Trevor Van Camp thought he had planned the perfect winter proposal for his girlfriend, Danielle Jenkins: a surprise getaway to Boyne Mountain Resort in Boyne Falls, Michigan, capped off with a romantic walk across SkyBridge Michigan — a glowing, timber-towered suspension bridge suspended between two mountain peaks.
Jenkins had been sending Van Camp TikTok videos of the bridge for weeks, hinting that it was something she really wanted to experience. So he quietly turned the idea into a surprise trip.
“It was something she really wanted to do, so I made it a surprise,” Van Camp explained in a video interview shared by the resort on Instagram.
After taking a chairlift to the top of the slopes, the couple headed out for a nighttime walk across the illuminated bridge. Van Camp admitted the moment required some courage on his part.
“I’m not a big heights guy, so this was solely for her,” he said with a laugh.
As they stopped to take photos on the 1,200-foot-long bridge, Van Camp dropped to one knee and asked Jenkins to marry him. But just as he reached for the engagement ring, disaster struck. Nervous and shaken, he fumbled the box — and the ring slipped through the bridge’s metal grating, plunging 118 feet into the snow below.
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The shocking moment was captured on video, showing Van Camp’s stunned reaction as he realized what had just happened.
“We panicked for a minute,” Van Camp recalled. “Then we looked at each other and said, ‘We need to find it.’”
Resort staff gave the couple permission to search the area beneath the bridge, and they spent more than two hours combing through the snow. Pat Harper, the resort’s night-shift snowmaking supervisor, even loaned them a metal detector to help with the search.
Despite their efforts, the ring remained missing.
But Harper wasn’t ready to give up. Along with two colleagues, he took over the search himself.
“They promised me they were going to find my ring,” Jenkins said. “There were no ifs, ands, or buts about it.”
Harper later explained that after searching for 20 to 30 minutes, he noticed footprints in the snow and decided to scan them with the metal detector. When the device beeped, he dug down, first uncovering dirt — then spotting the edge of the ring.
“I just sat there for a minute thinking, ‘There’s no way you just found that,’” he said.
Meanwhile, Van Camp and Jenkins had returned to their accommodations and were packing up to head home — already resigned to buying a replacement ring.
Then came the call.
When they returned to the resort, Van Camp finally slipped the recovered ring onto Jenkins’ finger.
“I give huge props and kudos to Pat for doing that for us,” Jenkins said. “He truly saved the day.”
Now officially engaged, the couple says the ordeal has given them a story they’ll never forget. And one day, they plan to return to Boyne Mountain Resort — this time to finish their walk across SkyBridge Michigan, with the ring securely in place.
