“Immer hinter der Kamera laufen”

Immer hinter der Kamera laufen. Immer hinter der Kamera laufen. Immer hinter der Kamera laufen.

“Always walk behind the camera” was our mantra for the night. We huddled near to the car as we always do, and every time one of us picked up our tripod to chase the aurora around the sky… “Immer hinter der Kamera laufen!” as to not cross in front of another mid-shot.

An obvious benefit to solar maximum are nights like this one, of course. All the most amazing colours, visible to the eye and everything, along with the most beautiful dancing structures.

The weather moved fast, as it often does here, but we settled in to a great little spot under mostly clear sky. The fresh snow on the mountains was magical. It felt like a really, really special night - the kind that became engraved in my memory.

It’s so easy to be in love with this lifestyle on these nights, and now more than ever, they aren’t ever taken for granted.

Time brings all things to pass

On the first of back to back nights, clear skies abounded. Really, truly clear skies - not just Whitehorse clear. I make fun of our weather a little bit. Clear usually translates something closer to a few clouds, and overcast lands closer to cloudy periods. The other 99% of the time is partly cloudy. None of this is bad, for you. For me, it creates a little more stress than what I feel is ideal.

So this first night, clear skies were everywhere early, which meant cherry picking a favourite place under wonderful aurora conditions. If we stayed long enough, we may meet some slow travelling cloud up from the south, but it wasn’t likely, and in the end waiting that long wasn’t necessary. The aurora danced early and often.

Our second night presented an ever so slightly less optimistic scenario. The weather was pretty bad, the aurora conditions much worse, and an early morning flight departure meant we didn’t have all night.

We left Whitehorse in the rain, but with a clear direction out of town for clearing skies working their way toward us. On the drive out, I saw a dramatic change in the aurora data which perked my ears up and landed a sheepish smile on my face. There is sometimes that little bit of magic in life and in timing.

Our night worked out in the most magical way, and my love for that was never more, standing in such a different place just hours earlier.

Messy nights and pointed drives

The perfect nights are leaving town with all but assured stable, clear skies and very favourable aurora conditions that present a ‘when’, and not ‘if’ question. But those nights are not every night.

Sometimes our drives are long and meandering, sometimes they are very pointed, and sometimes our nights involve shooting from less than ideal locations for very short periods while we stay more on the run to keep up with changing weather. These sorts of nights are our reality too. They don’t make the perfect blog posts, they are not what you see promoted, but they’re real, and there is a real beauty in them too.

When we can genuinely set aside what any of social media has impressioned us with, these quieter, messy nights are there to be loved and appreciated. Before smart phones and social media, these nights meant the world to us and we’d have given everything just for them too.

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.