A life on gravel roads

I make a pot of tea after dinner, pretending that tonight is the night I will stay cosy at home, only to, by the time I’ve taken my first sip, already have decided that I need to be off on a highway driving into a blindingly low sun for another retreat to nature and sure rendezvous with wildlife.

Shadings of dust and sand would settle neatly in place on the back of my car while clouds of it chased me down more and more kilometres of gravel roads. The little ‘SOS’ and satellite icon in the upper corner of my iPhone has become an almost familiar comfort. This has been my nearly daily life for weeks now.

The mosquitos weren’t quite out yet, just the odd one that seemed dazed, confused, and way, way bigger than I remember. Snow is, of course, still very abundant in the mountains, and streams have begun to fill crevices through the flora, bringing magnificent colours back. It’s like the world comes back to life again, and I just think I have never been more in love with that.

But the last days I have finally spent more time inside than out, chasing any darkish corner in an all white, east and west facing apartment in the northern summer, with hopes of being able to curl up and edit any of the millions of photos and videos I’ve been taking.

Right now it is after midnight, and the sun is finally below the horizon. My salt lamp glows warmly on the windowsill, and behind it, the outline of the mountains against a bright twilight sky will remain for another few hours until the sun rises again. I want to take in every moment this, of the twilight glow and cool breeze in through the window. For these months, it’s difficult to keep a normal schedule. I want to be up all night and asleep through the middle of the day.

A time between

Blue hour hung over endlessly, ultimately until morning this time of the year. The sky was slow falling into enough darkness to allow the aurora to shine. Naturally, this is one of my favourite times of the year for that very reason. The magic just never ends. I cosied up in the car, eating fig bars and drinking tea, of course careful to grab the tea and not the bear spray, watching out the moonroof, waiting and waiting for the darkest hour or two to fall.

While it all sounds beautifully romantic and perfect, which it was, being at the edge of a river in the middle of the countryside at dusk as bears emerge from a long winter isn’t the most relaxing thing I have ever experienced, but the specialness in it is far from lost on me. These are some of my favourite weeks of my life.

Signs of spring

Just so quickly overnight, winter lost it’s grip. Daytime temperatures recently have been well above 0°C. There was even a light rain a couple of nights ago.

I’ve taken the cover off my patio furniture and enjoyed my first morning coffee there, and the temptation to begin seeds inside is overwhelming. The streets are dry and the gravel sweeper has already been by, and I put an abrupt end to my car’s transformation from ‘Star White’ to ‘Earth Brown’ with her first wash of the year.

“It [the aurora] just makes you feel so small.”

Over a couple of nights, we had some drives north up the beautiful Klondike Highway, chasing clear sky and separation from approaching cloud banks. Stars would momentarily disappear, and in those moments the outline of a mountain rising from the side of the highway towered above us.

The aurora started gently but grew quickly, wiping away any doubt that it could actually fill half the sky as the tourism magazines love to show. On nights of such perfection, it was refreshing to turn the car off, walk out to the lake and not look back for a few hours. The winds were persistent in their harsh gusts, but the warm temperatures let them be more beautiful than painful. In the end, the hours passed far too quickly. 4am arrives fast.

March magic

The weather has been such an intimate part of my nights in Whitehorse. It has given the aurora chase a new meaning for me, and I have found so much more love for the process and the journey because of the challenge and opportunity from the weather here.

Our weather moves very quickly and changes very quickly. It adds such a special dynamic to the aurora chase, a further depth. The feeling of reaching clear sky after a drive or seeing the aurora appear in a break in the clouds is an incredible feeling. It’s a real magic that differs so greatly from wide open clear skies. It is a mystery and one that matches the mystique of the aurora herself.

For all of the nights of having our location determined by the weather, this night was not one of those. We left town under clear sky, and drove west under clear sky the entire way out.

We arrived to a beautiful, almost invisible-to-the-eye, arc of aurora across the northern horizon, and yet, it seemed almost inconsequential against this surreal beauty of the stars, the mountains and frozen lake.

That timing couldn’t have been more perfect. The time to soak up such a sky was just enough, and then the aurora danced, and danced, and danced.

Finally as our night with the aurora wound down, the moon rose in the south east. A warm glow creeped up in the sky, and the softest orange light began kissing the sides of mountains.

While we drove back to town, we couldn’t help but to stop at the edge of the highway to gaze at the rising orange moon through binoculars, and further along stopping to say an early morning hello the wild horses.

Paralyzing beauty

When I emailed my guests, I told them that I would like to go much earlier tonight. But I said it is taking a little bit of a risk because if we are wrong, it could be a longer night out there.

“We love an adventure so earlier is fine with us.”

So a couple hours earlier than I would normally be greeting my guests, I laughed out loud as they walked down their driveway just off the Alaska Highway. Above us, a green curtain danced.
”Yeah, a risk”, we all laughed.

Then after some minutes just admiring the perfection above, we finally jumped into the car and made our way out of town.

What a night.

“When we heard you swear, we figured this probably wasn’t normal.”

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Guilty footsteps and repeating tire tracks

I had finally returned to Kusawa Lake for the first time since freeze up, and I was the first footprints out onto this pristine snow covered ice. A light guilt passed over me, not wanting to spoil any photos or such an undisturbed view with my footprints, as distinctively humble as the mukluk prints are. The step from the shore onto the lake was obvious to a good ear. The sound of the ice underneath my boot changed dramatically.

“It was the perfect, untouched winter landscape I would dream forever of.”

For the next couple of weeks, it seemed like I couldn’t make a decision that didn’t involve Kusawa Lake. Pristine, windswept snow was everywhere. It was the perfect, untouched winter landscape I would dream forever of.

It was the right place, on the right day, at the right time, so many times.

The true silence out here made time feel like it had stopped moving, and then I’d look at the clouds just a few hundred metres above fly by so quickly while the sunlight climbed the hills so slowly. The water still flowed effortlessly down the river while on the surface so much was completely frozen.

“There is no beauty like that of nature during the depth of winter. It is a world of extremes.”

On a night that demanded a lot of kilometres, and more trust in weather maps and weather patterns than I had experience of, we once again settled back around Kusawa Lake. The wind was fierce, but strangely comfortable at just -2°. Snow blew up in clouds across the highway and trees swayed violently in the forest. Pullout after pullout - cloud.

Still we had to wait for the clear skies to become reachable for us, but once they did, we were there and the stars and a few faint arcs of aurora in such a dramatic environment were worth all the trouble a thousandfold.