Tales of the beautiful everyday from the North
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 place beyond belief
In quiet conversation and deep trust
I knew leaving Whitehorse we were in for a long night. Weather maps showed hope, but far, far out. So we drove, and drove and drove and drove.
Our first stop around 100km from town was under quickly disappearing clear sky, but it was our first little taste of the stars and some diffuse aurora. I updated maps and continued further to where it looked like what our eyes could make out on the horizon and the weather maps were in agreement on - a large, relatively stable for Iceland Whitehorse, break of clear sky.
I think our timing tonight could not have been more perfect. It was the kind of timing and circumstance that makes you believe in the pure magic of life. Within minutes of stopping under our clear sky, the aurora danced and danced and danced all around and above us, and continued on until morning.
I can never overstate just how much I love these chases. These nights of powerful weather… the mountain scenery, snowy highways and cold, cold winds are some of the most special moments of life.
Ever humbling
It wasn’t the curtains, all the beautiful structure, the dance or the luminosity. It all felt surreal, humbling beyond reason still.
It was the reds. It was the reds visible to my eyes, in real time. It wasn’t needing a camera to identify them first and then recognize a difference in hue. It was in real time the most beautiful red colour which has alluded me for so long, so many times over the last 16 years. I don’t remember the last time I saw them in this fullness… I don’t know if I ever had.
