Closing in

Unsure in yet another feeling of a spring arriving much too early, I can’t decide if it’s just my lack of experience in Whitehorse, and this is the usual here - to be flirting with temperatures around freezing and seeing the outside world melt - or if this really just is the changed way of the north now.

This daytime warmth and melt is a familiarity I used to find in Yellowknife toward the middle of April, so normal or not, this still feels strange.

We’re nowhere close to the end of the aurora season yet, there are plenty of dark nights ahead still - despite that soon the sidewalks and neighbourhood streets will be dry enough for evening roller blades.

In the meanwhile as I write this, it’s +1° outside, with the sun drying up my patio. The warmth of the sun on my skin is easily identifiable and for a moment I wonder if it’s worth throwing off the cover of the patio furniture for a coffee outside.

But the last few weeks have been the closest we’ve had to a real winter this year. Nightly temperatures sunk consistently into the -20s, and low -30s. Aurora chases have taken us from barely outside the city limits to well over a hundred kilometres out in search of clear skies. We’ve experienced everything from the softest nights of the aurora to the absolute most spectacular.

Life gets really busy over these next few weeks, but I’ll be back with more again soon.

A highway chase

It wasn’t quite the way I had the night drawn up on paper, but isn’t that the way working with mother nature on multiple fronts goes.

I had hoped that after making our way some 70 or so kilometres from town, we’d have arrived under mostly clear skies. However we had arrived under mostly cloudy skies, which was a vast improvement from town, but far from ideal. Clear sky was breaking from the south west, which prompted a little running back and forth chasing clear breaks along the highway. Referencing weather maps, running a few kilometres, rinse and repeat for the first half of our night. And finally later in the night, the weather stabilized and arcs of green aurora shone through clear sky now open in the north.

Winter blues

The full moon blue night sky on a frozen lake is the heart of winter kind of feeling for me. These few months are the time of year full moons transit brightly through the sky high over snow covered landscapes. Ghostly greens and vibrant pinks dance across the horizon in front of us at -27°, and that feels so much like home.

Every one of us was bundled up tightly in our parkas, in our big boots and big mittens, faces covered, and that was a kind of comfort too. It’s a comfort of what winter should feel like and how I love it to feel like. So having to dress this way out of necessity feels almost like a privilege when so many days and nights lately just bounce between 0 and -10°. My fingers and face appreciate the warmer temperatures very much, but for my heart, the -30s are far more comforting.

Units of time

We started earlier than usual from town, making two very immediate stops off the highway on our way out. The aurora teased early, and if that would have been all for the night, it would have been okay, but as our night grew later into our more usual hours, I became more and more convinced we needed to stay out.

But that’s not always easy, especially over quieter periods of time with not much changing in front of our eyes, except the clock - very slowly, and the frequency of our yawns - increasing rapidly.

“I find the key is to think of the day as units of time, each unit consisting of no more than 30 minutes.”

Hugh Grant, in one of my all time favourite movies, About a Boy, talks about breaking up the day into units of time. And as I began to write this post and think back on this night, his line about units of time fell perfectly into my mind for this post.

Sometimes as nights get later and I data watch a little heavier than normal, I break time into 15 minute units. It’s short enough that I can continually re-evaluate where we are, but long enough that it allows for change to take place in external conditions.

This was my key for the night, and it took us through 3am in the -30s to this most breathtaking dance across the entire sky. It was perfect.

Back to the frozen abyss

Deep winter, sunrise views along the Alaska Highway at the edge of Kluane National Park are some of my favourite views. Favourite, favourite views.

We were in and out of ice fog for a lot of the day, a lot of the drive. You can’t have the magic of a hoar frost covered landscape without the suffocatingly dense ice fog first.

This is the environment and the climate that I just can’t be without. It’s so beautiful it almost hurts the soul.