Real November nights
November has given me some stretches of quieter nights at home, and it was a time I was really looking forward to later in October. I knew this heavy and dense cloud would sit over Yellowknife for days at a time, heavier snowfalls would come and ice fog would blanket the city in white. Occasionally, pink would emerge low on the southwest horizon in the early afternoon for sunset. These were moments I routinely fell in love with. They felt precious.
City streets and highways are frozen. My winter tires and AWD earn their keep in the countryside on tour nights. The snow and the air are so dry, and just one night without moisturizing will leave me with painfully cracked knuckles. There’s no slush in this environment anymore. Temperatures are steady around -15, moving to -30 in the coming days, and the sound of the cars on the streets are tires spinning on ice off stop lights and gravel stuck in tires clicking against the asphalt.
This is all so strangely comfortingly Yellowknife and it is for so many more months ahead.
Hiding throughout some of these nights was the warmest company and most beautiful people still out on aurora chases with me. Every single night began with a scrape of heavy ice off my car windows, and then leaving town in dense cloud, passing through kilometres of low visibility from ice fog.
Almost every one of these nights has been either the longest drives to the end of the highway, or just a few kilometres outside of the city limits, and on one night — aurora viewing at both the end of the highway and the beginning. It’s been a strange mix, but of course we take whatever clear sky we can through this time, and those skies have been immensely rewarding.
