In June 2021, Francis Charles Marley checked out Ashleé Michele Miller’s Match.com profile, but clicked away without so much as a like. She would have let it go if the app hadn’t pictured him cradling a baby moose in the middle of a raging Alaskan river.

Ms. Miller, 35, was riding out the pandemic at her parents’ house in Reidsville, N.C., when Mr. Marley thumbed past her profile. The Upper West Side of Manhattan, where she lived, was still under Covid restrictions, and as a professional musician who specializes in music theory and clarinet performance, her life there had come to a standstill.

Her teaching gigs at the Juilliard School’s Music Advancement Program and as an adjunct professor at Adelphi University and the City University of New York had moved online, and her regular performances with Miami’s Nu Deco Ensemble were being live streamed. Concerts with another ensemble, the Parhelion Trio, were on pause.

A pause from her dating apps would have been welcome, too. In New York, where she had lived since 2006, sorting through men had started to feel like a part-time job. But in North Carolina, “my mom said, ‘You have to keep dating,’” she said. “‘You can’t put it off.’” Hoping to meet someone in upstate New York, where she had recently bought a parcel of land near the Catskills to enjoy the mountains later in life, or nearby Massachusetts, she expanded her search range.

Alaska was a little farther than she would have liked. But when she saw that she had caught the eye of the man with the baby moose, fascination gripped her. “That hooked me,” she said. So she messaged him. “I said, ‘Hey, I saw you looking at my profile. I just wanted to say I think you’re really interesting.’”

Mr. Marley, 52, a coordinator of abandoned mine lands and hazardous materials for the Department of the Interior Bureau of Land Management, was slightly embarrassed. His breeze past Ms. Miller’s profile wasn’t for lack of enthusiasm. “I saw Ashleé and her music and her New York background and I’m like, ‘Well, I doubt she’d be interested,’” he said. There was also the possibility she had heard the rumor: In Alaska, the odds are said to be good for women looking for single men. But the goods? Odd.

It’s a trope that felt at least partially true to Mr. Marley at the time. Since moving to Anchorage in 1996, spurts of dating app activity had confirmed for him that the state “is like a small town,” he said. A shrunken cast of available women resurfaced on every app he tried. For fresh prospects, “I needed to look outside Alaska,” he said. He wasn’t afraid to cast a wider net.

The sheepishness Mr. Marley felt when Ms. Miller caught him perusing her Match profile in 2021 didn’t last long. Within days, both were feeling breathless before what became daily Zoom dates. “Every night we talked for hours and hours,” she said. “I was amazed by how kind he was. I started thinking to myself, I wonder if I could live in Alaska.” That July, on her first trip to Anchorage, she had her answer.

“I didn’t expect to fall in love with it,” she said. But after a week spent hiking, mountain biking and watching the sunset with Mr. Marley, who had “chivalry kind of mannerisms about him,” she said, she was hooked. And not just on the landscape. The day of her return flight to North Carolina, July 14, 2021, “we Zoomed all night, into the next day.” A week later, she flew back.

Ms. Miller, an only child, found her love of music as a preschooler, while watching her mother practice piano in Reidsville. “She kept saying, ‘that’s an A’ or ‘that’s a G,’” she said. Thinking each key corresponded with a letter, Ms. Miller drew the alphabet across the keyboard, left to right, and tried to pluck out words from storybooks.

By the time she left for boarding school at what was then known as the North Carolina School of the Arts, she was playing several instruments. Her bachelor’s and master’s degrees, both in music, are from the Mannes School for Music at the New School. Her doctorate in music is from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York.

Mr. Marley was raised in Fostoria, Ohio. His mother died of a heart attack when he was 11. The oldest of three surviving children — one of his younger twin brothers died shortly after birth — he took on caregiving duties for his brother and sister. Their father, a defense attorney and acting judge, “was a busy man,” he said. “I learned how to help.”

In 1991, he joined the Army National Guard, retiring in 2021 as a medical operations officer and, in between, racking up a list of accomplishments dense enough to cause a shortened version of his CV to sprawl to four pages. His fascination with Alaska started in his late teens, after a winter’s worth of National Guard training there. “It kind of shaped my adventurous spirit,” he said. Just after he completed his bachelor’s degree in natural resource management at the Ohio State University, he made the move to Anchorage.

By the time he met Ms. Miller in 2021, he had lived in Alaska on and off for almost 20 years, leaving from 2005 to 2012 to go to medical school — he completed two years at the Medical University of the Americas, in Belize — and then to work as an organ preservation specialist at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. Along the way, he left for overseas deployments in Afghanistan, Mongolia and Kosovo and earned a pilot’s license, a master’s degree in environmental science from Alaska Pacific University and multiple search and rescue certifications.

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In addition to his job at the Bureau of Land Management, where he is tasked with protecting 24 million acres of federal land, he volunteers on two search and rescue teams for the Alaska State Troopers and is a vice president of a nonprofit organization, Global Exploration and Recovery Team.

During Ms. Miller’s second trip to Anchorage, Mr. Marley got a middle-of-the-night call to help with an underwater search and rescue mission. Ms. Miller came along, taking notes onshore. By the end of that summer, she became a search and rescue volunteer for the State Troopers. “They kind of adopted me as someone who could document what was going on,” she said. Like Mr. Marley, whose photo with the baby moose had been snapped just after he rescued the stranded creature, she didn’t take the commitment lightly. She had made up her mind: She wasn’t sure when, but she was moving to Alaska.

It happened sooner than either expected. On Jan. 9, 2022, while on a first skiing trip together at Hilltop Ski Resort in Anchorage, Ms. Miller broke her leg, tearing her ACL and meniscus. “After that, we were put in a kind of ‘either this works or it doesn’t’ situation,” she said.

Going home to New York, where she was due back at work after the long Covid pause, was impossible; her apartment was a three-story walk-up. So she moved in with Mr. Marley in Anchorage. Through several surgeries and bouts of anxiety over her career, “he really took care of me. Being a freelance performer and an adjunct professor doesn’t give you a whole lot of protections. With him, I felt safe.”

For Mr. Marley, living together unexpectedly proved what he already knew: He had found his life partner. “It probably accelerated our relationship by about a year,” he said.

Ms. Miller was flying back and forth between New York and Alaska on crutches to perform and teach when he started thinking about how he would propose.

On July 22, 2022, Ms. Miller’s first week off crutches, they had dinner at a favorite restaurant, the Rustic Goat in Anchorage. After, he drove her to Beluga Point, a rocky outcropping overlooking the mountains and an inlet known for attracting beluga whales. She was still feeling unsteady on her feet from the injury when he dropped to one knee and pulled out a ring box. Her yes left her weak-kneed in a more swoony kind of way. “He had to help me stand up,” she said.

On April 13, Ms. Miller and Mr. Marley were married at the Holy Name of Jesus Cathedral in Raleigh, N.C., by the Rev. Joshua West, a Catholic priest. Mr. Marley’s family is Catholic. Ms. Miller, who grew up Southern Baptist, converted to Catholicism for the marriage, receiving the necessary sacraments weeks before the ceremony.

In a custom Enaura V-neck wedding gown, she walked down an aisle with her father, Daniel Bird. Mr. Marley wore his military dress blues at Ms. Miller’s request. “A tux wasn’t doing it for me,” she said. “I’m a musician. Everyone wears tuxes.” The church, filled with 82 guests, was chosen for its organ, one of the largest Fisk organs on the East Coast, Ms. Miller said. She commissioned a Juilliard colleague, Daniel Felsenfeld, to compose the bridal processional.

After a full mass, and after Father West pronounced them married, the couple walked under a military saber arch formation just outside the cathedral. A reception at Tobacco Road Distillery, a converted tobacco warehouse in Raleigh, awaited them. So did a life of adventure in Alaska and elsewhere.

“We plan to keep our home base in Anchorage, but we’re both really passionate about service, about search and rescue and teaching,” she said. Together, “we’re going to conduct projects and missions around the globe,” Mr. Marley said.

On This Day

When April 13, 2024

Where The Holy Name of Jesus Cathedral, Raleigh, N.C.

Not Forgotten Instead of a guest book, Ms. Miller and Mr. Marley asked attendees to sign a set of moose antlers. The antlers belonged to Mr. Marley’s brother, Christopher, who died in a motorcycle accident in 1996 just after a visit to Alaska. “When he was up here, we had been on a hike and he found them,” Mr. Marley said. “He rode across the country with them in his backpack on the motorcycle.”

Long Commute For now, Ms. Miller will continue to split her time between New York and Alaska, teaching and performing in the continental United States. Two days after the wedding, she returned to New York to finish the semester at Juilliard. “We can only plan two months in advance,” she said. “Sometimes we have to figure stuff out week by week.”

Groundbreaking The couple is building a new log cabin they’ll call home in Anchorage. The place includes a 2,000-foot grass runway for Mr. Marley’s piloting adventures.