SUPERSTITION MOUNTAIN, Ariz. — Mina Harigae got married last Saturday, just five days before the start of the 2023 LPGA Drive On Championship.
She did so at the Superstition Mountain Golf & Country Club, host of the first full-field LPGA event of the season.
Dana Fall (nee Finkelstein) tied the knot on Feb. 25, 2023, also at Superstition Mountain. Well, technically, on top of Superstition Mountain, as she and new husband Henry made a predawn trek, along with his younger sister Belle Fall, who officiated the wedding and took some amazing photos at Lone Tree at Weaver’s Needle.
“There’s this one tree and we got married under that tree,” Fall said, adding that the two had hiked the trail before. “It was a cool spot and we were just going to go to the courthouse but we figured we should do something, I don’t know, something special, something we can remember.”
Who gets the credit, though, for actually coming up with it?
“It was Henry’s idea,” said Fall, who went to Corona del Sol High School in nearby Tempe, Arizona, before playing college golf at UNLV. “I just wanted to do something simple and small. I like going on hikes. It was fun. We started in the dark because we wanted to be up there at sunrise. I had never done a night hike.”
That meant headlamps. And golf clubs.
“We took some golf clubs up with us to take pictures with, but also to have as weapons, just in case there was. … you never know,” she said smiling. “And then at the bottom, our parents were there. They wanted to be a part of it, so we re-did the ceremony down there for them.”
That 90-minute hike on Feb. 25, 2023, was captured in photos by Belle, an ordained minister who is also a photographer. The wedding took place three years to the day after the couple first met.
Coming back down the mountain, the golf clubs were a talking point for hikers heading up the other way.
“People were heckling us, like, ‘Why do you have golf clubs?’ Every single person coming down,” she joked.
Harigae’s wedding was more recent – Sat., March 18, 2023 – and a little less adventuresome but no less memorable.
Harigae, who grew up in Monterey Peninsula, moved to Arizona about 14 years ago. The 2021 U.S. Solheim Cup team member and runner-up in the 2022 U.S. Open, was the first LPGA honorary member at Superstition Mountain Golf Club and during one her first days practicing there “our general manager Mark Gurnow told Travis Kreiter to go introduce himself and at the time he was playing professionally,” Harigae said.
It didn’t take long at all for the two former college golfers – Kreiter played at Bradley; Harigae had one season at Duke before turning pro – to hit it off.
“We played nine holes the first time we played, he took $20 off me,” she said. “That was the day before I had to leave for a seven-week stretch, but we talked every day.”
Kreiter was her caddie last summer when she finished solo second, which was good for a $1 million payday, at Pine Needles Lodge & Golf Club in Southern Pines, North Carolina, at the U.S. Women’s Open.
The two sneakerheads wore matching red Air Jordans on their wedding day. Just don’t look for them on any hiking trails.
“I don’t like hiking,” she joked. “Travis and I are not hikers, so that is their [Dana’s and Henry’s] thing. That is not our thing.”
This week, Harigae and Fall will each seek to win for the first time on the LPGA. There could be no better backdrop than Superstition Mountain.
