The blog
“It’s a great night to go to work!”
I was supposed to be getting my final things together to get out the door, but I was just running and back forth between the east and west windows of my apartment. The aurora was arcing overhead and curtains were dancing.
Walking around the front of my car, I was trying not to kill myself on the skating rink the parking lot had become while also watching the aurora dance overhead. I took a quick video and shot it off to my family chat...
“It’s a great night to go to work!”
Our night that followed was spectacular of course. After a short drive to add a little further separation from incoming cloud, the aurora danced, and danced and danced and danced.
Warm temperatures, little wind, and beautiful moonlight - it was the most exhilarating of nights with the aurora in all of her heavenly splendour.
Auroral activity did come back down the following couple nights, but still we enjoyed beautiful skies and vibrant colours even under the spring full moon. They were the nights that make my heart swell with love for this magical phenomenon that give so much beauty and meaning to life.
The usual suspects
“All we need are clear skies and patience.”
It is my most sung song. It is everything in aurora chasing and so much of my world.
This time of year, the weather moves so fast. It snows sideways in the streetlights one minute, and ten later, clear skies are overhead. Panic and worry is completely unnecessary, and instead I’m getting used to living in the Icelandic mantra of ‘If you don’t like the weather, wait 10 minutes.”
Nights this week were filled with breathtaking auroras, of course all the way through to the far too early morning. The ice sings loud, the temperatures swing widely, and this morning I stood against the frame of my balcony door with it swung half open, feeling the warmth of the sun with my coffee in hand.
The annual March heatwave has arrived and spring melt is on.
A very messy time and an empty blog
The last month has been me surviving a relatively controlled level of daily chaos, with still far too little sleep and not nearly enough time in the days to keep up blogging.
CaptureOne is littered with nights and nights of aurora chases, all with beautiful stories to tell.
Each night, the hours into the early morning have been the calmest and slowest of my days and weeks. Gentle clear sky chases and magical timing with the aurora has been the soothing I’ve been craving. It’s a time where there’s no rush, nothing else to do but carefully read weather maps and travel slowly out between locations.
This underlying calm is something I’ve always loved more than anything in aurora chasing. There’s always still such excitement for each night, but the underlying calm from a chase of something we have no control over is, in an otherwise completely chaotic time, so soothing.
So here’s a short collection of some of my nights lately, from new moon to full moon.
Equal parts exhilaration and exhaustion
A couple of nights with opposite forecasts. “Clear” and “mainly cloudy”, but they meant the same thing, as they usually do… Skepticism of forecasts and predictions, and a subsequent chase into clear sky.
Still they fill me with exhilaration, and equal parts exhaustion.
Dramatic weather is nothing new to Whitehorse, but a few days above freezing at the end of January flipped the city from the most beautiful, hoar frost covered, crisp white winter wonderland into the quintessentially ugly northern spring of gravel, brown slush, and icy deathtraps.
Now, a week or two later as I sit here and write this, heavy snow finally falls outside blanketing all the frozen brown slush after a night of ice fog sat over the city. Low cloud covers the mountains and the sky is just an endless, flat grey tone.
It’s the cosy winter days I dream of.
The most beautiful part in all of that above freezing mess was the melting of so much snow on the lakes. Puddles formed and refroze, reflecting gorgeous colours and intensities of light from the aurora.
The ice became the loudest I’ve heard this year. All through the night, the lake sung in the deepest tones; a constant companion through the -33° night.
A meditative state
Sitting out on the counter from a late, late bake the night before were some 5-minutes-too-long-in-the-oven scones.
In the morning now, snow just fell and fell and fell from low, overcast cloud. It seemed like every time I looked out the windows, the clouds had gotten lower until none of the mountains were visible at all.
It really was just the cosiest homebody kind of day, where the 11am sunrise blurs into the late afternoon sunset, and my cosy window lights never lose their glow against the sky outside, and we were supposed to be going to the mountains.
We easily agreed to delay 24 hours, leaving plenty of time for a new batch of scones to be over-baked, however I didn’t. Sugar was still nowhere to be found, and these couldn’t be completely inedible, I was mostly pretty sure.
Aside from having to dodge a snowplow a few times, waiting a day was just the best decision. Hot coffee and heartfelt conversation filled the car as we travelled deeper into nature. Fast moving clouds, mountains of snow, and cold, but not frigid, winter air on my face brought back so much Norwegian nostalgia. Time passed far too quickly, and soon we were stumbling down a snowy hillside in the dark.
Sometime while I was sleeping in the late evening after our heavenly afternoon and getting warm drinks ready just before 11pm, the skies had mostly cleared.
Instinctively upon waking up, I look skeptically to the sky in search of cloud banks, double checking weather maps, looking for where the other shoe is going to drop from. I think that’s the years and years of chasing clear sky, obsessing over the weather night after night, for 9 months of the year. But that other shoe wouldn’t come tonight, we were in the clear all evening, but as ever, that’s just half our story.
“Good, but calm. And it would be nice if things were a little bit more unsettled.”
With the weather as close as we come to worry free in Whitehorse, it was onto the aurora conditions which were good, but calm. Full moons in the middle of winter always give some challenges, as beautiful as they are.
We waited as long as we could tonight in the company of the occasionally heard singing ice of the lake. Careful steps out onto the shore cracked the ice under my feet. It was equal parts alarming as calming. There is something so special about the ice. An early morning flight departure eventually brought us back into town. Despite squeezing every last minute out of our clear skies tonight, the aurora remained quiet. Gentle, but beautiful low across the horizon.
