It never leaves you

“I think sometimes you don’t know what a place is to you until you have to leave it.”

A completely new to me part of the Yukon, and truly I could not believe what we stumbled into. It was like some sort of mystical fairyland cross of Iceland’s Thingvellir National Park, West Fjords and Norway’s coast, but all less than 200km from my door.

This sense of overwhelming, full body, cute rage kind of exhilaration, amazement and disbelief isn’t something I have felt maybe ever. I think sometimes you don’t know what a place is to you until you have to leave it, and then you long for it every day since you’ve left.

As often as I joke about on road trips pulling over every 100m for the changing scenery, this was our reality here. Paralyzed by a complete inability to progress beyond where we were without first combing over every moss and berry covered rock, admiring the little lakes and streams that have formed in every crevice. Peeking over one ridge led to the next and the next and before I knew it, I was far from the car. I lived in a place between wanting to stay forever, but explore further. These days passed much too quickly, but of course we will be back soon again.

An evolution of enjoyment

On any other night in Whitehorse, leaving as early as we did would have been insane, but we had overcast skies to run from and a geomagnetic storm to meet up with.

As I was thinking about potential locations earlier in the evening, I had one place I kept coming back to. Mountain scenery above a river that should be beyond the clouds.

A little more pause

In a still new(ish) experience for me, after 17 years, I wasn’t drowning in hundreds of photos on my computer after a night like this as maybe I usually would have been.

As I was thinking about writing this, the word enjoyment, and finding more enjoyment, kept coming up in a way to describe my experience this night being more balanced in both viewing and living the aurora as actually photographing it, but that really wasn’t it.

I do love living the aurora through photography, and it increases my enjoyment of the aurora just so much. My ‘lack’ of photos from a night like this reflected an additional enjoyment of just standing back and watching in real time the aurora weave itself across the entire sky and feeling the pure amazement in that and the magic of life it brings.

This was an additional enjoyment, and not the replacement of one joy with another.

Abrupt chaos, warm winds, and tripod tumbleweeds

On the run north to escape clouds around Whitehorse, our expected hour or so drive was interrupted out of nowhere about half way through with green and purple curtains raining down over us. We tucked into the nearest driveway and the entire sky filled with green curtains, arcs and vibrant pink edges.

While the aurora retreated into some quieter hours, we moved further up the highway for a better position with the weather for later in the night. Far to the north horizon, a spectacular lightning storm caught all our attention, the aurora still gently everywhere above us.

Almost immediately as we set up here, extended tripods that were not closely guarded were sent tumbling to the ground more times than I could keep count. It was quickly becoming almost comical. And at a temperature of 12°, these winds felt comfortable, almost late summerish, especially compared to the night around freezing two days earlier.

After a lot of patience and hope, the aurora gave us a second beautiful show. Curtains of green and purple again danced around us, and I think I loved the whole of the environment as much as the aurora itself tonight. It’s that magical part of the aurora chase - the wild and the power of nature.

On the way home, we fought the wind the entire way. I had not felt anything like that since a white knuckle drive in north Iceland 11 years earlier. But finally back and parked at home now, I relaxed my hands and surprised even myself at just how tense my hands had actually become.

A friend driving south that night messaged that their entire drive was just as intense, and that all the cruise ships to Skagway had skipped port because of the high winds, which was a nice little confirmation that it wasn’t just me wondering if I was being dramatic.

Chance

The early evening presented a messy situation. Slowly swirling cloud and a little bit of a dilemma on which highway offered a more acceptable risk vs. reward scenario for us, spoiled photographers as we were.

We chose the little more risky approach, closer to cloud, but with more beautiful scenery. Along the way, we’d move through a corner changing the direction we were seeing in front of us, sometimes right into a looming cloud bank. Ohh, the nervousness in my body in those moments. But there had to be trust in what we saw on the maps and we stayed the course - which in the end turned out to be about as perfect as it could have been.

“Chance favours the prepared mind.”

As we were arriving back to the city lights of Whitehorse, and I personally was finally begin to defrost, I explained how grateful I was for our night, for our decision to choose the location we did, and how lucky I felt we were in all of that.

My guest quoted an old French scientist, “Chance favours the prepared mind”.

Maybe he is right, but I still felt very lucky and incredibly fortunate. Part of it, being able to travel the evening with a meteorologist.

The nights you dream of

One of the things that makes me so comfortable chasing the aurora in Whitehorse, and one of the things I looked forward to the most when I was on my way here, was the dynamic weather, extensive highway infrastructure, and mountain scenery, and how all of that felt so much to me like the very first days of when I began chasing the aurora in northern Norway around 2007 and 2008.

“It was our first night out there, and best night, so I just had to close that door and start all over again.”

As just a guide at first, but quickly a friend, and forever a mentor, Kjetil recounted his first time chasing and photographing the aurora on the 29th of October, 2003, to a BBC film crew a few years later. “The snow was actually coloured red”, he said. “It was our first night out there, and best night, so I just had to close that door and start all over again.”

For one of my guests on this night, it was her first time seeing the aurora. And the night started gently, but it wasn’t long before we were front and centre in a spectacular onset of a geomagnetic storm that would buffet the earth for several more days. The reds were the most spectacular I have ever seen, and it reminded me so much of Kjetil’s story from his experience more than 20 years earlier.