The blog
The first snow
The light around my home the last few days has been breathtaking. It’s the end of October, so the sun is not plentiful. The days are shorter, and it’s more our notoriously cloudy time. I appreciate every moment of sunlight so much.
I’ve spent these days chasing golden hour, sunset, and blue hour around my home with my phone in hand, never able to appreciate it enough. It’s the feeling of winter. Short days and beautiful light. Contrasts of warm and cool - colours and temperatures.
I spent last night on tour under a gorgeous clear sky. By the time I woke up in the morning, everything was white. Our first snow had arrived, and now it’s almost 16 hours later around 2:30 in the morning and the snow has not stopped. Maybe some 5-8cm has fallen. It was a night off for me tonight, and still I’m a night owl - of course.
This snow day has filled my heart with such overwhelming love. My breakfast and slow morning coffee, my computer work beside the window on the sofa, and my errands out in town all felt so much more of my pace and my world. Every moment today felt like how life should feel like. Cosy, quiet, slow and completely in love. Out my window now, the sky and neighbourhood glow in that magical bright white light that only fresh snow and snow clouds can give. Little fox prints surround my place outside, and inside, my radiators creak as they heat and cool off. I just don’t want to go to bed because this welcoming of winter is much too beautiful to miss a moment of.
It’s a mess
The last weeks have been a mess of a lot of kilometres chasing down unstable pockets of clear sky, sometimes to the end of the highway. Some nights have been very late, some nights incredibly lucky - arriving to short lived clear skies just in time to meet breathtaking auroral displays - and other nights not quite so lucky finding ourselves trapped under heavier cloud.
It’s also been a time of navigating the first full moon phase that really felt like a full moon phase. It’s still nothing compared to the full moon of winter nights in a snowy landscape, but it was significantly brighter than the moon of the early autumn.
“It feels good sometimes to take a step back.“
These photos have been sitting in this draft of a blog post for more than a week. I’ve been so uninspired. Burnt out - maybe, and complete exhaustion for sure. But it’s cosy to look back at the photos below, remembering the nights and appreciating them. Even when they were just minutes with a clear break long enough to find the aurora there too, it feels really special. I’m grateful for that and for this life - but sometimes taking a little step back helps me feel that more than feeling buried.
Touch and go
For the second night in a row, I was out of the house early. Early, early. Twilight was still on the horizon, and the aurora was already dancing overhead.
It was almost the anxiety inducing aurora of this is all just too beautiful and too much will never be enough.
“Every kilometre felt like an eternity.”
But it was on to grab my guests and get out of town, or try to get out of town without pulling over every 100m. We couldn’t get away fast enough. Every kilometre felt like an eternity. We made a stop on our way out, and then another trying not to miss a moment. And finally in a quieter moment, made our final run to where we settled in for the night.
Never a doubt
It was a cloudy night in Yellowknife through and through, and after a good half hour drive out we reached partly clear skies which didn’t last. We were getting clouded out with the clear breaks being eaten up almost entirely by cloud and what was left of the clear break was moving back toward Yellowknife.
We packed up the car, and as we were about to pull out of the driveway we had tucked ourselves into, a guest confirms if we are going in the direction of Yellowknife to those clear breaks which passed over us. It was the logical thought.
Actually we are going to head further west, hopefully through this cloud to more stable clear sky. Probably another 20-40km, I said.
Forecasts were showing more stable clear breaks up far in the northwest, and it looked like there might be some clear sky low, low on that northwest horizon from where we were.
“And you never doubted this for a moment, right?…”
Our next 30 odd kilometres were under a lot of heavy cloud and over a lot of frost heaves.
We finally started to reach a few stars, and shortly after tucked into another small driveway with the sky mostly clear. It wasn’t long until the aurora danced above us. It was perfect, perfect timing, and as this was all unfolding, I joked to my guests that they definitely never doubted this for a moment earlier…
A call back to 2008
While we drove away from the Nova Hotel and the last of the downtown city lights, we all watched the aurora from the windows of the car. We were leaving town early tonight and still the aurora was ahead of us, but it was to be expected under these kinds of conditions.
I told my guests that we will see the aurora the entire drive out, and it will be beautiful, but we will keep driving to get into a better position for later in the night. She will stay with us, so don’t worry about her disappearing as we drive.
“We trust you.”
There was nothing to worry about this night.
As soon as we arrived in the countryside, we bounced out of the car and immediately reached for our tripods and cameras. We were the happiest bunch over the next several hours. It was one of the nights that produced audible gasps and repeating heavy, heavy beauty sighs from me.
Through my early aurora chases with Kjetil in Tromsø, over the weeks of cosy stays at his place with his family, long daytime drives to the countryside and late nights aurora chasing, he was always so gracious and humble.
We were stopped at a gas station one night on one of our chases, and while other guests were finishing up getting snacks inside, he was showing me some of the wallpapers he made for his phone background from some of his photos. They were breathtaking, I was in complete awe. They were gorgeous, gorgeous photos - deep twilight skies from shoulder season aurora chases, stunning purples and red coronas, and he shared with them me, to my little old black Nokia 7500 Prism, for my background. The images are ingrained in my mind forever. I loved them, and I hung onto what they meant and where they came from - this friendship, generosity and wonder.
So this night when we started seeing these incredible, sunlit auroras at the beginning of the night, and later, the repeating coronas filled with the most beautiful reds overhead, I was taken instantly back to those 2008 chases with Kjetil that I’ll never forgot or let go of.
