A continuation of our latest weekend in Yellowknife. Following Not Enough Words in the English Language, Jen flew up to join us for a couple nights under the lights, and there wasn’t any way in hell she’d miss it after I text her about what was probably the greatest display of the northern lights I had ever seen the night before, when I woke up the following morning at noon.

I’m about three thousand percent sure that in every trip up to Yellowknife this aurora season, I’ve hit it on their coldest weekends. It’s been -30s into the -40s repeatedly, which I love, it’s great. But there is such significant elation in a few nights finally up to the negative teens. Tripod heads don’t freeze up solid after a few minutes outside. Fingers don’t tingle with numbness when they contact metal, and eyes don’t water for four hours straight with the tear drops freezing to your cheeks. One thing that doesn’t change is the way a wind still numbs your face, so we retreated to a small, make shift valley where we contemplated an all nighter but decided to call it as 4am approached on daylight savings night.

It was getting late, like 3am late, and we had already witnessed such a great night. The skies were quieting down, and the aurora was very subtle. We began driving back toward the end of the lake to get back onto the road, and eventually the highway when we felt the impulse at a sudden brightening to pull over. And it wasn’t two minutes later I gave up trying to talk, and I took my hands of my camera, and off my tripod. I stopped spinning in circles trying to decide where to shoot… I laid my body down on the ice road and stared straight up for what felt like an eternity. There was 360ºs of curtains of green, purple, and pink. It felt like you could reach up and touch them. And while Val & I still yelled back and forth laughing trying to pin point exactly where was the most beautiful, there just aren’t words for what we saw.

Ohh, Yellowknife. Here I am, sitting in a friends living room, overlooking a couple islands and great slave lake just past a few homes along the shore line. It’s a beautiful, sunny day. It’s warmed up to 26 below from the 37 below it was as we were driving back from Vee Lake last night.
I’m really so fortunate to have so many terrific friends here, and always meeting more. There’s at least one of those friends, who, at about 11pm last night, asked what kind of drugs I was on. I was staring at AuroraMax. Yes, again. I had the screen brightness on my MacBook cranked all the way up, and I was tilting the screen forward – for absolute maximum allowing of any ‘shadows’ to show because as I told Val, there was a really, really faint just starting to appear right over Yellowknife. But frankly, if you have to work that hard just to THINK you see a band, you’re probably making it all up in your mind. But I wasn’t. And Val was convinced I was. Fortunately, Val’s husband was on my side. And brought Val back to Earth since when I’m not up here, it’s often her thinking so hard to see that first faint band, that it’s probably more in her mind than actually there.
So, with a short battle of who’s more insane behind us, we ended up on Vee Lake with a new friend from Nashville who wanted nothing more than to see the lights for the first time before she had to be at the airport for her flight home in six hours.

It’s amazing the way these nights go. Starting from home where you’re not sure if you’re actually seeing the aurora on camera, or if it’s all in your mind, to standing in starlight outside the city lights seeing just the faintest band overhead, to, within seconds and minutes of that, curtains of bright green and purple sweeping across the entire sky, right overhead.

What an incredible night. Although it still feels like I’m seeing the aurora for the first time on nights like these, it’s the best thing in the world to be out with friends who are seeing it for their first time. And to our friends just down the lake from us who were yelling, screaming, and laughing hysterically, just like we were at the show all last night, thank you for the incredible fun and for co-creation out there. We loved the company.

It was overcast out there. Really overcast. But like every other night, whether I’m in Yellowknife or not, Val and I were watching the AuroraMax camera monitoring the sky above Yellowknife anyway. Out of nowhere, literally within minutes, the clouds went from overcast to broken revealing bands and swirls of green everywhere. And then it was a flurry of text messages between us… “HURRY UP, HURRY UP, HURRY UP! Get dressed faster! Drive faster! Gooooo!!!!!”.

And so, for me personally, there is only one thing better than driving down a road of packed snow in moonlight, with the shadows of 30 foot trees covered in snow on either side of the road under a still band of the northern lights right overhead. To pull over on the side of the road as the lights get brighter within seconds, lean forward over the dash to get a better view, and then to jump out of the car not really dressed to be outside, without your camera really set up to photograph them. Because there’s just so much magic in witnessing the aurora brighten the sky and landscape all within a matter of seconds. You have to come experience it. It will leave you speechless. What an amazing night.

For a while, there was a bit of a recurring theme happening when I was in Yellowknife. If Jen stayed home in Vancouver, I went to the ice caves. And like any genuinely loving, well meaning boyfriend would do, I text her a few photos of what she missed. After all, they’re only ice caves. It’s not anything really spectacular like incredible frozen formations that our spectacular planet produced entirely on it’s own that are so perfect, and so breathtaking, you couldn’t dream up how it feels to stand before them. It wasn’t anything like that at all, so I couldn’t understand why she was making such a big deal of it. Never the less, I couldn’t stand listening to her complain about not having seen them yet any longer jumped at the first opportunity we had together and happily obliged to take her to them.
Another small reward of not… forgetting about schoolwork, but… confirming you work well with a quickly approaching deadline, is you get to hang out under the northern lights. There was a weekend last Autumn I went to Yellowknife without Jen, just before she left to India, and it was the first time I had ever really seen purple aurora with my eye. Again, wanting to share my experience with her even though she wasn’t with me, I text her what I saw, and well… I probably shouldn’t include the screenshot of text messages she sent me in response to the photo I shared with her guided by my best of intentions. But there was nothing to worry about this weekend, because she stood beside me (with a gun to my head until I set up her ALUMINUM tripod for her, at -33ºC) and savoured another awesome night together under our favourite thing in the entire world.

6:06pm. I had it down to a science that that weekend – when the AuroraMax 360º camera of the Yellowknife sky switches on. 6:06pm on that Saturday night also meant the Canucks season opener on CBC was a minute or two away from puck drop. Of course I don’t stray from my phone for more than a few minutes at a time in Yellowknife, except when I drop it into a snow bank along a sidewalk, but that’s a story for another time, so I took a quick look at AuroraMax before settling in for the Canuck game. The sky was still a deep twilight from sunset at 3:30pm, and… wait, what? The northern lights were out already. Not just a faint blob along the northern horizon, but OUT out… across the sky. Sometimes we’re lucky if we see them before midnight. It was only 6pm. Hello, solar flare.

I panicked a little bit. “JEN GET DRESSED! THE LIGHTS ARE OUT!!!”. To pack carry-on only for a place that’s -40ºC, you wear smart casual on the flight, and pack your one outfit of Winter clothes. Well, I was wearing them. Jen… Not so much. She still wanted to be smart casual. So getting her dressed and out the door in record time with Jason, we were outside the city to the lakes by 7pm. And we didn’t stop, well, that’s not true – we went back home for an hour to our warm apple crumble, until somewhere in the likes of 3 or 4am. I had never seen the lights like this before.

Meanwhile on Facebook, initially unannounced to my cooperative model, Jason, Canada Goose chose me as their January ‘Fan of the Month’ with what is now surely myself & Jason’s most proud moment through our photography/modelling careers thus far. Check out the feature on their Facebook page here!

In a recent trip, I stayed with a new friend in Yellowknife who said something I loved. Something I loved, and something I couldn’t help.

“I heart the fact that he hearts the north. He was willing to face the -40 temps to venture out to Yellowknife’s best hidden treasures. That adventure is hard to find sometimes.”

There is actually more to Yellowknife than the northern lights. I know, hard to believe, and you’d never guess it if you only knew Yellowknife by my blog, but it’s true. There’s a lot of amazing in a place this far north, this accessible by foot. As long as you’re covered nose to toe in Canada Goose attire. And while it isn’t always the most comforting feeling to lose the majority of feeling in your fingers because through your gloves you’ve held onto a metal camera body for a total of a minute and a half, there are methods back to ‘warmth’. You learn very quickly that once you make that fist inside your glove to keep your feeling in your fingers, you can’t go back to individual fingers because without your body warmth filling the rest of the glove, it is now negative thirty something like the air that freezes your nose hair.

We caught the aurora for a little bit through some pretty heavy cloud this night, and when you’re crazy enough to sit out in temperatures that low, there’s such a rush of exhilaration when the clouds break just a little bit.

One of the most inspiring people, and experiences I’ve rendezvoused with was chasing for the northern lights years ago with Kjetil Skogli. Some of my first days I had ever spent viewing the northern lights was on a tour with him through Norway, and what ended up being Finland as well, to escape some cloudy weather. More recently, I spent a week with he and his family in Tromsø which did make my blog.

One of my favourite quotes, and it gives me goosebumps every time I hear it, was from Kjetil where he was hosting some folks at the BBC out on tour one night. “You… You can’t imagine it, you have to… You have to see it.”
On nights like this one, you can’t say it any better than that. You can’t imagine how fast the aurora moves, you can’t imagine how beautiful the greens and purples are to your eyes. I’ve got some pretty grand plans brewing to bring you up to see it, and they are in the works very nicely. Until then, I’ll continue to bring nights like these into your living room – the milky way, the crunch of the snow under your boots, the -41°C, the ice fog, and the most spectacular light show in the universe.

Wild horses couldn’t stop me. It wasn’t our usual weekend. There wasn’t going to be two of us this time, it was just me. I wasn’t staying with anyone I had met before, but in the north, you don’t worry about that sort of thing anyway. The temperatures weren’t even going to be comfortably uncomfortable, they were just uncomfortable. And discovered as recently as 24 hours ago, not only does ice fog roll into Yellowknife and frost everything in the most beautiful white I promise you’ve ever seen in your life, but it also takes a… dry, tolerable? -40°C to -40°C with 100% percent humidity. Which is really fun. But there’s one thing that was the same, my eager anticipation of what unexplainable beauty the hours upon hours of sunrises and sunsets would bring by day, and how the lights would dance, or not, come night.

There are no guarantees the lights will come play, even on the most perfect long winter nights of clear weather, but I can tell you this time, going four for four on nightly aurora viewings was something really special. More to come.

In the highly advanced age of technology with infinite weather apps, and expanding LTE coverage to access them from, a lot of times on our way up to Yellowknife we joke about how cold it’s going to be by if, and how quickly our nose hairs freeze the second our feet switch from inside the aircraft cabin to the iced ramp hooked up to the aircraft at the gate. INSTANTANEOUSLY! There was no buffer of time. Our first breath of arctic air was in, and on the way out, our nose hairs crystallized. Or iciclized.

And still over the course of our stay in the Yellowknife area, (or wherever your final destination may be, isn’t that right, Westjetters?) we were talked into, talked ourselves into?, driving six hours roundtrip around Great Slave Lake to Fort Providence for the Deh Cho Bridge opening. It’s not easy to be organized when it’s -35°, but somehow a half hour bridge walk turned into a few hours of waiting outside. In -35°C. Without the windchill accounted for.

Of course we weren’t going to leave without fulfilling my reason for being. So once the clock struck midnight, and it was officially Jen’s birthday, the lights came out to initiate the celebration. We partied hard, and late. Pretty late. Tears were unintentionally shed – involuntary crying is just a byproduct of hours outside at -32°C. And heading back home with Samantha in the comfort of a +25°C Ford Escape, she asked if we were jumping and dancing around down there on the frozen lake. We had been. It’s just a byproduct of watching the northern lights dance across the sky of a full moon. Three or four years strong into this, and no excitement lost. Not once. Ever.

How cold was it in Yellowknife? Have you ever seen a cat crawl completely underneath a duvet to sleep? That’s how cold.

Now let’s all congratulate Jen on her brand new Canada Goose parka, and Jason on FINALLY WINTERIZING A LITTLE BIT.

They say when you don’t know where to start, go to the beginning. So Thursday night, like they always used to be, Jen and I spent it packing after we were both off work late. Stuffing, cramming, sitting on on our little black 22″ suitcases for our early morning departure to the great (almost all white) north. Have you ever tried to pack everything you need for days and nights spent outdoors photographing, hiking, and standing around for hours in the high teens? Wait, the NEGATIVE high teens. You know, -18°C into the low twenties. Only, the low twenties this weekend. We may as well have been in shorts, hey, Yellowknife? Wait a minute, …hey, Jason?

Jason is a very good friends of ours up in Yellowknife who, in the Winter at least, has a habit of making Jen & myself look like the biggest, most pathetic, un… Canadian like ‘Northerners’ in all of the country. I go out in boots, long johns, snow pants, and my beloved Canada Goose parka – Jason goes out in hikers, jeans, and a light bomber. If you’re unfamiliar with his work, do yourself a favour and enjoy a few hours here. Or don’t, because if you do, you’re likely to never come back here, and I like it with you here.
The three of us spent an afternoon avoiding Canadian shield dynamite blow-outs along the Ingraham trail toward Cameron falls, and then one of the most breathtaking sites I’ve personally I’ve ever seen in Canada. And while this trip didn’t end with that sky-filling, purple and green dance Samantha, Jen & I have become a little too accustom to, it was by far, one of our most memorable yet. And we’ll be back for more, real soon.

with just hours until summer solstice, why WOULDN’T i blog about winter right? obsessed much? i just, have to tell you, how great of an aurora chasing winter is right around the corner. great things are happening in this little studio apartment to chase the northern, and southern lights, like never before. and until then, there’s LOTS of great sessions and weddings on the way. best yet, friends!

the title makes this sound like a novel coming from a brilliant imagination. getting stuck in a foot and a half of snow on a frozen lake, somewhere outside yellowknife, as the northern lights dance overhead. you almost couldn’t make this up. fortunately, or unfortunately, although it’s funny now, because we got home that same night (early morning – whatever) it is fortunately, it makes for a good story, and is yet another bit of oddity in my love for a place so beautiful, so north, and so cold.

what better place to be on a friday night, in perfect weather (clear skies, light winds, and -22°C) than on a frozen lake, away from the city lights of downtown yellowknife, set up with my camera to once again, after way too long, enjoy the dance of the northern lights. it was magical. just like i remember almost exactly one year ago seeing them for the first time in my own backyard of northern canada. watching a band of faint white stretch the horizon shimmer into a noticeably green shade while it starts to crackle and curtain into colours of magenta and purple… it is indescribable.

and for a little adventure, because you can’t JUST fly to yellowknife for 48 hours and forty minutes. the three of us had piled back into the explorer as the lights started to fade – perhaps us driving to a new location would spark them again, and backing up a slight incline in less than compact snow was proving to be a little bit more difficult than maybe we had envisioned. ‘just pull forward onto the lake and we’ll turn around and come back up’. i could feel my anxiety building just a little. the snow was less compact than before. we were sinking. we had sunk. we weren’t going anywhere. on our own. we were stuck. and digging down to try and get some branches beneath the tires wasn’t working either. with no luck reaching a tow company, it wasn’t thirty seconds later that two trucks pulled into the ‘parking lot’ above. some minutes later, we had our escape rigged up to their truck, both vehicles in reserve and eventually with four of us on the front of the escape pushing up through the foot and a half of snow (in moonlight – bromantic, i know), we rocked the escape out of the hole we’d dug it into and were free as a ptarmigan on great slave lake.
take THAT, tourists at aurora village! …alex and samantha are now taking adventure bookings.

friends, i have issues, and i may be insane. you’re welcome, clients who think you want to book with me!

i was on the bus home from work, heading to superstore for a grocery shop. i know, groceries on public transit – sucks right? but who cares, that’s not my issue. in fact, you should have seen my stack of groceries inside those black fabric bags. playing tetris with bags all day at the airport has it’s perks ;) anyway, groceries or not, i was still a few stops away from mine, i had a few minutes, twitter is usually a good time passer. “@auroramax: an aurora is now visible above yellowknife, northwest territories. check it out here…” my phone is in the red. i’m down in the single percentage. i need two things to grocery shop. music. and my ‘reminders’ app. i should be all right for battery. maybe. i check it out anyway… asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/astronomy/auroramax/

then, it happened. the sky was filled with curtains of green, streaks of purple. on a 360 degree webcam. a webcam. i felt it, my heart started to beat fast, it went into my throat, and then it sank. anxiety. all over again. everything seemed to slow down, and my thoughts? it’s monday. i can’t leave until thursday night. at the earliest. why is there a storm hitting the earth’s magnetic field tonight? this entire universe revolves around me, who the hell missed the memo, and why. but i got over it, and here i am settled back in at home, with a full fridge. freezer. whatever. and prepared on the other side of my apartment is a post with another breathtaking show of the aurora borealis, a couple weeks ago, like i had never seen before. i had never seen purples so vivid to my eyes. i’d never seen it dance so fast. i’d never before stood back from my tripod, without the cable release in my hand, given entirely in to just watch it swirl and dance, because as good as i am photographing the lights, there’s no photographing the way it’s moving straight up my head. and maybe one day, that full freezer of mine, will be up in yellowknife, where i’m convinced i belong.

#auroraborealisanxiety

we looked up out the sun roof, out the side windows, straight out of the front windshield and we were socked in. it was all a mess of orange and bright white puffy no-goodness. hours passed at a variety of still lakes, at different pull offs along the ingraham trail. cell service came and went with the kilometres driven, the clouds didn’t. we were watching the aurora dance through the now broken cloud, but it was about to become one of those nights. the kind of night i once spent with good friend, kjetil, when we started off in tromsø, along the norwegian coast, and ended up in finland still chasing for clear skies.

it was now one of those nights. it was one of those nights i would be sitting at home on my couch, glancing up to my mac where open i had a chrome browser with aurora max’s live shot of the yellowknife sky. their 360 degree webcam was filled with a transparent layer of broken cloud, and bands of aurora stretching the entire sky. we stopped the car, looked straight up, and were baffled. really baffled. ‘that’s the sky above yellowknife’. i would look straight up… ‘this is the sky above yellowknife. i don’t underSTAND!’ but as we drove back toward the city, the skies cleared, star square footage almost seemed to match cloud square footage, and finally, after four hours under starless skies, a calm green danced the night away.

it’s my brother’s fault. yeah, what older sibling hasn’t said that in front of an audience before ;) he made me watch a conspiracy show about how solar flares will end our planet because they’ll knock out all our power grids. the only thing that came to mind for me? …well, at least i’ll croak watching the most amazing aurora this earth will have ever seen, and then when i’m up floating around up in non-physical a few moments later, i’ll REALLY have a view to die for.

things happen quickly for me. it’s kind of like – i speak it, get giddy about it, forget about it, and it materializes. it’s a pretty cool way to move through life. granted, sometimes it gets a little bit out of control. coincidence, creation, rendezvousing… call it what you will.
wednesday’s are THE day. they’re the day i ask to the sun to have a little pow-wow, a little solar flare, and then spew solar wind straight for the earth, so that by the time it arrives at earth on friday and saturday evening, i’m up in yellowknife under infinite stars on the edge of still lakes. so with solar wind en-route to earth, jen and i again jumped a flight up north and had the show of a lifetime. again.

somehow, at our b&b once we arrived and were getting settled in, i had this crazy idea of seeing a thunderstorm and the northern lights simultaneously. and seriously, that night, sheet lightning rolls overhead and off into the distance as the aurora comes out. you just can’t make this stuff up… check out the clouds on the horizon.

every single person who knows me intimately, not at all, or just on twitter – isn’t that right, samantha, knows that my idea of night life, and probably 98.7% of the rest of the world’s idea of night life, are polar opposites indeed. but once you see it, there is no denying it.

i got a text from a friend as i was leaving for this trip. it was different from a lot of others. it wasn’t the… ‘yellowknife again? why are you going there? you can go anywhere westjet flies, why would you choose yellowknife?’ text.it was different, it inspired something really unique, and my thirty seconds of focus on this particular text message sent me spiralling into every reason i go. a friend of a friend saw my some of my aurora posts, and wants to come see the northern lights for herself one day. ‘i don’t have the money right now, but one day soon i want to go.’

i love you all very much, but i’ve never cared very much what you think. i don’t live anything in my life for the approval, agreement, or praise of others. i just aim to do what i love to do the most. i’m a pretty simple person. spending as many nights in my life, as the bank account will allow, under the northern lights is something i haven’t been able to get away from since i experienced it first a few years ago in norway. and i hope it never stops, because inspiring new friends to what i love so much, is almost as thrilling to me as just doing it for myself.

here’s night two of last weekend – september the third, and early on the fourth. enjoy, friends.

what’s better than getting back early, early sunday morning to the cutest little cat on your bed right?

my weekends are dramatic. my entire life is pretty dramatic, because i like it that way, mostly, but for the sake of you making it down to the photos – let’s just talk about my weekends. let’s talk about yellowknife, the northern lights, and a woman with a heart bigger than the sky. jennifer, on the other hand, who has learnt to deal with my dramatics via a heart of steel, told me ‘things will work out. they always work out for you. just chill. something’ll come up.’ i shouted back ‘NO! IT’S NOT OKEI!’ in an all caps text to her early wednesday night. i KNEW we had to be in yellowknife friday night for the weekend, and i knew going up for just one night saturday would be greatly unsatisfying. friends places were full, my three favourite bed and breakfasts’ were completely booked. friday of a long weekend, you’re forever my good friend and arch nemesis. so in a last ditch effort at about midnight on wednesday, i tweeted something to the effect of being jealous of samantha seeing the aurora outside her home in yellowknife. not three tweets later, jen and i had a bed, not just a floor, but a bed, for friday night. we were going, and we weren’t going to have to share a tent with the bears in the forest.

so what do you say about meeting someone else who, too, shakes with giddiness as the skies miraculously clear in the evening after a day of total overcast skies? how do you tell the story of feeling like family in a cozy home with perfect people, or finally straining our neck once again watching the aurora borealis dance the skies until three in the morning over a still lake? i don’t really think you do. this is friday night, saturday night is up next.

you think back to some of the stuff you’ve seen, to some of the places you’ve travelled and it just makes you realize how perfect the place you’re standing in right now is the exact right one. there was a time not very long ago, just a few years, where i didn’t even know what the northern lights were, but i was on the perfect path to go ass over tea kettle right under them, so to speak.

and so right now, travelling between vancouver and yellowknife every weekend to chase them, because it feels the best thing in the world to do, i’d never imagined i’d have felt what it could be like to share the aurora with friends, who, for the last three years, and have been wanting so much to see them with their own eyes. when one of jen’s friends at work got wind of our insanity, she wanted nothing more than to meet us there for the lights. and on night two, we did. and while there was no drive into the far out countryside, or car to keep warm in, it was perfect. there were the lights, and there we all were to shout out to one another when the aurora began to pulse stronger and dance vividly. who’d have ever thought flying to such a perfect city in the north of our country was actually attainable every weekend, or to make such great friends, and have such breathtaking experiences. who’d have known.

maybe it took twenty two years, but to find something that makes your heart SING, there’s no price. there are no travel dues to pay, there’s no winter conditions that could keep you from it. to find something that really makes your heart SING is, it’s what life is all about. to me. there are no words to explain it, or words to help others understand. you know when you find it. and you find perfection everywhere you go when you follow the perfection your soul knows.

there is, without question, magnificence to spending your night in starlight watching colours in the sky rocket around at a hundred miles an hour while it turns the snow green, but when you can connect with friends, and share that together… it’s something indescribable. what better fun than to bust out dance moves you once swore were only for your private viewing in your very own apartment, in front of friends to keep warm. how fun is it to fall back onto the snow bundled up in snow pants, gloves, and a fur lined hood, lying looking straight up at the sky. there is no thing better in my world than this, and when i left monday saying it was one of the best nights of my life, it sounded dramatic, absolutely, but it absolutely was one of the best nights i’ve had in my life. there are no words to describe it. there really are no words to describe any of it. there are no words to bring it to you here, and all i was able to do in the car driving back from the lake that night was trip over my tongue. it leaves you speechless. i promise.

and in a couple more sleeps, we’re back on westjet 108 to yellowknife for another weekend of these deliciously satisfying, overwhelmingly breathtaking, joyous, creative moments. you’ll know where to find us, friends.

here are some shots i set up pretty much blind as far as focusing goes. lit by the moon and the aurora ;) here’s jason…

jen! check out her frozen eyelashes and hair!

myself, of course! interesting side note – i’d never felt the cold so harshly on my teeth before as i did after two takes of this ;)

it was early in the night again when jen and i were in the living room making friends with another couple, from vancouver as well, when we spotted a faint band appearing between the quickly passing clouds. we loved the company so much. travelling so far north and of course rendezvousing with another couple so invested, and adoring… appreciating the sky as we do… you can’t describe how it feels. you just have to feel it, and connect with it. we milked such a pleasant time as we ran out onto great slave lake, at times dancing our bodies backwards into the wind out there, and maybe it was only a few minutes of the northern lights so early, but coming so far and missing it so much back home, i was determined to milk every moment of this. we did. we absolutely did.

so when jason met us out front of the bayside b&b on our way out of the city lights, it wasn’t anything like having to land an aircraft on a frozen lake covered in large snow drifts, but i suppose we took a little bit of a chance crashing through them in the car to pass over to a more isolated area of vee lake. the winds were gusty. 55 kilometres an hour gusty. and it was already -29 degrees celsius as we piled out of the car for a second consecutive dance party in the sky. and on the ground. both jen and i busted out moves in a -50 something windchill throughout the night ;)

it’s never easy leaving something you love that you don’t have constant access to, but we would come back soon. we had to. so by the time three something in the morning had rolled around, we had packed up our cameras and chased a fox or two back up the lake on the way into town. and as typically canadian as it was, we pulled up to tim horton’s drive-thru ordering extra-large warm drinks & a doughnut each knowing it wouldn’t be the last time either…

i remember being downstairs in our room at the bayside bed & breakfast, and poking my head out the door leading onto the porch every few minutes eager for what was out there. it was around 9:00pm, and finally through some clouds, a faint, faint, faint band in the sky appeared. jen called it at the exact same time as me. i felt like i wanted to run upstairs and get everyone, shout it into the neighbourhood that the northern lights were out! in the blink of our eyes, jen and i suited up, sort of, it was only -5 so far, and ran off our porch, jumped down the backyard onto great slave lake and ran across the runway as fast as we could.

after we had a distant rendezvous with a fox on the runway, the clouds were pretty consistently blowing through, so it was a perfect time to hook up with an old friend of mine, and from there drove out to vee lake, about a half hour outside yellowknife, where we spent the rest of the night…

It’s five fifteen in the morning, you’ve just had two and a half hours of sleep knowing a thirty hour travel day awaits you, and you’re standing outside a huge casino resort in flip flops with frozen toes, next to your 40 pound suitcase. Ask me how to stay forward looking in the midst of an extreme travel day. I’ve had some experience here, and here. I do it by anticipating pleasant rendezvous. By imaging the most beautiful skies. By hoping for the northern lights. By striving to enjoy the journey as much as I knew I would enjoy Turkey, Russia, Georgia, the Ukraine, and Greece themselves. So this time, without the long, dramatic travel day story, I was where I wanted to be, and these few images are but a fraction of that journey to Athens, where we would board our M/S Prinsendam to take us out into the Black Sea.

Dress… a jacket short of a suit, a small black shoulder bag filled lightly with a camera & two lenses. A small red roller bag with my tent, toothpaste, change of clothes, and sleeping sheet, and a Gitzo carbon fiber tripod dangling from my free hand. I stepped out of the cockpit of our Dornier aircraft in a small town up North I’m becoming increasingly good friends with, Fort Nelson, BC and was recognised immediately by our girls who clearly hadn’t forgotten what I look like since my last visit a few months prior. While it was starting to get late after an extended dinner & drinks at Boston Pizza with Shelby and four of her girlfriends, I still had a few hours to pass before the skies would dance overhead in greens and purples.

I had set out to camp at the school. In dress shoes, nicely fitted skinny dress pants, a shirt & skinny tie. Shelby would be back to pick me up at 07:30 and take us both to the airport – her work day, my flight back home. As brilliant as it sounded to camp out in the middle of a field surrounded by forest, I couldn’t ignore the calling of a safe, wildlife free hotel room. No bears. No mosquitos. No strange noises. A one bedroom suite. A jacuzzi in the living room. A kitchen. A king bed.

Walking the outskirts of town in skinny jeans & a now, slightly sweaty t-shirt, I glance to the corner of my right eye to a window rolling down from the biggest truck I’ve seen all night. “Sean?! …Is that you? …I have a hot chocolate for you! I was going to drop by the school and see if you wanted some company.” It was Christine, who I was introduced to in the middle of four other names at dinner all in about 6.4 seconds. I, of course, didn’t know that until I asked her three hours later, and we’d driven 20 minutes outside town down a logging road up to an incredible lookout over the entire Northern Rockies.

It was a funny thing. The northern lights weren’t half as active as forecast, but none of that seemed to really matter very much. They were there. And we watched in deep appreciation as they fade in and out leaning back on the front of her dad’s truck out atop this mountain in the middle of no where. Hours passed. We told our life stories to one another. We enjoyed it for everything it was worth.

So, how do we come home after just a single night away, and begin to try and describe this experience to our friends, family… blog stalkers? There really aren’t any combination of words, no matter how eloquently put together, that can bring you this experience. I can talk for hours about the way the aurora dances a tango across the entire sky, entire sky, or about how it will just pulsate itself into existence out of nowhere, but it isn’t anything you can imagine, or take my word for. Absolutely, these photographs are gorgeous and they may give a slight sense of what I’m all about when I light up entirely as I talk about my experiences under the northern lights, but, what it’s really about for me, are those moments… Those moments of wrapping my arms around Jen while we stare straight up, and just about feel as though the aurora is dancing just for us.

And while a weekday break to Fort Nelson doesn’t quite have the same natural romantic ring as a weekend break to Venice, Italy does – it did for us, and it was more. It was romantic in a way that was perfect to us, and standing in a mix of mud, snow & slush for four hours certainly won’t do it for some, but it did for us.

Here’s a little something I put together that gives you a slight sense of our evening when the lights didn’t immediately dance right across the sky and out of my frame ;) Enjoy.

northern lights – 6 april 2010 from sean norman on Vimeo.

“He stalks the aurora. Like actually. He’s not just obsessed, he stalks it…” That’s how Jen cut off my words while talking to the waitress at Boston Pizza once we’d got into town. I guess checking the aurora activity several times every single day for months sort of… quantifies that doesn’t it.

So when Jen called me on her break as usual late Monday evening, and the first thing I said (yelled) when I picked up the phone to her was “WHAT ARE THE CHANCES OF YOU DROPPING EVERYTHING AND FLYING UP TO FORT NELSON WITH ME TOMORROW FOR A NIGHT?!”, she should’ve known exactly what was up. …I was stalking the aurora, and watching a geomagnetic field storm from my computer monitor which was not acceptable. I was going North to see the lights, and she was coming with me.

Something to the tune of not being packed, missing work, missing class, not having a flight, not having accommodation, and not sure how this was going to come together gave us a sort of exhilaration we couldn’t quite put to words. We knew what it was all about though, we knew even before we left we love to travel together and love to be spontaneous together. We love just being. It doesn’t matter if we’re sitting in Waves Coffee – her working away on school papers, me on the editing of something, or if we’re hundreds of kilometres away standing alone at the edge of a forest in the middle of the Canadian North under those majestic northern lights. And, to see her face absolutely light up when I pointed North at a very faint green band over the city lights as we were walking down the Alaska highway… it gave me the utmost joy & appreciation for another little moment win. So we ran down the highway, up a muddy hill to the edge of the forest and spent the next four hours just being.

Do come back and join us for the second half of our evening in a few days! We’d love to have you along. More coming!

How magnificent is a half moon in clear skies rising across the south sky while the aurora plays in the north sky? It’s pretty close to perfect. Especially as the sweetest young couple out with us from England decided to get engaged under this night sky. He knew exactly how perfect the moment was, and even from the distance, each of us were as overjoyed for them as they were. It can be difficult to imagine something so completely breathtaking become even more so, but it happens.

I’m just extremely thankful Kjetil didn’t point out the fox holes I stumbled over numerous times sooner than he did or there would’ve been no way I’d have fought my way through the two feet of snow all over to obtain some of these foregrounds. So thanksverymuch indeed!

If you’re here to compare posts with previous posts, then it’s probably best to close this window before you read much further. After only a few nights of chasing the northern lights, one of the most important things I’ve learnt is how completely futile it is to compare one evening to another. In fact, not only is it impossible, but it’s really the quickest way to lose the feeling of pure exhilaration that is observing and chasing the aurora borealis. No two displays will ever catch up with one another, and each has it’s own very distinct beauty. This evening was certainly far less dramatic, but it was ridiculously beautiful filled with a certain magic that is, once again, impossible to describe with words from a place of not being directly under the aurora itself.

I cannot recall, for the life of me, a time where I have felt more love, more appreciation, and more enthusiasm for being here on planet Earth. I just can’t. Even now beginning to put together this post, I’ll include a photo into the area below and the very feeling of that moment washes over my body. Goosebumps and all, zipping up my jacket so quickly I cut my lip wide open and all, throwing my arms in the air, my hands on my head and all.

To quote Kjetil… “It is one of the best nights so far this season.” But it was cold. So cold. The wind howled at the water where we started, dropping the temperature to below -20, easily. We took a chance and headed inland just after 10p to a beautiful valley you’ll be seeing more of (think camping with a bonfire), where it was much cooler – but felt a million degrees warmer without the wind. Enough words, here’s sight of our Wednesday evening…

I’m not sure if you’ve seen her, because she loves a fun, tireless game of hide & seek but when she comes out to play – she plays, endlessly. If you’ve seen her, you know there aren’t words that accompany these moments. In fact, there aren’t even words to help define the sight of her or re-live these moments away from her. You just… you can’t describe it, you… you have to see it, you have to stand in the -12 for six hours in snow a foot and a half deep, surrounded by the Norwegian mountain scape and the dead silence of the valley.