The highs (look up!) and lows (-25 degrees) of seeing the northern lights in Alaska
Looking back, I realize now how poorly prepared we were for Fairbanks in February. It’s not as if we hadn’t pored over how-to articles on photographing the northern lights or armored ourselves against Alaska’s wintry breath. No, our gear stood ready and bags bulged with warming layers. Still we were not ready.
In our defense, Alaska in any season exceeds expectations and defies description. The written page proffers inadequate hints: Jack London’s stark descriptions of “the fearful cold” or John Muir recalling auroras marching through the heavens as “glad, eager soldiers of light.”
Fairbanks is famous for its aurora possibilities from late August to late April. In 2017, National Geographic identified the city as the country’s best spot to see the aurora borealis, the shimmering dance of solar particles set to the beat of Earth’s magnetic field.
Perched 200 road miles from the Arctic Circle and blessed with frequent clear, cold winter nights, Fairbanks typically makes “best of ” worldwide northern lights lists. Popular winter lodgings book up a year in advance, and last year for the first time, the colder months saw practically the same number of Fairbanks visitors as in summer.
The aurora viewing window extends deep into the night, often until 2 or 3 a.m. In the slack time, my wife, Mica, and I chased other pursuits. Many were new experiences, at least for us: walking with reindeer, dog sledding through the snow, cross-country skiing, sleeping in a (fiberglass) igloo, and ice fishing.
I like to think of them as the northern highlights. Breathtaking, in fact, especially as airways and lungs bravely confront low temperatures down to minus 25, as ours did.
As much we enjoyed such outings, they seemed but a dim substitute for the light show we awaited. The pandemic seems to have accelerated our collective need to catalog bucket-list items, but as a string of cloudy nights extended to four nights in Fairbanks, we faced the possibility of this bucket going home empty.
So we celebrated newfound friends instead, and small victories, like watching them reel in tiny trout and landlocked salmon through holes cut into a frozen lake. A wood-burning stove warmed a dozen of us ensconced in a cabin for Alaska Fishing and Rafting Adventures’ ice fishing and northern lights experience.
Mostly we were looking down, not up at the cloudy sky. Just before 11 p.m., the guide, Greg Schneider, said he could start talking about the aurora any time. Skepticism burrowed in; its cold fingers clutching.
“It’s really just a form of torture,” said John Harriman, part of a foursome from the San Francisco Bay area. “We’re probably not going to see it.”
Not an unreasonable conclusion, based on some unpromising weather and sluggish solar activity. But we weren’t prepared to surrender just yet.
Stockpiling experiences and awaiting the night
Harriman, his wife, Barb, and longtime friends Tori and Bob Brant had planned the trip for months to celebrate Tori’s 70th birthday.
“He asked me if I wanted a party for my birthday and I said, ‘hell no,’” she said. “I’ve always wanted to see the northern lights.”
Like us, they were stockpiling other experiences after the late nights, and we compared notes. We traded dining recommendations like The Crepery, which quickly became our go-to casual spot, as well as finer dining possibilities such as Lavelle’s Bistro, and The Pump House, a Fairbanks institution.
We told them about the world-class vintage car collection at the Fountainhead Antique Auto Museum and the displays of history and Native culture at the Museum of the North and the Morris Thompson Cultural and Visitors Center.
We spent an afternoon learning about and getting close to reindeer at Running Reindeer Ranch and took a quick drive to the nearby community of North Pole (not the magnetic north pole, more than 1,700 miles north) for the oodles of Christmas goodies at Santa Claus House. We watched ice carvers wield chain saws and grinders to shape giant ice blocks in the World Ice Art Championships, held every spring.
Because of the city’s reflective electric light, it’s imperative to drive outside of town or book an outing to try to view the aurora. We drove one night about 15 minutes to Aurora Pointe (www.aurorapointe.net), a modern structure where visitors idle at tables, studying phones and sipping tea and coffee while awaiting the northern lights, like gamblers urging a slot machine to disgorge its treasure.
Guides at Aurora Pointe counseled patience and introduced us to the science. A host of websites track solar data and weather and spit out colorful charts and tables predicting the probability of seeing the lights. Clear skies are the first priority, but the intensity of the show is highly variable.
“Keep in mind that the numbers aren’t everything,” Sage Pegnottga told us. “A lot of aurora hunting just comes down to waiting. And don’t expect that when you see an aurora it’s going to be a giant rainbow in the night — that’s maybe 10 or 20 times a year.”
We had thought — erroneously — that if the clouds cleared the heavens would burst with light. And to our growing trove of misconceptions the guides added this: The aurora display typically appears silver or white to the human eye. The bright greens and reds of photographs are a result of the camera’s ability to “see” better at night than humans.
We caught glimpses of a faintly green nighttime glow during an incredible stay at Borealis Basecamp, about 25 miles north of Fairbanks. Set on 100 acres of boreal forest, the property’s fiberglass igloos and modern cubicle structures feature giant windows that reveal the night sky.
Daytime activities include zooming around on snowmobiles (Alaskans call them “snowmachines”) or dog sledding behind a team of excited Alaskan Huskies. Meals are delightful, especially the gourmet dinner selections such as panseared lingcod or seared salmon.
The weather during our two-night stay there, however, was mostly overcast, leaning toward snow. We wanted to stay an extra night or two, especially as the temperature was forecast to drop by 20-plus degrees and the skies clear by the weekend. But Borealis Basecamp justifiably fills up months in advance and we needed to scramble for lodging. We got lucky.
‘Glowing white colossal bridge’
Chena Hot Springs Resort, about 60 miles northeast of Fairbanks, owes its name to the natural hot springs discovered by two gold miners in 1905. We were relieved to find they had a room available, and went for an afternoon cross-country ski outing followed by dinner and a soothing soak in the hot springs lake.
The air temperature was below zero and dropping, foreshadowing a clear night. Other numbers appeared promising too: the websites and apps we were tracking projected robust solar activity, and as this would be our last night in Fairbanks we crossed our fingers and bundled up for an auroraviewing outing.
That night about 9:30, as we prepared to load into tracked militarygrade troop carriers known as SUSVs (small unit support vehicles), a driver glanced our way and pointed a finger skyward.
“Look up,” he said.
Oh my.
Twin silver-gray bands streaked overhead, shimmering and widening. Through the camera’s eye they appeared green and glowing. This was why we came.
Hungry to see more, we endured the half-hour ride to the top of Charlie Dome and exited the SUSV quickly. The show continued, mesmerizing. Bands writhed and disappeared. I set up a tripod and quickly discarded it as useless. Why? The lights appeared on the horizon’s four corners, moved, faded, and sometimes resurfaced quickly overhead. It was impossible to match their pace from a fixed spot.
After abandoning the tripod I struggled to keep perfectly still for the longer 2- and 3-second exposures on my iPhone. To operate the camera I had to remove one glove, and in minus-20 temperatures could bear only a few minutes before hustling into the yurt to warm my hands over a stove. It would have been comical if my hand weren’t so numb, and I silently cursed myself for poor planning — I should have packed a remote switch that would function with a glove.
This continued for about half an hour, when the show stopped suddenly as clouds crept overhead. The lights reappeared near midnight and lasted another hour, dazzling us.
Over the centuries, Native people in North America and around the globe have wrapped the lights in legend. To some they constitute a spiritual link to lost relatives. Others associate the lights with their gods and creation stories.
A little over 400 years ago, Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei lent the aurora borealis its name, borrowing from the Roman goddess of the dawn (Aurora) and the Greek god of the north wind (Boreas). He proposed that sunlight reflecting off the atmosphere created the display.
Time and technology proved him wrong. The accurate scientific explanation belongs to Norwegian scientist Kristian Birkeland, but his theory about charged solar particles interacting with Earth’s magnetic poles remained unproven until 1967 — 50 years after his death — when verified by a US Navy satellite.
As the cold numbed my fingers and I scanned the heavens, I felt more affinity for Muir the naturalist than for scientists with their colorful charts and hopeful predictions.
“… I fancy that if all the stars were raked together into one windrow, fused and welded and run through some celestial rolling-mill, all would be required to make this one glowing white colossal bridge,” Muir described the aurora after an 1890 trip.
Words just as true now as then. Overhead, all we had read about and packed for and dreamed of was made manifest. Still we were not ready for it.
Alex Pulaski can be reached at alpulaski@icloud.com.