The blog
Ice therapy
There was nothing I loved more than stepping out of the car and immediately, unmistakably, hearing the ice singing away. It wasn’t subtle and it wasn’t infrequent. It was a constant singing. I could barely contain my excitement, and I mean really barely keeping it together. I exclaimed to guests about the ice, knowing full well we weren’t on a singing ice chase and that nothing I could say would express how in love with this I was and how special the sound was to me. But it was beautiful and worth noticing.
“It’s completely quiet out here when the ice does stop.”
The ice just sang and sang and sang. It was our background to the night, one of clear skies until late after the aurora faded and it was time to pack up anyway.
The night of aurora was gorgeous, shifting gradually from the northern horizon to appear more overhead until curtains danced. It was a beautiful, beautiful night by all accounts, and one that made me realize how much I miss hearing the ice more than I already do,
The southern Yukon winter
A couple days ago, after the first of these three nights, Doris and I stood in my back room at the windows, overlooking the snowy mountains glowing against the belt of Venus and magical, winter twilight sky. We beauty sighed and asked rhetorically how anyone could not love winter. This true northern winter. The temperature was rising from -34° then.
Today as I write this, it’s +6°.
Gross.
Everything that represents the winter I love so much came rushing back in those -30 something nights. The creaky, bumpy first few kilometres in a cold car with slightly square tires, the low tire pressure indicator falsely illuminated, and the windshield icing over as I talked too much while we drove.
Our clear sky chases took us near and far from town, the aurora not always the most cooperative. But these nights are the ones I love most of all, although for now, it seems they remain a little further away again with the early arrival of summer.
Cautious optimism exhaustion
“Tomorrow night, we’re just going straight to our second location.”
Friends from life’s past returned for several aurora chases, but this time to the Yukon, where the forecast was awful and our belief in clear sky chases would be challenged.
A day before their arrival, I had a look at the weather for the few nights ahead and closed Environment Canada’s app about as fast as I had opened it. Non-sense, I thought. We’ll find pockets and outrun this mess hour by hour, night by night. I was mostly annoyed, but partially inspired. Cloud maps presented a less dire view of the nights ahead, however cautious optimism exhaustion is a very real state.
Our first two nights ended with us in different locations from where we began. They were differences of just a few kilometres, but provided dramatically improved views leaving behind heavier cloud cover. On the way home from our second straight successful chase, I joked “Tomorrow night, we’re just going straight to our second location”.
However, that move to a second location on our final night was less necessary than our first two (announcer’s curse, of course), although we did end up on a light chase further down the highway at a scenic pullout in a last ditch effort to, ultimately unsuccessfully, out wait very, very quiet aurora conditions.
Another case of cautious optimism
When we switched the night of an earlier tour to this night, the weather looked as good as it ever could, and then over the course of the couple days in between, I watched it become progressively worse, yet hold right on the edge of ‘reachable’. With a long drive and a little bit of luck, we might just be okay and into clear skies.
“I feel a lot better now than I did an hour ago, but let’s see.”
In the hours before we’d leave town, the aurora conditions looked pretty bad and satellite imagery of cloud cover was really testing the limits of how far I’d be willing to drive. But as I stopped just shy of my guests a couple minutes before their pick-up, I checked one last time the aurora conditions and weather, and both, within an hour, had improved greatly.
As I met my guests at the end of their driveway, they looked at me, looked up at a cloudy sky, and looked back at me. “I feel a lot better now than I did an hour ago, but let’s see”, I said with a smile on my face.
I was cautiously optimistic. And after a shorter then feared expected drive, we arrived under a clearing sky with faint traces of the aurora that grew steadily into a breathtaking show.
And we were home before 3am - proof that miracles really do exist.
The journey north begins with a single pothole
526 kilometres to Dawson City, and probably, honestly, at least 526 potholes. I have made 2,500km drives down to Vancouver that felt shorter. This wasn’t my favourite drive, but the highway views of endless rolling mountains and frosted forests were beautiful and cleansing of the near constant pothole swerving, and frost-heaves-out-of-nowhere anxieties.
A couple weeks ago, we spent a few days up in Dawson, wandering the wooden sidewalks, gorgeous forest trails, and breathtaking vistas from up above the city. It was a quiet little retreat filled with curiosity and the cosiest evenings of dinners in atmospheric little hole in the wall restaurants, and card games, snacks and tea back at our hotel on snowy nights.
