By Jesse Wood
When Jordan Nelson and his fiancée, Meghan Frye, return from the Caribbean next week, his marriage proposal atop Grandfather Mountain will likely be an international sensation.
Nelson, an aerial photographer and owner of Boone-based Nelson Aerial Productions, filmed the April 16 marriage proposal with his drone. Because he attended the Manhattan Film Festival in New York, which screened his film, Aerial Appalachian, shortly after the proposal, he didn’t get around to publishing the video until several days ago. Since then The Today Show and Good Morning America picked up the video.
This morning, Nelson said that Reuters, an international news agency, and the Daily Mail in the UK were the latest publications to reach out regarding the proposal likely to soon be heard ‘round the world.
Though the video warrants the coverage and Nelson envisioned some sharing of the proposal on social media, he said he was still surprised to see it receive the attention that it has so far.
“I was. When I envisioned everything, there was a chance that it would be picked up and shared … but to see it actually happen. I had Reuters TV and the Daily Mail in the UK reach out to me this morning. It seems likely to get international attention, which I didn’t imagine,” Nelson said.
When Jordan brought along his drone and camera equipment for a hike at Grandfather Mountain, Frye didn’t think anything of it because that’s his profession and he’s always hauling the equipment around.
“We go on hikes on occasion, and we’d hiked that exact same spot on our first date three years prior. That’s why I wanted that spot,” Nelson told The Today Show.
“I told her, ‘Let’s go for a hike! It’s been almost three years since we hiked there on our first date.’ And I said, ‘I’m gonna take my drone with me, too, and maybe we can get some really cool pictures of us up there.’ Since I do it for a living, she thought absolutely nothing about it.”
Once they got to the spot, the top of the rock that looks as if they are on top the world, Nelson put the drone on a flight mode that circles around a particular area – in this case, the rock they were standing on.
He then used his smart phone camera app to record sound and capture video up close. With this, he was able to capture the reaction from Frye, which he exclaimed was the “icing on the cake” of this awesome marriage proposal.
“At that point, I was getting pretty nervous,” he laughed, according to The Today Show. “I pushed her around to get her in the exact spot I wanted in. She though I was joking with her. She thought it was a late April Fool’s joke! But when I reached into the bag to get the box that had the ring, she kind of just lost her breath. In the video you can hear her kind of just go really quiet and she just couldn’t breathe for a minute … and then she started crying and everything.”
Nelson noted that he didn’t think to capture the audio and video up close until the night before the hike and proposal.
“That hit me the night before and I am glad I thought of that,” Nelson said.