake with buttercream frosting by a family friend.
The couple’s first dance, practiced while they were in the mountains, was swing dancing to Led Zeppelin’s “Going to California.”
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