The Wonder of the Aurora at Yellow Dog Lodge
I believe humans exist for two reasons: to form connections and to experience wonder. This is why we are here on earth.
This is why I set out for Yellowknife, Canada with my family on a cool April day.
More importantly, that’s what we found at Yellow Dog Lodge.
The Canadian Curse
I’ve never been to Canada. I was supposed to go in February of 2022, but Covid messed up that trip. So I planned another trip with an even loftier goal. I got it booked, waited a whole year, prepped and packed, purchased a fleet of cold weather gear, got to the airport…then our flights from Denver to Vancouver were canceled due to a winter storm, and another trip was thwarted.
Luckily, I did not need to wait another year and we got the same trip rescheduled for five weeks later…
Only to receive an email 10 days before the new trip letting us know that the lodge we planned to stay at had declared bankruptcy and was ceasing operations. Effective immediately.
We got mad. We got sad. I baked an inordinate amount of sweets as a coping mechanism. We debated if it was even worth doing this. But the allure was too great.
We were lucky enough to find another lodge with an opening on the same dates and thought we’d give it a fourth (and final) try. And it was incredible. Worth the bumpy ups and downs of the previous month.
North to Nowhere
After 21 hours of travel, my family (parents, brother, and aunt) arrives in Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories, Canada.
Yellowknife, so named for the copper knives of the Dene First Nation, is a city on the edge of Great Slave Lake, the deepest lake in North America and the 10th largest lake in the world. (The Caspian Sea is ahead of Great Slave Lake in the list, which doesn’t seem right to me given that it is a “sea” rather than a lake, so it should really be the 9th largest lake).
It was 12 degrees when we arrived on April 4. Descending a ramp to the tarmac, we crossed to the small airport where a polar reigns over a single baggage carousel.
A taxi took us into the town, bumping over snow-coated streets towards Ahmic Air. The lakeside airport is a single building on the edge of one of the bays of Great Slave Lake, and though we’ve got a flight in 2.5 hours, the airport is abandoned. The gate’s open, of course, but no one is around. At the restaurant across the street, where we go for lunch, the waitress tells us the airport is on northern time: the pilot will show up 15 minutes before the flight. We kill time by chowing down on fried fish fresh from Great Slave Lake: Arctic Char and Pickerel (Walleye).
So, about 15 minutes before our flight, the group of us are flocked around our bags on the snowy shore, pulling on our winter gear. The plane’s not heated, so we’re covering up: snow pants, parkas, hats, and mittens. After loading our bags, crowding into the tiny plane in our puffiest, most restricting gear, and receiving a safety demonstration that only consists of showing us how to open the door (twist and push), the pilot starts the propeller and we wait. As the rhythmic blasts of air shake the plane like a dog with flees, I hear the pilot say the plane was built in 1965…
But he assures us it’s the best bush plane ever made.
When the oil is warm, we start moving.
The front of the plane tips up but through the side window I can see the wide skis sliding over the snow-packed ice. It’s the smoothest runway I’ve ever been on and I don’t even notice when we lift from the ice (at 50 mph) because it’s like floating on candy floss. The snow is bright so I have no depth perception and…there we are: floating past the town of Yellowknife and out over the vast expanse of the Northwest Territories.
It’s 6 hours by snowmobile. Or 18 minutes by plane.
At an altitude of about 1000 feet, the trees look like toothpicks and ice roads stretch beneath us like ribbons, leading across the vast lakes to whole towns, or side roads branching off to cabins only accessible in the winter.
Curls of snowmobile tracks condense on the edges of each lake as riders thread through portage spots. Minnesota may be the land of ten thousand lakes, but the Northwest Territories has the state beat. As we fly due north, it seems we cross more snow-covered lakes than land. As far as the eye can see in every direction there are only lakes, rocky hillocks, and spindly pine trees, all coated in a thick layer of brilliant, untouched snow.
Yellow Dog Lodge sits at the junction of Duncan Lake and Graham Lake, and the plane swoops directly above our new home for the next four nights before alighting on the snowy lake with all the grace of a butterfly.
Watch us fly over Yellow Dog Lodge!
Yellow Dog Lodge
As we loop around on the snow, headed back toward the lodge, I notice a few orange cones and a line of drooping pine boughs sticking from the snow: a makeshift runway marker.
I already love this place.
The lodge owner, Gordon, pulls a snowmobile up beside the plane as we clamber out, and a three legged dog (Joey) follows him, sinking into the deep snow, but it doesn’t slow him down one bit. His coat is so thick it’s a burnished gold, barely hinting at the blonde he’ll be in the thick of summer. Joey greets us with a lolling tongue and soft ears, and we’re ushered into the warmth and charm of Yellow Dog Lodge.
We are staying in two cabins tucked among the trees. Gordon’s got water hooked up for us in our bathrooms–hot and cold–pumped straight from the lake and safe to drink. The staff (three WWOOFers) are staying in the third and largest cabin with a kitchen and shower. The lodge itself perches between the two lakes. Since we are Gordon’s last guests of the season and the only guests currently here, he’s closed up most of the lodge so he doesn’t have to heat the large space. So he’s running everything from the small cabins: cozy and family-style.
We settle into our cabins, the wood burning stove crackling, and then explore the area. We walk through the lodge, shadowed and cold, then trek around the shore and hike up a small hill to an inukshuk. Inukshuks are Inuit place markers or indicators of direction and there are two near Yellow Dog Lodge.
Gordon tell us this little hill is great for aurora viewing, but then again so was the deck, the dock, and anywhere on the ice on either lake. There are even small skylights in our cabins.
We enjoy a fish fry around 7:30, sampling pike, lake trout, and burbit from Duncan Lake, and then head to the lounge in the lodge. The staff had started a fire earlier in the day and it was warm(ish). We found a cribbage board–a classic Kunkel pastime–and settled in.
The sun set at 7:30, so already at 8 we were pressing our noses to the windows and craning our heads out the doors. But just because the sun set at 7:30 doesn’t mean it got dark. Twilight lasted at least an hour, and then the full moon inched over the eastern horizon and it was nearly bright as day. By 11:30, we were beginning to lose hope. (We were such amateurs back then [5 days ago]).
The Northern Night
Fifteen minutes after midnight, I am napping in an armchair and Mom and Mason are sprawled on the coach. Then Gordon pokes his head in and says the magic words: “I see the aurora.”
We leap from our seats (literally) and pull on layer after layer of clothes. It’s about 10 degrees outside, so I’m tugging on my gloves and mitten covers and simultaneously trying to put my phone on my cheap tripod. We clatter outside and tip our heads back and there…
…is a faint green smudge across the sky.
It’s obviously not clouds, partly because we can see the stars through it, partly because it is more deliberate than that. It’s hard to explain because it is both more ethereal than a cloud, but at the same time more present. Like my brain is setting off a slight tingle, saying that’s not supposed to be there. I’ve been noticing the night sky for nearly twenty-four years and that’s not supposed to be there. Yet, it is a pale green smudge. (The photo above is far more vivid than it looked to the naked eye). It stretches from horizon to horizon, but I am not the only one who rocks back onto my heels and frowns.
All the same, I set up my tripod because if this is it–if this is all the aurora I’m going to see–then I am going to take a picture, damn it!
The photo actually came out brighter than what we could see with the naked eye, which was both exciting and aggravating. But it is still a smudge, like a piece of light green chalk across the sidewalk. Of course, the full moon is shining directly down, beaming into our faces like a stadium light. I could have read a book by the light of the moon. Mason called it God’s spotlight.
We sit back in a row of Adirondack chairs on the dock and tip our faces toward the horizon. I snap a few more pictures. We try to make the best of our disappointment. No one wants to admit they are disappointed. But the forecast the rest of the week calls for clouds, so this might be it. This might be what we fumbled and fought for–and it’s not enough.
Then the smudge gets a little wider. Then it splits into two lines in the sky. When the tail end starts to curl and glow, Mason puts his hands behind his head and says: “I feel like I’m on shrooms.” It feels premature. The aurora isn’t spectacular, but it is different, certainly like a small hallucination. It is otherworldly in that it is there and then not there. Stars shine through it like we are merely imagining it, and the curtain goes from misty to more present at the drop of a hat.
When another strand appears above our heads, we are no longer feeling lethargic. We decide to hurry to the top of the hill with the inukshuk to get better views. By the time we reach the top, the aurora is completely different. It’s coming out of the west, wavy auroras lifting over the silhouette of Yellow Dog Lodge. It is still smoky and free, and the camera images are brighter than what we can see, but it curls and spins with a yellow hue. It splits and squiggles. It wafts across the heavens like smoke from a row of pipes.
And then it comes to life.
The color is ephemeral, and the aurora dances. Forming in the west, it ripples and flows across the sky, curling and spinning, coiling and unfurling. Hints of red limn the bottom edges, visible even with God’s spotlight, and the lights twirl from horizon to horizon.
I put my camera on time-lapse then drop to the snow. We spread out on our backs like a family of polar bears and oohed and ahhed over the luminous variation above our heads. It feels like, if we were only a few feet taller, that we could touch it and be swept up among the lights.
My feet are cold, the chill seeps through my coat, but it’s magical. The lights come from nothing and then forge across the sky with such purpose. Every moment is different, as different as one snowflake is to the next. The video below captures only 1/4 of it, as the lights slithered across the whole sky–horizon to horizon.
The north’s breathtaking show lasts almost an hour and a half, ebbing and flowing, sometimes winking out completely like it was never there, merely a figment of our imaginations. Only to ripple into being in the middle of the darkened sky, as though something had been brewing there all along. Vivid and brilliant, then only wisps of faint green smoke, then suddenly nothing but stars and memories.
And suddenly we remember our cold fingers and noses!
The Rest of the Story
Part 2: The Last Nine People (and One Dog) on Earth
Part 3: Awestruck in the Arctic: an Aurora Borealis Gallery
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