The editor spends more than a few nights standing outside alone in the cold staring at the sky and waiting for something he wouldn’t see. It wasn’t a waste of time. Trust me.
If you didn’t know it, 3a.m. in Alaska isn’t warm, at least not tonight. It wasn’t last night, either. Or the night before. It’s mid September about two hours’ drive from Fairbanks and I’m standing on a small, unlit runway at a semi-remote resort with my camera pointed at the sky, stocking cap pulled low, hands shoved deep in my jacket. At the other end of the runway there’s a crowd of Japanese. It’s dark enough that I can’t see them, but from the murmuring and occasional giggles I’m guessing there are near 30 milling around. Must be the student group I saw yesterday, I figure, and look back at the sky. The stars are beautiful, but they don’t stop me from uttering an expletive under my breath. My girlfriend is warm in bed and I’m standing in the cold “like an idiot,” she’d said, when I insisted on heading out again tonight. More than a week of this, looking at the sky waiting for something extraordinary. And it never comes.
The prophet Ezekiel is thought to have been describing the Northern Lights in chapter 1, verse 4 of his contribution to the Old Testament, when he wrote: “And I looked, and behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire unfolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the color of amber, out of the midst of the fire.”
Sounds great, and I was bound and determined to compare notes, but more than a week in some of Alaska’s most remote country had produced nothing but clear, starry skies and plenty of excuses for hot chocolate—and what a jerk I must seem, writing it like that: “nothing but clear, starry skies…” But nobody wants to read about what you didn’t see.
What the call-it-like-it-is types among us refer to as the Northern Lights were given their more elegant name, Aurora Borealis, in 1621 by a Frenchman named Pierre Gassendi. Known primarily for his work as a philosopher, Gassendi was also a mathematician, astronomer and priest. In a nod perhaps away from the latter vocation he named the mysterious lights in the northern sky for the Roman goddess of dawn, Aurora, and the Greek name for the north wind god, Boreas.
Though visible from most places north that require a parka at least part of the year, the absolute best place to see the Northern Lights (according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) is exactly where I was standing: in the dark outside in Alaska, from Fairbanks north past the Arctic Circle during the months of September and October. The Lights’ most typical manifestation is as a kind of luminous green smear across the sky or glow on the horizon, but they can explode into tremendous displays of color, disappearing and reappearing in dynamic patterns and shades—or so I’m told. This night turned out like all the rest, and after the Japanese gave up I found myself alone in the cold at 4a.m. There’d been a moose ambling around my cabin earlier, and it occurred to me that standing in the dark on a runway wasn’t the brightest idea I’d ever had anyway, so I folded up my camera gear and tripod and shuffled off to bed. Unintentionally half-waking my girlfriend, I subsequently ignored her “did you see any lights?” which I swear she delivered with eyes closed and the faintest of smirks upon her pretty, dreaming lips.
Long believed to be the result of ethereal activity, the Aurora’s actual cause was confirmed in a 2008 NASA mission when five THEMIS satellites (short for Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms) recorded energy releases in Earth’s magnetosphere. These releases cause what are called substorms, which can affect satellites in space and power grids on the ground, disrupting communications and wreaking electrical mayhem—not everyone likes the Northern Lights. Basically, charged particles from the sun build up in the magnetosphere (which itself was only discovered in 1958). The more these charged particles build, the closer to each other they’re drawn until finally they reconnect and release a tremendous burst of energy. That energy rides the Earth’s magnetic field lines like a fireman’s pole straight down, screaming toward the planet until it collides with our upper atmosphere—and then BOOM! Ezekiel writes his verse.
I’d long been fascinated by the Northern Lights, mostly because (despite the empirical observations of THEMIS) there’s a grand and overwhelming sense of mystery about them. Standing under an explosive collision of charged particles from a solar wind that originated 92.5 million miles away has to be life-changing, I figured. And I love Alaska, having visited before (on behalf of this magazine in fact). So when I had a chance to chase the Aurora, and the timing was right, I grabbed it.
Walking out of the airport in Anchorage, you pass under a more modest kind of northern display: a row of colored lights flashing on cloud shapes mounted on the ceiling. It seemed a charming and encouraging (if folksy) show of local flavor. In any case, my girlfriend and I collected our car, spent a quick night, and drove 400 miles to Fairbanks the next morning.
My plan was to drive as far north as possible, all the way to the Arctic Ocean, and that meant the Dalton Highway. Trouble is, most rental companies won’t let you drive it because, though it offers an unparalleled experience as it winds from Fairbanks to Prudhoe Bay, it’s mostly unpaved; 414 miles each way on a rental-car-thrashing dirt road. I couldn’t wait.
There are a small handful of companies that rent trucks for the journey, all of them have pictures of the Northern Lights on their brochures. One company—and only one—makes a case for the family sedan. From their literature: “Contrary to popular belief, four-wheel-drive vehicles are not necessarily required or even preferred for travel on the Dalton Highway. While the additional clearance provided by a truck can sometimes be useful… this feature can be offset by the higher center of gravity and reduced gas mileage.”
Ignoring this nonsense, I grabbed a 4×4 pickup from someone else and set off to cross 828 miles of rock, ice and mud. It’s no wonder the sedan rental place advertises that every one of its cars comes with a CB radio, jumper cables, a first-aid kit, tire changing kit and two full-size spares. Over the next three days, I passed very few couples in sedans on the Dalton; none of the women in the cars was smiling, and the men were only grinning because what else are you going to do when you’re rattling along next to an angry woman in a sedan and some guy races by in a truck?
Some time out of Fairbanks driving north through forest, we hadn’t seen a car or building in over an hour when we passed an attractive but clearly upset woman in her 20s walking alone in our direction of travel. I turned the truck around and pulled up next to her. “You ok?” I offered. Breathing hard, she asked if we’d seen a kid on a bicycle. “She’s run away; her name is Cindy. Please tell her to call if you see her,” the woman said, giving us a number and telling us she lived just up the road. A look of hopeless fear on her face, we left her walking alone. Both of us were quiet for a while, me focusing on avoiding the larger holes in the road, my girlfriend watching the thick forest roll by. “A person could disappear forever out here,” she said.
The Saami people (often called “Lapps,” though they consider this derogatory), from the areas of Northern Finland, Sweden and Norway, traditionally believed the Northern Lights were souls of the departed. When the Lights appeared, people were to be quiet and solemn, risking misfortune if they disrespected the spectral display. If you whistled under the Northern Lights, it was said, you would summon the souls closer and they would steal you away into the sky forever.
Wiseman, Alaska, has a year-round population of 15 or so. We added two to the number with our first night on the Dalton, staying at the town’s Boreal Lodge, which featured a photo of an amazing Aurora display on its Web site (boreallodge.com) and more than a few pictures of the Northern Lights on its walls. The Lodge is really a small collection of tidy cabins built and run by Scott and Heidi Schoppenhorst, a charming couple with an amazing knack for hospitality. The main house and dining room is the old community center for Wiseman, which received its name in 1923 courtesy of gold miners who’d abandoned claims in nearby Coldfoot. In 1930, traveler Robert Marshall wrote that Wiseman was “the happiest civilization of which I have knowledge,” and in fact the place is remarkably pastoral, situated on the middle fork of the Koyukuk River. Heidi grew up here, and had more than a few stories to share. The odd tour group comes by, she said, and because Wiseman is so small tourists often view the entire place as a kind of living museum, walking on properties and taking pictures through the windows of homes even while families are having dinner. Scott said he’d awakened one morning to find people with cameras walking around in their kitchen, mere steps from the bed in which Heidi was still sleeping.
During our night there, I dutifully walked outside after 1am and looked skyward for a burst of color, but a fog had come in and there was nothing to be seen except leaves hanging on branches, dripping cold, clear drops onto more leaves below. Seventy-five miles north of the Arctic Circle, the forest here is still thick.
We made an early start the next morning and, after some delicious pancakes from Heidi’s kitchen, doubled back to Coldfoot—basically a mud-lot truck stop with a kind of hotel on site—to fuel the truck. I saw an absolutely defeated sedan mired low in the mud next to a row of tall trucks and again did not regret my decision to rent the pickup.
It wasn’t too long and the trees started getting shorter, eventually disappearing altogether. Once we hit the tundra it was all land and sky, with some wildlife as well. In addition to the occasional caribou (and the more-than-occasional caribou hunters, which my girlfriend despised) we saw an Arctic fox, a bear, a lazy beaver paddling around a pond with a mouthful of lunch, a large number of birds and even a few clusters of musk ox, which look as prehistoric as they are, having crossed onto our continent from Asia during the Pleistocene era. Later, on our return trip, we stopped by the nonprofit Musk Ox Farm in Palmer (Jeopardy host Alex Trebek is a big supporter) and learned more about these incredible creatures, which because of their cashmere-like qiviut (kiv-ee-oot) can withstand temperatures of 100 degrees below zero.
At the top end of the Dalton, 412 miles from Fairbanks, we finally reached Prudhoe Bay and Deadhorse. Deadhorse isn’t a town per se, just an oil camp that exists for “Slopers” working the North Slope. Facilities here are not designed to be attractive, and they’re not. Mobile building units bolted together sit stuck in the mud, creating blocks of temporary housing for the workers and doubling as accommodations for the few tourists that make it this far north. Everyone’s a transient; as of the 2000 census, the official population of the area was five. The thousands of workers who rise early, walk through their respective lodgings’ buffet lines for coffee and breakfast, work a 10- or 12-hour day and return to sleep are here only for two, four or six weeks at a time, during which they work seven days a week. The oil companies fly them back to Anchorage or Fairbanks for two weeks off, then they’re back for another shift. The airport at Prudhoe Bay is large, with jumbo jets full of workers coming and going constantly. There’s mud everywhere, no alcohol allowed anywhere, and Purell dispensers at every turn reminding people that if one person here gets a cold, everyone here gets a cold. Rooms in the bunkhouses are expensive, hundreds of dollars per night, but are set up to be little homes away from home. Seemingly untouched since they were installed in the early 1970s, there’s wood paneling, carpet and the kind of furniture that made Laz-E-Boy a household name in the Mean Joe Green years.
To visit the Arctic Ocean, you have to take an official tour given by the oil companies. This runs several hours, most of which is spent watching a film describing the benefits of drilling on the North Slope, and then take a bus ride that tours such riveting sites as a tire repair facility, a maintenance equipment garage and the like. A quick stop at a security checkpoint and the bus finally pulls up to a rocky little inlet next to an equipment storage yard. On a small jetty that stretches 20 yards or so into the water, you have 15 minutes to dip your feet in the Arctic Ocean—or, as one of our bus-mates did, to strip down to your Fruit of the Looms and jump in, then shiver on the bus later while proclaiming how great it was. “Not planning a family any time soon?” I offered. But hey, whatever makes you happy.
Fifteen minutes at the Arctic Ocean, one night in a 1970s mobile home and a full tank of gas at near $7 per gallon. Again, between the clouds and the lights from the 24-hour-per-day drilling operations, there were no Northern Lights to be seen. That said, I wouldn’t trade the experience of the drive for anything. And the cookies in the work camp kitchen were good. Really good.
The next few days involved getting back down the Dalton Highway, stopping in at Coldfoot for more gas and a quick conversation over a beer with a truck driver from Minneapolis who didn’t know what to make of Brett Favre: “I mean, I grew up hating the guy, but if he wins games for us I think I have to… I have to… like him, right?” I told him I was a Tampa fan and couldn’t help. He said he felt bad for me, and we left it at that.
We stopped in at Talkeetna, gateway to Mt. McKinley, and took a “flightseeing” tour of the mountain, which advertised a glacier landing as well. I figure that if I got closer to the sky, it might reward me with a view of the Lights. Ironically, I was even denied a view of the ground as the clouds were so thick we could see only the very tip of the tallest mountain in North America. And we didn’t land on the glacier, which was a shame.
The Ancient Greeks—for whom the Northern Lights were a rare sight indeed—held the Lights to be fallen heroes battling it out in the world beyond, and saw the displays as portents of war and death. Many other cultures shared a similarly fearful view of the Lights, believing them to be spirits of the dead playing games, fighting or simply traveling. I like the Scots’ take, which has them as the spirits of maidens dancing and waving. Or the Algonquin Indians, who told a story that the Creator, having completed the Earth, traveled far to the north where he builds great fires that reflect southward to remind all of creation of his everlasting love.
That warmth didn’t reach me while I was standing on a runway outside of Fairbanks, and it didn’t offer any comfort as I walked under the display of cutout clouds and flashing colored lights at the airport for a second time. But the lights I couldn’t see did manage to help me find my way up a dirt road to the Arctic Ocean and to more than a few beautiful conversations with fascinating and hard-working people. Terrestrial pleasures, to be sure, but no less illuminating.
There’s an ice sculpture museum at the resort outside of Fairbanks, and because we didn’t want to spend our last day there on a trail ride with a large group of Japanese students, my girlfriend and I decided to check it out. Housed in a big metal warehouse on the edge of the property, the ice sculptures include two life-size jousting knights on horseback, an ice bar with ice glasses, a large bear (for a Coca-Cola promotion that didn’t work out), a handful of baubles, a woman (who had melted slightly and looked rather sad) and four ice bedrooms, which you can stay in overnight for a hefty fee. Almost every carving in there is illuminated by a series of flashing, rainbow-colored lights—inspired, our guide said, by the Aurora Borealis. My girlfriend took a picture.
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