In winter, see the northern lights in Churchill, Manitoba.
Churchill, Manitoba, is a chilling, thrilling wonderland with northern lights, dog sledding
CHURCHILL, Manitoba — When I landed in Churchill on March 11, the mercury was at minus 20. It was blowing a full gale, making the wind chill something like minus 40, which is the same whether you’re talking Fahrenheit or Celsius.
Churchill, better known as Polar Bear Central, is on the southwest rim of Hudson Bay. Each fall, 10,000 people stomp through this town of 850 during the bear season. Another several thousand come for beluga whales in summer. Now, there’s a thriving winter season whose main feature is the predictable, absolutely breathtaking aurora borealis. Meanwhile the bears mostly are asleep or elsewhere so you can safely walk about the land.
There are lots of reasons to come here in winter. In addition to the northern lights, you can see weather like you’ve probably never seen before and experience winter play — dog-sledding, snowshoeing, snowmobiling.
The first thing I discovered was that I didn’t have proper clothes. No one did. Luckily, the Polar Inn rents deep winter duds. The parka, itself, is large, thick and heavy enough to stand up unsupported, though most visitors just go with the thick pants and super-insulated boots.
Getting dressed in this climate is a procedure: first, heavy thermal underwear, then thick wool socks, warm vest or sweater, along with downfilled snow pants, boots, neck gaiter, balaclava (ski mask) and hat, down-filled parka with fur-ruffed
hood, fleece glove liners and down-filled mittens.
Once my comrades and I were geared up, we went out for a dog-sled run and a tromp through the woods on snowshoes.
Dave Daley, owner of Wapusk Adventures, has a couple of dozen dogs that live to race. In fact, he was getting ready to head off for the Hudson Bay Quest, where he came in fourth out of 15 racers.
“You do this out of passion for the dogs, certainly not to get rich,” he said about racing. Last year, he spent $8,000 to race the Quest and won $500. The winner got $2,000. Not exactly a great bottom line.
As for the dogs themselves, Daley explained, “You train these dogs with love and respect, not fear and intimidation.”
To do this, Daley is “the big dog,” the alpha head of the pack. He hugs the dogs, he kisses them and occasionally, he flips them gently on their backs and looks them in their eyes so they know who is boss.
“These dogs live to run,” he added.
And indeed, they do. Each team strained at their harnesses before we started our short demo run. They barked, they whined, they bounced with anticipation. And when it was time, the command was not “mush,” but “hike.”
The word “mush,” by the way, comes from the French “marche,” which means, more or less, “to go.”
So we took off — through the woods, past trees and around curves. It was fun. It was exciting. And yes, it was cold.
That night, it was northern lights. Inuits and Alaskan Eskimos feared the lights, some talking softly to them to fend off the evil spirits, others waving sharp knives at them. Southern Europeans thought they were a sign that war was coming. The Norse thought they were reflections from the shields of spirits who led dead soldiers to the afterlife.
The lights actually exist in an oval about 1,000 miles from the magnetic poles of both the Arctic (where they are called “aurora borealis”) and the Antarctic (where they are called “aurora australis”). The two ovals exactly mirror each other.
We went out in Frontiers North Adventure’s tricked-out Tundra Buggy. This is a house on wheels, with comfy couches, tables, two propane heaters, food, booze and a bathroom. We headed out across the tundra, stopping along the frozen Churchill River where a line of evergreens gave us something to put in our foreground.
Though the aurora forecast said “low,” the lights had something else in mind. Starting with a faint green glow, they grew to become red tinged ribbons flowing, bending, writhing across the entire sky.
Northern lights, we learned, happen when sunspots emit electrically charged particles that interact with the earth’s magnetic field and various gasses in the atmosphere. The energy from this is released as colored light — green/red for oxygen, purple/ blue for nitrogen.
But for us, the best came (as it always seems to) at 1 a.m. when the green glow morphed into two arcs, like green rainbows, which then sent spiked fingers that turned into a porous fan that covered the entire sky. It was a pulsing, folding curtain with white-hot knots that melted and twisted like something alive.
We yelled. We screamed. A few of us cried.
When we finally climbed back into the buggy, our guide, Doug Ross, announced, perhaps a bit too gleefully, that his thermometer had registered 35 below.
The next day our intrepid group went out on snowshoes with long-time Churchill resident Mike Macri.
First we visited his cabin, which, he explained, “is not your peeled log and granite fireplace kind of lodge.” No, it’s a simple, one-room building crammed with outdoor gear, a few cabinets, table, chair, bed and walls lined with plywood.
The woods looked asleep but they weren’t. Mike stopped by an open spot with faint marks in the snow. Those marks had been made by a ptarmigan using its wings and beak to brush snow aside and dig a hole for the night, where it lined it with its pellet-like waste, and slept warm till the morning.
There was also time to explore town, including, but of course, Gypsy’s Bakery with its plate-size apple fritters (hey, when it’s minus 40 outside, no food is off limits).
Next was the Eskimo Museum, where shelves are lined with the most amazing Inuit sculptures.
It wasn’t until Europeans started buying carvings that the Inuit started making their statues big (meaning large enough to see without a magnifying glass).
When you are a nomad, carting around a 20-pound chunk of stone or ivory doesn’t make sense. So the earlier carvings were truly small. One in the case was made from a hunter’s own extracted tooth, which he shaped into two almost microscopic figures of Inuit men.
The Via Rail station has been converted into a museum with dioramas depicting a mother polar bear in her den with cubs and a typical Cree Indian skin tent, among others. There are movies about the northern lights and the building of the railroad.
And, well, of course everyone went into the post office to get their passports stamped.
Our last night, a few of us walked to the edge of town where a huge Inukshuk, an Inuit travel marker made of stones, sits on the edge of Hudson Bay.
By now, it was 2 a.m., or so, and probably somewhere around minus 50 with the wind chill. We scrambled across a couple of snow drifts, set up behind one for a windbreak and stood in awe as green and red curtains of light played across the sky.
It was truly amazing and, honestly, I didn’t even feel the cold.