The blog
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.
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.
