Never underestimate the power of a father’s love.

Hurricane Helene has wreaked catastrophic damage across the southeastern United States since roaring ashore into Florida last week. At last count, the devastating storm has claimed nearly 100 lives and left more than two million people without power. The once picturesque town of Chimney Rock has been completely swept away.

David Jones, though, was determined to not let the aftereffects of the massive weather event stop him from walking his daughter Elizabeth down the aisle in her wedding this past Saturday.

The trip from Jones’ home in South Carolina to Johnson City, Tennessee where the wedding was scheduled to take place usually takes about two hours. Anticipating a longer trip, the father of the bride left at 7 p.m. on Friday. After seven hours in the car, a Tennessee trooper told him just across the state line that he had reached the end of the line. All the roads he was planning to drive on were closed or washed out.

Maybe they were impassable in a car, but for a guy who has run marathons, Jones decided to keep going on foot.

Jones said he told the state trooper, “You have to understand. My daughter’s getting married at 11:00 this morning, and I’m going to be there to walk her down the aisle.”

With only the flashlight on his cellphone, Jones plunged ahead into the “awful” darkness.

“I can tell you a lot about the mud and the debris fields where I have to climb six, seven-foot-tall piles of debris of old fences and huge trees and it was just a tangled mes and dead-end roads and all kinds of things,” he told Nexstar’s WJHL.

At one point on his trek, he encountered a backhoe whose operator didn’t see him get stuck in mud.

“I was up to my knees in mud and couldn’t move,” Jones said. “And he doesn’t see me. Of course, his cab is facing the other way. Most of the time, he’s swinging this thing around, and I’m ducking. Really, I’m thinking this could be it. There was a lot of prayer at that point.”

Jones’ prayers were answered.

Managing to free himself from mud, the father of the bride kept moving, using a reflective state to warn other emergency workers that he was out and moving in the murky soup.

By this time, Jones had walked nearly 30 miles. With eight miles to go, he met an old friend, who drove him to the wedding venue in time to clean up. Neither Elizabeth nor Daniel, her husband-to-be, had any idea of his ordeal until the wedding reception.

As a wedding gift, he gave the happy couple the reflector stake he had been carrying. He said he wanted them to have “to remember, to be a protector and a good reflection of each other and a reflection of God.”

According to David Jones, his harrowing 30-mile trek through muck, mud, and mire was “What any dad would do.”

Whether that’s accurate or not, Elizabeth is thankful.

“I woke up at 4:30 a.m. this morning just wide awake, just spent that whole morning praising God that my dad made it and that my dad’s alive,” she said.

Good fathers sacrifice for their children. David Jones’ remarkable journey also models the lengths a husband and father can be willing to go through in order to protect his wife and family – or walk a daughter down the aisle on her wedding day.

Image credit: WJHL.