When Bonnie Hedlund first started dating Charlie Barrett in 2005, every day was Valentine’s Day.

She would come home from work to find her driveway sprinkled with rose petals, placed there by Barrett, an exceptionally talented rock climber and boulderer based in Northern California. Love notes were hung from trees with messages like “Keep going beautiful girl.” He put more notes inside Hedlund’s cabin, which sat on forested land near the Truckee River. When the weather was right, Barrett sometimes set up a romantic space on the porch, with a table and chairs, candles, dinner for two, and a mattress. He made CD mixes and wrote poems on beautiful stationery.

Barrett, then 21, was 12 years younger than Hedlund. When she was introduced to him by a mutual friend, she never thought of dating as an option because of their age difference. But then he started randomly showing up at her cabin, making his interest clear. He was attractive—tall and dark, with broad shoulders and a big smile—and attentive in a way she’d never experienced. Better still, some of their best times together happened in her favorite place: the outdoors.

“The climbing was phenomenal,” she says. “We would do amazing climbs nearly every day.”

Like Barrett, Hedlund was an accomplished sport climber and boulderer, and she had been ticking off difficult routes on the east side of the Sierra Nevada since the late 1980s, before the region became widely known as a bouldering destination. The couple, along with their core group of Tahoe-area friends, did routes together constantly. As the relationship grew stronger, Barrett moved in with Hedlund and her dog, a rescued wolf hybrid.