In the morning, we sat around for like two hours before finally leaving the Browns' wonderful cabin.
We drove into Denali National Park in a vain attempt to see the peak of Denali. Instead we were able to check up on the park’s team of sled dogs which lead teams of rangers into the park during the winter off-season to make sure things are okay in the middle of the park.
After that quick detour, we hurried north to the horrific shithole of a city known as Fairbanks. This was the most disgusting, depressing place I think I’ve ever been in my life. The city is a dark, grey maze of strip malls and highways and gas stations. We dropped the car off for an oil change and went for a crunchy, frigid stroll through the fields of asphalt and concrete until the car was ready. As the sun set at 3 pm over this morose cemetery of a town, we took a leaf out of the birds’ book and flew south for the winter.
With me in the driver’s seat, we reunited with the Alaska Highway and meandered southeast at breakneck speed as the early northern night set in. The skies cleared amazingly as we went, and the enormous audience of the stars took their seats high, high up. We flew down through Tok, where we first split off to go to Anchorage, and continued nearing the Yukon border as the hours went by. We finally crossed back into Canada after a meaningless exchange with the customs officer and we were back in the Klondike wilderness.
When we left Alaska, I was sad that we hadn’t seen the Northern Lights during our trip. It was an almost impossible task, when you didn’t know what you were looking for, waiting for both the Sun’s and the Earth’s weather to synchronize with a solar flare-filled cloudless 18-hour night, every second of which you spend staring for amorphous, glowing clouds. It seemed significant to me that this night, the last night we’d be in the right latitudes, was utterly without moon or cloud. From the driver’s seat, I had a view out the left side of the car looking North and East, and I spent almost every minute of the drive looking out at the sky, swerving into the wrong lane of the dark, empty road. Because Darren had already seen them once before, and Gordon didn’t care at all, Bryan and I were the only ones who really wanted to see the Lights. We’d stayed up late on all the cloud-free nights, outside in the freezing air waiting, while Darren and Gordon slept in the tent or cabin.
Unfortunately Bryan was on the wrong side of the car and Gordon was behind me, so I asked him to keep a look out so that I didn’t go off the road, but he didn’t really care, so he rolled his ice-covered window down once or twice every four hours. I opted to keep looking then, and tried to not go insane every time I saw anything, not anxious to repeat another episode of screaming about a cloud caught in the light of a maintenance shed. I had to keep myself under control when I thought I saw a peculiar glow along the Northern horizon. I had everyone look, and they said it was just a city or town on the other side of the mountains there. We kept going, but I kept looking, and kept thinking that glow looked stranger and stranger. I realized suddenly that there are absolutely no towns and cities of that magnitude in the Yukon territory, and decided to swerve to a stop on the side of the road. I got out of the car while everyone else sat waiting, wondering what I was doing. From outside the car, the glow was much, much brighter. It was too high in the sky to be a city. I then saw that the ‘horizon’ which I thought were the dark mountains against the sky, had stars all over them, and that this was just the sky itself UNDER the bottom of the lights. I stepped back and saw the light curving in an absolutely mind-destroyingly massive curve from east, south towards us, then back northwest, curving around what I knew, far in the distance, was the earth’s northern magnetic pole.
This all took place in about 20 seconds, and I ran back to the car and started shouting in a hoarse whisper, “I think this is it! I think these are them! I think this is it!” Everyone got out of the car and joined me on the other side of the road, and before our eyes, this colorless glow against the sky, turned a vivid sea-green from the bottom up, like 100-mile-tall flames that licked the stars. There was some quiet gasping, then about a full minute of complete silence, followed by laughter and deafening screams. We shouted into the frozen wild and listened to the echoes, and reached out for the giant green curtains and danced across the shoulder of the road to keep warm. Gordon immediately went back to the car and slept because it was cold. Darren, Bryan and I were out in the below freezing air for at least an hour, just watching the Aurora shift and glow and fade. I thought it would only last a few minutes, but it kept going once we decided to get back on the road, and as I drove, I could still see it shining and burning against the big dipper.
This is pretty close to how the northern lights looked that night:
This is how my camera thought the northern lights looked:
This is us dancing along with the lights to stave off frostbite:
Our plan was to try to drive as far as we could that night before camping somewhere, or to at least get back to Whitehorse. After I’d been driving for 13 hours, I switched off and the plan became to drive through the night. After our last stop at a Timmy Ho’s at 4 am in Whitehorse, we set off for British Columbia.
We developed some really innovative ways to deal with the blinding light of the morning whilst driving 24 hours a day, which involved some combinations of hoods and pillows and jackets. My best two were putting my head inside my pillowcase while laying on the bare pillow, and my specialty, pulling my hoodie drawstrings tight enough so that it left a hole just big enough for my mouth and nostrils. In this way, we absolutely careened down the west coast of Canada, going over 900 miles in less than a day.
We had to stop at a gas station because one, just ONE of the billions of tiny rocks we drove over, decided to be a dick and puncture our tire, so we ended up using the first of our two full spare tires, deflated the loser one, smashed it into the back and continued.
That night we ended up stopping in a town called Smithers in British Columbia and treating ourselves to a nice restaurant meal as we were about to drive through the night and into our third day in a row. It was a very nice restaurant, and we got some lovely beverages, and I, in the worst decision I’ve made in my life since the time I tried to break up a bar fight in an Edinburgh sports bar, ordered something called ‘Seafood Pasta’. Bryan got the same thing, and it was great at the time. About 4 hours later, whilst en route to Vancouver at about 2 in the morning, Bryan suddenly did the “I don’t feel good” thing. Having my 2nd vision of the car covered in puke in the last two weeks, I had to keep asking him if he wanted to pull over, and he gave so many non-descript non-committal answers, that I finally just pulled over, and watched him squat in the red glare of the taillights for ten minutes, with his hood over his head, not saying or doing anything. With no gastro-intestinal expulsion occurring, we still blamed the Seafood Pasta even though I felt fine, and he finally climbed back in the car and we kept driving. Bryan was supposed to relieve me of driving, but was in no condition to do so, so Gordon was nice enough to fill in that post, and I settled into the backseat, trying to ignore the horrible feeling in my stomach, and lay there not sleeping for the next 8 hours. I felt terrible when I ‘awoke’ in the late morning of the next day as we were pulling into Vancouver. The combination of seafood pasta and no sleep for days had taken its toll. We pulled into the parking lot of the hotel we’d decided to stay at, checked in, had some pizza, and immediately Bryan and I were both terribly sick for the next couple days.
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