"Frigid"

I'm sure you're familiar if you've at all been checking the weather for Yellowknife lately. We don't even get the just "cold" when we get into this -38° range. And when it warms up to just -16 on Saturday, the feels like is falling back down to -45° from a wind gusting 60km/h. But if we're going to continue to see these kind of clear nights, it's all okay by me. 

Hyggecar

I said on the way out of town that the more you learn of the science of the aurora, the more every night feels special knowing the perfect alignment that the weather and space weather must come into for all of this. So when we drove from town for some 40 minutes and did find some clearing skies, it felt wonderfully victorious, and extremely premature. Leaving cell range, aurora conditions were very quiet. So we waited, huddled into the car for some road trip hygge with conversation of a Norwegian scientist, love stories from Iceland under the aurora, and homemade chocolate cayenne cookies with enough of a kick to warm your insides for the -30s outside. 

It Couldn't Have Been Worse/It Couldn't Have Been Better

Nothing like a little raw honesty after a night off. 

The interplanetary magnetic field (read Bz) couldn't have been worse. Like at all. And the sky was littered with cirrus cloud. Remember this post from a week ago? Exactly.

Really, exactly. And as we drove further and further from town, the Bz flipped to 'couldn't be better', and almost like magic, the cirrus cloud again dissipated and we were left with a full moon and, well... 

The Truth About Aurora Chasing

The truth is, aurora chasing just sounds a whole lot cooler than clear sky chasing with incredible amounts of patience. The latter is a little more truthful of our experience, but harder to brand. 

And tonight we didn't have time for all the patience in the world, because we didn't have all the highway in the world. We had 70 kilometres of it to try to catch the end of clear skies before it, and we, were eaten up by cloud and forced to watch as clear skies disappeared to the unreachable distance. Of course we could have used a little more time, and infrastructure, but this 45 minutes with her was a beautiful 45 minutes that still went by much too quickly.

Maintenance Days

They are my favourite days, my most nervous days, and the days of little to no sleep. Perhaps 2-3 hours the night before, and a few broken hours during the day waiting for the call from Ford that Bryndís is all ready to come on back home. But getting my girl back serviced perfectly, with today, freshly cleaned and greased sway bar bushings that silence the cold weather squeaks of -32° night drives the length of the Ingraham Trail make me the absolute happiest.