The blog
Rain or shine, we climb
While still reeling from my sleepless few days and nights prior, Doris had some friends from Germany arrive in Whitehorse before a small, couple hundred kilometre canoe trip up the Yukon River.
During the cosiest late dinner, Doris had set her sights set on the Kusawa ridge hike for the next day - a light 850m elevation gain over about 4.5 kilometres above Kusawa Lake. We knew the forecast wasn’t great, but the thought of a fjord hike through cloud and mist seemed perfectly fitting.
That evening, home with fresh baked bread and warm soup, muskelkater was already setting in something serious, as if we weren’t expecting it from our shaky legs the entire way down. But our hearts were full, proud of ourselves, in love with the beauty, and already excited for the next time.
No rest for the wicked
A couple aurora chases and a couple day tours packed into a weekend where almost the only time spent at home was for a few hours of sleep, and this is a whirlwind I’m just getting too old for, no matter what I tell myself - or you - so don’t you let me do this again.
But the company and scenery was just so good. We reminisced over aurora chases in Finland and Scandinavia, and what it means to keep such a pure love for 17 and a half years.
Every aurora chase today still feels as special as my earliest ones, and adding in the odd day trip far out into Kluane or the countryside, it feels more and more like those first years in Yellowknife for me. They were a time lived in a constant state of overwhelming love, appreciation, but total exhaustion and slight fear that had me in bed and asleep by 10pm on off nights. The worry of building a business from nothing, totally alone, and overextending myself in every direction eventually gave way to something of a reasonably sustainable life until Covid, and I hope only that the same happens here too.
On the days the aurora dances so wildly and vibrantly, it’s hard to ever imagine a time again when she could be so quiet. So coming home from Kluane on an evening of beautiful sunshine and clear sky, it was hard to imagine the next morning we would be engulfed with low cloud and steady rain. But that thought was cosy, comforting and intriguing more than it ever was discouraging for another few hour scenic drive.
We filled the car with the cosy smell of tea and coffee and hit the roads to recolour my car from ‘celestial silver’ to ‘Earth brown’. Leaving the car in quick bursts for beautiful photo opportunities before again taking refuge back inside were the theme of the morning. And at night, one last chase out into clearing skies for a calmer than expected night of aurora viewing.
The winding down of summer
Discovery of such a beautiful lake so close to the city would probably come a lot sooner than 2 years into living in a new place for most people. But most people is really not me, or Doris, but she does eventually, successfully, carry me in my shell closer to the city and new places, and that’s probably a little bit good for both of us.
We spent some beautiful days at Chadburn Lake toward the end of July, finally bringing our water toys into these glacial waters.
Following that, we ran out for a quick day trip to Kluane checking in on how much mountain, national park beauty it takes to make peace with disgusting 30°C temperatures, and then finally the first aurora chases of the season were successful in early August with more on the way.
Alpenglühen
We wanted to leave town earlier tonight, and once again we weren’t sure if we were going to be out all night or not. We’d cross the aurora bridge later. Our tripods were in the back anyway, and we had armed ourselves with ample snacks. We fuelled up the car with gas and ourselves with coffee, so we were all set either way.
The weather was magically dramatic, prompting highway shoulder pullovers several times along the way out. I can never, ever resist these views. It was hard not to rush all the way. I knew how beautiful the ice was, and I couldn’t wait to get back to it with more daylight tonight. I could have flown for hours and hours, taken thousands of photos and far too much video flying over the ice. It was one of the most magical things I’ve ever seen, or as you’re used to hearing me say here, maybe the most beautiful experience of my life.
I had never heard of “Alpenghüen” before Doris’ soft whisper of it as we stood, still in our parkas of course, marvelling at the pink sunlight kissing snowy peaks down the lake. But it was perfect, the perfect word for the perfect moment.
For much of the night, we wished the sky would break open just a little more in the northwest to allow the sun to come through to us and light the mountains surrounding us.
It’s another game I play with the weather. I would rather risk too much cloud than none at all when we are chasing sunsets, but there’s always a balance to strike there. When the light did break through close to sunset, there wasn’t any way to perfectly capture the magic of that light, so we enjoyed it mostly just meandering our way back along the beach to the car.
As we reached the top of the dirt road to meet back up with the Alaska Highway, I thought we should check aurora conditions just in case. After all, we were now almost a half hour past midnight under a sky that had cleared dramatically.
“Great that we checked this before we left the beach” I said, tongue in cheek.
The dirt road isn’t the easiest drive in the world, and it would have been great to know just how good aurora conditions were before we drove a half hour back up to the highway. But after mulling over options for a few minutes, we u-turned ourselves back down toward the lake arriving just in time to see curtains of the aurora begin to dance dramatically overhead.
My dream May
For a year, I’ve been so looking forward to these nights again. I loved the memory of them so much, it almost seemed improbable I would find that same love in them again this year.
But it’s the memory of the dust clouds rising behind the car travelling down narrow gravel roads deep in the countryside and seeing beautiful golden light fall over endless forests and up mountains which make me hopeful. They are the small moments and the simple things, the real things that tie these nights to my heart just as much as the beautiful photography.
Short of breath
It wasn’t just the weight of my camera bag and balancing walking over river rock along the beach for kilometres, it was everything else around it. These nights are just filled with my deepest, most pure loves in this life.
They are the nights that energize me and fully awaken my soul. I could stay out all night in the quiet of the countryside, putting aside sleep again. All of the sound around is just the swans and ducks, and the ice crushing up against itself. Occasionally we hear elk calls from the forest behind us while we stand on the beach, but it is an overwhelmingly soul calming quiet.
Heavy eyes
For all of my love of May and energy I get from these perfect nights in the countryside that are full of real life, I still come back home and crash. I settle myself into my little office with my laptop to write and edit photos, and my eyes get heavy so quickly. I can’t even put together all the images for a single post. I just want to sleep, and sleep and sleep and sleep. It is a strange contrast in life to feel the extremes so intensely, but it’s a part of the spring here I’m just so in love with.
