The annual road trip south

24 hour drives through the bright nights of northern summers have, over the last 8 years, become one of my favourite things in the world. Hotels never felt necessary because I could sleep just when I felt tired, which was rarely ever. I loved all the light, open space, and total freedom way too much.

This year was the same, but different. There was so much to see, so many places to stop. So many mountains, so many lakes, and so much wildlife. So we included an overnight in Fort St. John on the way down.

Our departure was not set in stone, but at 3:30 in the morning, all that remained was wrapping up a couple stollen along with other baking from the night before, re-warming our non-alcoholic Glühwein, and taking our blue IKEA bag full of snacks and goodies out to the car.

The sky was already bright, and although we weren’t driving all the way through in one day, we were still staring down a 1,300 kilometre day one, which we expectantly turned into an 18 hour day with truly dozens of wildlife sightings and goodness knows how many other photo and coffee stops. Some stops we planned, like Rancheria Falls and the Liard Hot Springs, but far more were spontaneous requiring u-turns more often than not. If we weren’t careful, we would have spent more hours in the shoulders off the side of the Alaska Highway watching bears, caribou, dozens or hundreds of bison, mountain goats and moose than we would have actually driving.

“Oh my god, oh my god, I’ll call you back! Baby bears!”

Nearing the end of day one, about halfway between Fort Nelson and Fort St. John, we were on the phone to my mum when I stopped her mid sentence with a dramatic “Oh my god, oh my god, I’ll call you back! Baby bears!”

It was what we had wished to see since we left this morning, and at the side of the highway, a mama bear and her three cubs. We pulled way off into the shoulder and just watched, photographed, and took video. It was the best.

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Asking the real questions — IKEA or the Icefields Parkway

At breakfast in our hotel at the beginning of day two, we still had not decided on our route to Calgary. A far more direct route via Edmonton that would include a convenient lunch stop/shop with better stock availability than Calgary, or a several hour detour through a mostly smoky Icefields Parkway. We were never going to have all the time we wanted for the Icefields Parkway this time, plus we hate summer, so we knew we’d be back eventually anyway. But in the end, we decided on the Icefields Parkway and it was more beautiful than I had remembered, and a quick Click & Collect order from IKEA Calgary to secure the lowest stock items made this the right decision for sure.

Sunset in Calgary at last

I can’t stop

Another perfect evening of slow driving along gravel roads, cautious walks along the river and flights out over thawing lakes.

“Every time feels like the first time.”

And I can’t stop. It’s like an addition, and every time feels like the first time. I can take the same flight paths over and over and never get tired of it. I am never uninterested.

Absolute stillness in the air

A silence not often understood can be hard to hear

Wildlife in their own world

Golden hour, sunset, and the northern twilight ever changing

This is just the most beautiful place and it just is my happiest place.

A midnight hike

There’s nothing that says spring in the north like midnight hikes and trails turned streams.

Passing a couple two thirds to the top, I jokingly asked if it gets better, and they replied “worse”, laughing. Perfect, I said. Except for a while, it did get better, until that last few hundred metres where there was nowhere to go but over the top of 60cm of rotting snow. Tread lightly and you’re okay, but as soon as one foot goes through the surface, that’s where misery lies.

186cm & 68kg walking like Tinkerbell and I still faltered. Into the hopelessness of trying to bring one leg out of snow without putting my next leg right back through it I went.

But then finally getting out of that path, and really above the treeline, that’s where the magic was for me. Walking alongside, and in, the stream on the way up was beautiful too, but exploring the tundra in such ethereal light with so much curiosity, that can never be matched.

The colours and the life in the tundra flowers, reindeer lichen, grasses and mosses were so extraordinarily beautiful, I would have spent the entire night just combing slowly over every centimetre of that. But as more ridges appeared in the distance, I had to get to them too. I couldn’t stop. I was hopeless in my addiction of this chase of beauty.

Walking the ridges above the treeline felt like a world of contradictions. I was warm under my jacket but conscious of keeping my toque down over my ears and hiding my bare hands in the sleeves of my jacket as my nose ran. The last rays of sunlight still felt warm on my face but the air temperature was far away from that.

Occasionally I would glance at the time, but I knew it ultimately didn’t really matter. It felt like it should, but it didn’t. I feel more awake at 11pm than I do 9 hours earlier these days. The sunset was a little while before 11 o’clock, but twilight would linger through until sunrise somewhere after 5:00.

Still, I hurried from one ridge to the next, not worried about darkness and the hike back down, but just losing the pink sunlight touching the peaks. I was fully engaged in a hurry up and wait. I wanted to see it all and I wanted to do nothing but sit in every moment up there. I didn’t want to miss one ray of light shooting out from a mountain or the footstep of any of a couple little dinosaur birds grouse who were perfectly matched to the changing landscape.

I could have walked these ridges and watched how the light changed around them all the way through sunrise, but I did have a stream to navigate back down to the car.

Spring in the north

I remember even from my apartment seeing the sky in the west and having that feeling inside that this was going to be one of those sunsets that I wouldn’t be able to handle missing. Tonight it was a haziness in the light reaching over all the clouds and there was only one decision.

Much further from town, in the gravel of the shoulder, I sat up on my centre console poking my head out of the moonroof with my camera. As minutes and photos elapsed, I could put my camera down with total contentment and just rest my head on my heads still out of the moonroof, and simply observe the elk.

I was totally relaxed in my car in the company of the elk. But I could feel an internal nagging to find somewhere more open. The light was turning more and more orange, and for as fast as the clouds were moving, the sky only seemed to be getting more and more spectacular.

I at last left the elk and begun down another gravel road, stopping well before the end of the road at the lake. I just couldn’t handle how beautiful this sunset was.

“I had learned by now just to keep my parka, mittens, and a beanie inside the car.”

These days were reaching temperatures not shy of 15°C, which may as well have been Mexico in December to me, but the evenings fell quickly back to freezing. I had learned by now just to keep my parka, mittens, and a beanie inside the car. It only took one evening of running out of the house after a sunset without gloves to create a failsafe against that from ever happening again.

And in typical Kusawa Lake ways, the wind whistled brutally down the fjord.

There I was in the middle of May, under a 10:30pm sunset, with mittens and a fur trimmed parka hood pulled over my head. Spring in the north.

Ice obsessions

Then a couple nights later, I was back to Kusawa Lake ready to fall in love with the lake ice one more time before the summer.

The shore was an endless journey of slow paced exploration and overwhelming beauty. I mean the true, overwhelming in your body kind of beauty. The increased heart rate, beauty sigh, physical touch, deeper breathing but almost short of breath kind of overwhelming.

At one small curve along the lake where the ice came back closer to the shore, I could feel the air temperature drop by several degrees in an instant. It was unmistakably tangible in an environment completely devoid of disturbances.

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.