Not the end

"I needed to remind myself... This wasn't going away, not any more than it does every late spring."

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In between so many majestic curtains, coronas overhead, in between chasing my tail being unable to put my tripod down to take a photo because it was all just too beautiful, I couldn’t fully realise that this wasn’t the end. I didn’t want it to end. I couldn’t have it be the end.

It was almost anxiety inducing. And then I realised this wasn’t about Yellowknife, this was about the aurora.
I get varying levels of this every spring, when the aurora gives way to endless daylight, but it hasn’t been this crippling maybe ever. It’s usually an emotionally, mentally, peaceful transition to the bright summer nights.
This was a surfacing fear I was giving the aurora up, but this isn’t that. Leaving a place I have for so long associated with such a deep love is not so straight forward. The aurora will be waiting for me again in the fall, and I will be there to meet her, just in a new, even more beautiful, better feeling, place.

"If there's one thing I've learned, it's that I need this as a big part of my life."

This distinction was one of the most important ones to have made. Chasing my tail holding my tripod, unable to put it down because I was too excited about the aurora in every part of the sky and feeling waves of anxiety as I prepared to leave — this was the beginning of Yellowknife for me. It was nearly every one of those 20-something trips here 10 years ago.

10 years ago, it was as much about Yellowknife as it was about the aurora.

Now it is, I feel it in my bones, now it is just about the aurora.

La bise

Passing 10am, I stepped out of the shower and leaned slowly in toward a mirror. The heaviness of my eyelids was unrelenting, and my cheeks and my nose were unusually rosy. I remembered how they hurt even under my balaclava just 8 hours earlier.

Sometimes even after a sound sleep, that end of winter, frigid day and night, full life exhaustion sets in.

"If aurora hangovers exist, I had found them."

The night before, the wind was finally slowing from the consistently 30 gusting 50km/h it had sustained for days prior. The temperature settled at -34°C. Once again cold enough for my right eye to tear single tears consistently through the night, as it always does when it is so cold. It felt so good to be wrapped up in my parka and in an indescribable warmth, not the least of which was such a magnificent twilight sky.

This is my favourite time of the year to be out with the aurora. I love it so much, and the feeling of these April nights, most definitely this one in particular, I wish I can keep forever.

Another weekend of stollen, ice roads, and the magic valley

Two and a half months since our last visit and it felt like a lifetime of change in between.

"I feel like you've turned a corner, in more ways than one."

Some of the very best, the most raw and deep in my heart moments over the last 7 years here were birthed in the just days between cross country flights at ungodly hours inclusive the misery of 6 hours on Q400s. The winter walk with glühwein, the Zehabesha takeaway nights, the hysterical laughter and genuine weirdness that only two of the closest friends share, and endless, endless tea and coffee consumption.

A few aurora chases and new-to-us-both ice road drives with sweets and coffees made it all too perfect.

Besties.

The magic valley

In a race against time, driving… a little bit quickly… over the last stretch of ice road, I just repeated in my mind “Please, please please. Just a few minutes more.”

I was, of course, speaking directly to the aurora. Begging and wishing for just a little more time before she would dance. It was not a question of if, but when. And it felt strongly like it was an any second thing now.

For the last few minutes driving, I watched my odometer more than I watched the road ahead of me, waiting for the perfect addition of numbers to signal where my turn needed to be.
I could have stopped at any moment, but I wanted so badly to disappear into this little 'valley’. It is my favourite place to photograph the aurora here, but it has been years since I’ve been there.

When I pulled over just where I wanted to be, I didn’t hesitate for a moment in stepping outside. The exterior lights were already in the off position, and as soon as I placed the car in park, they all went dark. I didn’t bother with the interior lights. I just took my camera and tripod, and half zipped up parka outside into the -37° and looked up.

I think before I even shut my car door behind me, I spoke a soft “wooww” out loud, to just myself. The Milky Way and entire moonless sky of stars all around the silhouettes of the mountains was literally breathtaking.

Just some short moments passed, just enough time to extend my tripod legs. And then it was the beginning of hours of the aurora dancing all across the sky. I am sure she was far in the south this night, and just maybe I had her ear.

A heavy heart

I came to Yellowknife for the first time on 25 February 2011. I had chosen Yellowknife because it was the northern most destination on WestJet’s route map. When our plane touched down in Yellowknife and taxied to the terminal, veins of snow blew violently but beautifully across the taxiways beneath us. The sky was overcast.

Both of the next two nights, we walked some metres out from behind our B&B, and watched the northern lights dance.

By the end of that two nights and three days, I wanted to move here. A for sale sign was in front of a condo across from the B&B where we were staying. I looked it up, and the price was more than triple what I was expecting. I felt disappointed, but in a way indifferent over it.

Four years and three months later, I did move here, but two years later than I had planned, and in a completely different life.

Hidden in plain sight

Just a handful of people know this story, and even fewer the raw depth of it, but in 2013 with my then girlfriend, we had made a deposit on a half duplex in Yellowknife. We got to make small changes in the design and choose our finishes. On one of our dozen or two trips to Yellowknife over a few years, we walked to visit the site where we would build.

"It is my most painful heartbreak and my biggest regret."

We stood at the edge of our soon to be home, but for now barren and snow covered lot, when our future neighbours of the duplex which was already built next door arrived home. We introduced ourselves and chatted for some time. They warmly invited us, total strangers, back later in the evening for a cosy visit with tea and cake when they could show us around their place, which was designed and constructed by the same builder we were with. It was a beautiful evening, and we vowed to stay in touch.

Then just months later, hearts were broken and lives were in total upheaval. It is my most painful heartbreak and my biggest regret.
Our relationship ended, and with it, our Yellowknife dream.

Some one and a half years later, I had reflected enough to know I needed to go back to Iceland to find both peace and closure. In the back of my mind was Yellowknife, but I knew I needed to take care of my heart first.

Now back home, I was fully tunnel visioning on Yellowknife. I partnered with the same builders as before to build new, but for months we stalled over finding a suitable lot to build on. There finally came a time I needed to have a decision if we were going to be able to build, or if I would begin searching to buy on the market.

In the end, the project couldn’t go ahead, but in less than 48 hours from that decision, the just 3 year old duplex I was supposed to be living beside, was now listed as for sale.

I called the listing realtor, offered the asking, and bought the home from 2,300km and two provinces away. The family we had tea and cake with a couple years earlier, were now my shared wall neighbours. And immediately on my other side, the very house which was almost ours, that has our fingerprints all over it.

It was in a way a full circle and one of the most surreal things I’ve ever lived.

“You need some green!”

Those shared wall neighbours, before they sold some years ago to move back to Sweden, and before I had any houseplants, left me with their aloe plant. The planter and saucer stick out like a sore thumb in my decor, and now I love that so much. It’s still thriving, in it’s original pot, sitting on it’s mismatched saucer. It’s one of those things in someone’s home that feels so out of place—that you feel it in your bones—there must be a beautiful story buried away in there somewhere.

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A broken soul

This is the part I don’t know how to write. Every time I begin, it leads to the same place; a dark place I don’t want to go back to. I don’t even want to say it, but you know what it is. Over the last two years, I have woken up countless nights in cold sweats. For hours unable to self soothe or come back to relaxed breathing. I have been in tears so many times.

“I don’t think I want to come back here.”

The last two years in the Northwest Territories has torn me apart—my life and my soul. It has killed the part of my soul that was head over heels in love with this place, that couldn’t imagine leaving, and was so in love with this life. It’s taken me this whole two years through single weeks, months, sometimes just days by day and hours by hour, to kind of deal with this and come to terms with it.

I need to move on and to rebuild—financially, emotionally and mentally.

And I think the end just kind of comes at a perfect time when I’m ready to kind of make the next steps that I need to make, to leave my feelings of this territory behind and hopefully leave my broken life behind.

I can begin to sense a certain peace in me.

Maybe the best times of the last two years for me has been the hours spent just listening to the singing ice.

60.72°N

I am leaving Yellowknife, and I’m moving to Whitehorse, Yukon. This spring marks the end for me here.

Beginning in August, I will continue chasing the aurora as my career in my new home of Whitehorse, with such cosy small groups as ever. I want to keep the core of my business just as it’s always been.

In a way, this is so nostalgic for me. It’s the warmer, more dynamic weather and expansive highway infrastructure leading to real aurora chases through mountain scenery and cloud fronts. It feels so much like where I ‘grew up’ chasing the aurora in northern Norway, and I’m just so excited and so nervous to hit the ground there and to begin again. I really, really hope you just might come with me on this journey too.