Tales of the beautiful everyday from the North
The nights that pass too fast
The aurora was quiet, still gentle, when we arrived out onto our frozen lake for the night, but that quiet wouldn’t be for long.
Clouds were threatening from the west, but this was still far from an immediate concern.
Inside, I was already the happiest. Frozen lakes, ice roads, and the aurora. Everything I so feared losing forever back in April 2022, I had again, and the comfort and homeyness of the ice singing below us all night was something I’m not sure anyone else could ever understand.
I felt reconnected with a love that I discovered and felt grow with every year in Yellowknife. But it was more than just the ice, it was the shorelines, the tree lines, and as close as we have to mountainscapes here, and then the virtual ease with which the aurora just danced above all of that. It’s really the magic of Yellowknife, and this night felt like full circle from that one night in particular back in April of 2022 just before I moved away that produced so much heartbreak.
Returning after 10 years
It was a breathtaking night, really truly breathtaking.
We waited many hours through quiet conditions and cold, but not extremely uncomfortable, temperatures. We were just barely into the -30s, which we’ve been for weeks now, and I’m well adjusted after my yearly fall anxiety about winter winter.
It’s so difficult sometimes to write about nights like this.
There’s a gentle contentment but overwhelming perfection here. It’s in the company of my guests who returned after their first visit 10 years earlier, a quiet location away from everyone else, so much patience and then this beautiful show all around us of colour and movement that you cannot imagine until you are under it.
Repeatedly testing our luck
“…there’s rarely a better feeling than being at the right place at the right time.”
Through the middle of December, we had nights and nights of close calls with cloud banks. Sometimes arriving into clearing skies at just the right moment to meet a waiting aurora. Other nights, we hung on to clear sky as long as we could, hoping the aurora would join us before we were eaten up by cloud.
This really is all at the heart of aurora chasing for me, and there’s rarely a better feeling than being at the right place at the right time.
Facing winter head on
Coming out of a fresh 30cm snowfall several days ago, temperatures were running straight for the deep -30s for as long as Environment Canada would show.
The morning after our snowfall, I woke up to see the trees swaying dramatically outside my bedroom window. I thought about tour that night and immediately wanted to pull my duvet over my head and go right back to sleep.
When I came downstairs and saw snow drifts across my patio and snow pushed up against my door frame, I could hear in my mind the squeaks and stiffness of my poor little car already having not moved for days and it made me wince.
All is love and pain in these winter days
After more than 10 years living in the north, I have my eyes wide open to life here. I know the struggles of daily life in the north through the winter, but it doesn’t get any easier. It just becomes more familiar. I still hate the squeaks of rubber bushings not flexing like they do in normal environments. I hate my momentary lapses of judgment leading to incredible pain touching metal that’s been outside for an hour at -37. There are a lot of hard moments, but they are also what makes life here so special.
The wind settled, somewhat, by the time we settled in the countryside under this clear sky. The aurora started very gently, but was soon enough vibrant to our eyes even in the face of a full winter moon.
The first steps back out to the ice
It’s not that I didn’t spend days and nights out on frozen lakes in the Yukon for the last 3 winters, because I did, and they were magical. I miss so much about the Yukon every single day
But what it is, is just how vividly I remember April 6th 2022 here before I moved away.
It was one of my last nights in Yellowknife, and it was a magical night out on Prelude Lake, still so frozen, and I remember the gut wrenching feeling I had about leaving all of this. It was an anxiety and a heartbreak. The aurora was so special that night and I was so scared about leaving it, and about leaving the frozen lakes and the ice roads. It was, ironically, the extreme cold that gave me so much comfort.
So when a couple nights ago I took my first steps back out onto a frozen lake for the first time, I felt a happiness and fulfillment that I was missing for so long. There is a magic in the frozen lakes here, and all night I ran back and forth through deep snow between the lake and the car feeling those moments of total freedom and perfection. The entire landscape around was a frozen wonderland, ice crystals and snow covering everything, and the aurora endlessly breathtaking.
It’s winter. It’s finally really, really winter.
