Alpenglühen
We wanted to leave town earlier tonight, and once again we weren’t sure if we were going to be out all night or not. We’d cross the aurora bridge later. Our tripods were in the back anyway, and we had armed ourselves with ample snacks. We fuelled up the car with gas and ourselves with coffee, so we were all set either way.
The weather was magically dramatic, prompting highway shoulder pullovers several times along the way out. I can never, ever resist these views. It was hard not to rush all the way. I knew how beautiful the ice was, and I couldn’t wait to get back to it with more daylight tonight. I could have flown for hours and hours, taken thousands of photos and far too much video flying over the ice. It was one of the most magical things I’ve ever seen, or as you’re used to hearing me say here, maybe the most beautiful experience of my life.
I had never heard of “Alpenghüen” before Doris’ soft whisper of it as we stood, still in our parkas of course, marvelling at the pink sunlight kissing snowy peaks down the lake. But it was perfect, the perfect word for the perfect moment.
For much of the night, we wished the sky would break open just a little more in the northwest to allow the sun to come through to us and light the mountains surrounding us.
It’s another game I play with the weather. I would rather risk too much cloud than none at all when we are chasing sunsets, but there’s always a balance to strike there. When the light did break through close to sunset, there wasn’t any way to perfectly capture the magic of that light, so we enjoyed it mostly just meandering our way back along the beach to the car.
As we reached the top of the dirt road to meet back up with the Alaska Highway, I thought we should check aurora conditions just in case. After all, we were now almost a half hour past midnight under a sky that had cleared dramatically.
“Great that we checked this before we left the beach” I said, tongue in cheek.
The dirt road isn’t the easiest drive in the world, and it would have been great to know just how good aurora conditions were before we drove a half hour back up to the highway. But after mulling over options for a few minutes, we u-turned ourselves back down toward the lake arriving just in time to see curtains of the aurora begin to dance dramatically overhead.
