Tales of the beautiful everyday from the North
Real November nights
November has given me some stretches of quieter nights at home, and it was a time I was really looking forward to later in October. I knew this heavy and dense cloud would sit over Yellowknife for days at a time, heavier snowfalls would come and ice fog would blanket the city in white. Occasionally, pink would emerge low on the southwest horizon in the early afternoon for sunset. These were moments I routinely fell in love with. They felt precious.
City streets and highways are frozen. My winter tires and AWD earn their keep in the countryside on tour nights. The snow and the air are so dry, and just one night without moisturizing will leave me with painfully cracked knuckles. There’s no slush in this environment anymore. Temperatures are steady around -15, moving to -30 in the coming days, and the sound of the cars on the streets are tires spinning on ice off stop lights and gravel stuck in tires clicking against the asphalt.
This is all so strangely comfortingly Yellowknife and it is for so many more months ahead.
Hiding throughout some of these nights was the warmest company and most beautiful people still out on aurora chases with me. Every single night began with a scrape of heavy ice off my car windows, and then leaving town in dense cloud, passing through kilometres of low visibility from ice fog.
Almost every one of these nights has been either the longest drives to the end of the highway, or just a few kilometres outside of the city limits, and on one night — aurora viewing at both the end of the highway and the beginning. It’s been a strange mix, but of course we take whatever clear sky we can through this time, and those skies have been immensely rewarding.
Familiar
A lot of cloudy night guest pick ups make me laugh. It’s a little bit of the mutual realization that these circumstances are not quite what we know to be ideal.
While everyone trickled out of the B&B tonight, I chatted with a guest at the car about the aurora, under very cloudy skies with some light snow falling. She showed me a photo of the aurora she hoped to imitate tonight. It was probably my smile and gentle laugh that made us both crack up and really laugh together. Another guest was returning after having been to Yellowknife almost exactly 10 years earlier. This was all a warmth within minutes of meeting that you don’t often feel for months or years of a friendship, but the aurora and this environment will do that.
Of course we all could feel and see the snow falling, so we were starting at the very beginning and had a long way to go before we were photographing the aurora straight above us surrounded by a beautiful forest.
From town, I took us a short distance east hopeful to confirm my suspicions that a small break of clear sky was indeed already out of reach before backtracking over to the west where we were likely to be in better shape by late in the night. I was hopeful, but cautiously hopeful, because this wasn’t my first November in Yellowknife after all.
It didn’t come easy, and we ended up driving a little further than I had anticipated, but sightings of stars steadily increased the more kilometres we made, and we did find a home under gorgeous clear sky.
It took the aurora a little time to really join us, but she did.
After a long night of laughter and cosy conversation, the aurora danced all across the sky above us, and the beauty had turned our talkative little group into an almost deafening silence. It was the most beautiful, and just the kind of night I’ll always, always cherish.
A check in from winter
The weather from town tonight steadily improved over the half hour or so we drove, from mostly cloudy in town out to mostly clear further out east. It was, to contrast just a few nights earlier, cold cold. It was an immediate parka night, hood up as the wind blew steadily all night. I switched quickly to thicker mittens with separate liners, and it’s in those moments I wonder how I’m ever going to survive the next 6 months. But somehow these humid, windy nights just below freezing always felt so much worse than the -30s of January. I just hope it’s true again this year.
Our patience out in this wind was not at all in vain. As the hours passed, the aurora danced and filled the sky with greens, purples and pinks. It was everything you hope for, everything you wish for everyone to experience. Magic.
The circles we move in
Tonight started close to town in the east, and ended close to town in the west, but there was a lot in between.
Not wanting to overplay our hand by running far out in the east, we did stay closer to Yellowknife at first. The clouds were, in classic October fashion, very low and fast moving carrying a lot of light pollution from town - problematic while we were seeing very quiet auroral conditions. Even still, some visible aurora came and went between the clouds at various stops.
After three stops out in the east, we had been wholly eaten up by cloud cover, so now well after midnight, we backtracked to town and over to the west where we once again met some stars through lighter cloud. Finally, the quiet auroral conditions had relented and even through the cloud we could see as much.
Stars were eaten up quickly again, and in one final move a few kilometres back toward town, in a heartbeat, we were in the clear. Clear clear.
We tucked into a small driveway, the milky way and aurora overhead, and finished our night off with the deepest beauty sighs and gratitude. It felt like heaven, and a really long night.
This happiness
It’s a late, late October night and I’m not as cold as I thought I should be. But November has to be where the plunge into winter really begins now.
My mittens were too warm to stay on my hands, and the night barely demanded a parka. A wool sweater was more than fine. I was comfortable photographing with bare hands for most of the night, and this feels like a luxury I should not have, not this time of year anymore. But I’m grateful, because I know winter is coming. I know there will be snow drifts up against the side of my home, centimetres of ice creeping in from the edges of my windows, and the cold will be torture on my little frost bitten fingers. I know it’s all coming.
The days at home feel so much darker already, and this brings me such a deep happiness along with our first snow. Every night I’m lighting candles, some mornings need cosy lighting while I have breakfast. It is a tease of the life I love more than anything; dark winter days that demand cosiness at every turn. It’s what I live for - just as much as these still nights in the sweetest company, under the most beautiful sky.
