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.

My dream May

For a year, I’ve been so looking forward to these nights again. I loved the memory of them so much, it almost seemed improbable I would find that same love in them again this year.

But it’s the memory of the dust clouds rising behind the car travelling down narrow gravel roads deep in the countryside and seeing beautiful golden light fall over endless forests and up mountains which make me hopeful. They are the small moments and the simple things, the real things that tie these nights to my heart just as much as the beautiful photography.

Short of breath

It wasn’t just the weight of my camera bag and balancing walking over river rock along the beach for kilometres, it was everything else around it. These nights are just filled with my deepest, most pure loves in this life.

They are the nights that energize me and fully awaken my soul. I could stay out all night in the quiet of the countryside, putting aside sleep again. All of the sound around is just the swans and ducks, and the ice crushing up against itself. Occasionally we hear elk calls from the forest behind us while we stand on the beach, but it is an overwhelmingly soul calming quiet.

Heavy eyes

For all of my love of May and energy I get from these perfect nights in the countryside that are full of real life, I still come back home and crash. I settle myself into my little office with my laptop to write and edit photos, and my eyes get heavy so quickly. I can’t even put together all the images for a single post. I just want to sleep, and sleep and sleep and sleep. It is a strange contrast in life to feel the extremes so intensely, but it’s a part of the spring here I’m just so in love with.

A night for the world to enjoy

On Friday morning, I noticed aurora conditions were the strongest I’ve ever seen. Despite forecasts of very intense geomagnetic storming, the data surprised me. I passed the day refreshing data and weather updates, waiting for the daylight hours to pass, of which there are many now.

Then, about halfway through the first period of game 2 of the Canucks & Oilers, the internet was dying a slow, painful death - which is really just another Friday for those trapped in Northwestel’s monopoly of the north. And then all phone service was gone too, and none of it was coming back. So what better circumstance to push us out the door into the countryside for a long night ahead than that?

I was curious though. Was it just me, or something more widespread. I wondered if it had to do with this geomagnetic storm knocking out some communication lines. So on the drive out of town, I tuned into local radio - something I had not done for… years, maybe.

“This is an emergency message from the Government of Yukon”

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My dad worked in radio when I was young and I loved it. I still love it. He has that perfect, lost art radio voice, which of course most definitely did not find it’s way down to me. My earliest memories of radio were my dad and the voices of Canuck play-by-play announcers - Jim Robson, Jim Hughson and John Shorthouse, all among the best in the business.

Radio represents a more simple time. It’s nostalgic for me, and I love that.

When we finally programmed the tuner in my car to any local radio we could find, it’s when we heard between songs a message from the government that forest fires in the south had destroyed communication infrastructure which was causing all phone and internet to be down. It was a nice to know thing, and nothing you’re going to do anything about. So we continued on with our drive, slowly passing elk and dodging running bunnies.

Dressed for winter

It still makes us laugh walking out the door in insulated snow pants, down jackets, and balaclavas, while throwing our parkas in the back of the car these nights. But that’s our life in the middle of May and I wouldn’t choose anything else. The wind blows relentlessly, and it’s still that cold, cold winter wind walking across frozen sandy beaches down a small fjord finding our perfect little spot.

All of our night out there was magical, as we knew it would be. The weather, the aurora and the quiet of the environment was everything perfect, and we knew everyone far south around the world from Washington to Germany would be enjoying this one too - and they did.

Cat and mouse

Usually I would say, ‘We can have the best aurora conditions in the world, but without clear skies, that doesn’t really matter.’

Chasing the aurora sometimes often begins days in advance from the cosiest corner of a beige IKEA Söderhamn sofa. A light knitted throw, pillows, tea and too many tabs open on my laptop studying trends and forecasts kind of sounds idyllic, but it’s equally agonizing.

There is a real equilibrium here though. The broader circumstance of things being completely out of any of our control provides a strange calm and peace, but it’s my emotional attachment to the experience that makes these decisions sometimes so painstaking.

Tonight, the aurora conditions looked pretty bad and they were trending worse. The skies were clear, and if the aurora conditions would just break away even a little bit, it could be perfect. However I was beginning to lean more heavily, although still hesitantly, that we trust in a more perfect alignment of all conditions tomorrow. It left me uneasy, as these decisions always do, but I am used to that now.

So as it came time for a decision, I suggested we wait a night - despite the perfect weather.

This next day, the clear skies stayed, and the aurora conditions changed trends in perfect time. Sometimes a little game of cat and mouse works out in the most magical way.

A quick check in on spring melt

A year ago, I couldn’t understand how beautiful the end of April and beginning of May was here. I was in it but I couldn’t make sense of it.

I struggled every night choosing between playoff hockey double headers or long countryside sunset drives and drone flights. The sunset chases and changes in the ice drove me night after night into the latest hours of the night with a chest so full of love it constantly felt like it was going to explode. But it was not always like this.

“I always hated May so much.”

There was a time not long ago when almost the day after my last April aurora chase in Yellowknife, I would be fulfilling an itch to leave the territory as fast as I possibly could to go south until summer was in full swing and there wasn’t a trace of the dusty, uncomfortably bright and underwhelmingly dead countryside of May.

But May in Whitehorse cannot go slow enough. I wish the nights would last forever, and there’s nowhere I’d rather be than here. This weekend was the perfect opportunity to check in on the progress of spring, and all of what I fell so in love with a year ago is right on schedule. I never love losing the aurora for the summer, but as she begins to inevitably fade into later and later and everlasting sunsets and sunrises for the next few months, I am so ready for these magical evenings that are just ahead.

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