I flipped the lights on and shook my mom. “Wake up!” I whispered, trying to get her attention without startling her.
She slowly opened her eyes, squinting in the dim light of the hotel bedroom. “What?” she muttered.
“The clouds are clearing. We need to go,” I said urgently.
Somehow, we were all in the car only 10 minutes later. The time was 1.15am — a time I had never dared to wake up my parents before (at least, on purpose). However, there was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity on the line, so I knew it had to be done.
As my dad drove, bleary-eyed, up to the lookout we’d scouted earlier that night, I looked up at the sky. The clouds, which had threatened our mission all night, were crowding back in. By the time we reached Lake Patricia, just north of the town of Jasper in the Canadian Rockies, the cloud was a blanket that stretched seemingly from horizon to horizon.
The view we had at Lake Patricia at sunset was slightly more inspiring than the blanket of cloud we found at 1.30am.
Luckily, we had a plan B, courtesy of the receptionist at our hotel — who also happened to be a keen photographer (and really, how can you not be when you live in a place surrounded by as much beauty as the Canadian Rockies has to offer)? He’d never been keen on our idea of Lake Patricia, even though I thought it would be a great place to see reflections of the night sky. Instead, he’d suggested driving as far towards Edmonton (300km to the east) as we could and then just pulling off the side of the highway.
Unfortunately, since we’d been so set on the idea of driving just up the road, we’d forgotten one key detail earlier in the evening: petrol. We were running low, and oddly enough, petrol stations in Jasper weren’t open at 1am. We had enough to go a short way out of town, but we wouldn’t be making any epic treks into the wilderness that night…not that my parents were too interested in doing that anyway.
As soon as we got on the highway, we knew we were onto something. I could see the cloud that had blanketed the sky at Lake Patricia; it seemed to be intent on staying there (and only there). The rest of the sky had only the occasional cloud skimming across, always in a hurry to get somewhere else. Behind them, the Milky Way blazed bright all the way down to the silhouettes of mountains on the horizon.
In between two silhouettes, I began to see a moving mass in the sky. As we moved further from the lights of Jasper, I could tell that, despite its whitish colour, it wasn’t a cloud. We’d found what we were looking for: the northern lights.
Luckily, the fuel light didn’t come on until we found a perfect turnoff to pull into; what was clearly a picnic spot next to the river by day became our own observatory by night.
Our ‘picnic spot’ — complete with northern lights to the north and Jasper’s lights lighting up the sky behind us.
Having previously seen the northern lights in Norway, Sweden, and Finland, I knew what to look for. I could pick out the dancing, magnetic movement that is a signature of the aurora, and with a lot of pointing and attempted description (“It’s like lines, all moving in parallel across the sky”) my mother found them too. Even in the dark, I could see the grin spread across her face.
My dad was a bit more skeptical, but after I took a few long exposure photos and proved that the whitish colour was actually a very faint green that became significantly brighter in the extended exposure time available to the camera (but unfortunately, not to our eyes), he believed me.
The wobbly lines that are the signature of the northern lights, and what convinced my parents that they were actually seeing something other than cloud.
Of everything we did on our trip, of all the glaciers we walked on and amazing mountain vistas we saw, the evening when we got out of bed at an ungodly hour and essentially just stood in a parking lot for a few hours ended up being one of the most memorable of our trip. It gave my parents a glimpse of a natural phenomenon that they thought they may never see, given their unwillingness to travel to cold climates, and it gave me the chance to show them the aurora (and convince them of what they were seeing).
So what are my tips to you for chasing the northern lights?
Have you ever seen the aurora before? Would you have thought to look for it on a summer trip to a northern (or southern) destination?
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