The 5 best places to see the Northern Lights
Witnessing the aurora borealis is considered a bucket-list experience by many travellers but patience is required.
Daylight tarries and nightfall sallies in the depths of a Canadian winter.
The cold has turned oxygen to liquid ice and frozen every last exposed surface: lakes, eyelashes, fingertips, eaves. In the waking hours the landscape is blinding white.
By night, it retreats beneath a cloak of velvet. Shards of light prick the darkness; snowflakes trapped in the glow of my headlamp trail earthward like tiny comets.
On clear nights the skies are radiant with light; they flood with the neon green and fluorescent pink of the aurora borealis.
Low humidity, unpolluted skies and proximity to an earthly band of auroral activity – the “aurora oval” – render this phenomenon more vivid and frequent here than anywhere else on Earth.
The aurora has swayed halo-like above the First Nations people since the beginning of time, and has hypnotised the many outsiders drawn to this empty wilderness.
“She’s active around 320 nights a year, but we need clear, dark skies to see her,” says Tracy Therrien of Bucket List Tour. “We don’t see her at all during the summer.”
But tonight’s full moon has rinsed the sky of colour, and snow is beginning to fall.
Rimed spruce trees flit by, bright and jagged as teeth as we head out of Yellowknife along the Mackenzie Highway.
If we kept driving for 18 hours, we’d reach Edmonton, the city where Therrien grew up. She came to the Territories in 1988, planning to work here for a single summer.
“I fell in love with it. Fell in love with the immense possibilities, the opportunities,” she says. “You’ll love it or you’ll hate it. You’ll either stay and make a life of it or you’ll count the days to get out.”
Make a life of it she did. A veteran of Yellowknife’s tourism industry, Therrien recently built an aurora-viewing cabin outside Yellowknife, but the spectacle has been shy of late.
“We’ve not been that lucky with the aurora this last month,” she laments. “We’ve had extremely warm weather with cloudy skies, which is very unusual for Yellowknife.”
Warmth is relative in the wilds of the Northwest Territories, a region of immensity and extremes: a full third of Canada’s landmass lies within these bounds; tonight’s “warm” temperature is a bone-snapping minus 24C.
But the cabin is warmed by wood fire; lining its walls are Inuit parkas honouring the frontier’s Arctic heritage and fur coats commemorating the trade that tempted trappers this way.
If tonight’s skies were clear we’d be roasting marshmallows on a bonfire; instead we’re slurping fish chowder and smearing Saskatoon berry jam on bannock (damper) pulled hot from the indoor oven. In summer, the berries grow wild across tundra now entombed in ice.
I must conjure these ruby fruits in my imagination, just as I must see the Northern Lights through someone else’s eyes.
“When you’re in the dark and the water’s calm and aurora’s dancing and it’s reflecting across the lake, it’s just awesome,” says aurora hunter Val Pond, who moved here as a child in 1974. She first photographed the lights reflecting off a lake in the autumn of 2010.
“I never actually took an interest in the aurora until I got a camera. It was just, ‘Oh look, the aurora’s out – yeah, OK.’ Most Yellowknifers are like that.
Now, late at night, she heads out with her camera. There’s no sound but the tinkling of bells attached to her bag – a warning to bears that might have roused from hibernation.
“I remember one occasion, it was about two o’clock in the morning, the aurora came out. I’m standing out in the middle of the ice road taking pictures and all I can hear off in the distance is, ‘Ooh, ah, I love you aurora!’ And it’s tourists further up the lake. They were screaming and dancing and laughing.
And I’m standing there in the dark and I’m thinking, ‘Thank goodness you got to see it, that is so awesome.’ I was enjoying the aurora, and they were just in their glory somewhere else in the dark.”
The world is bright white next day as I take a spin on that ice road, a frosty ribbon embossed upon Great Slave Lake. In winter, it’s the only major road extending north of here; it carves a path across frigid waterways to the region’s diamond mines.
“It’s a private road, but they don’t close it to the public,” says Yellowknifer John Stephenson. “But if you go there, you’re on your own. There are no services, no gas station.”
In truth, Yellowknife is the end of the road, as Stephenson discovered when he moved here on a whim from Toronto in May 1974.
“May is still winter here. I had been in green spring in April in Paris, Scotland, Ireland and then Toronto. I could have got back on that plane … but I found work and discovered a beautiful place to live.”
As he surveyed highways, managed a remote Indigenous community and guided hunters and fishers, Stephenson found himself immersed in an otherworld of tundra, crags, wetlands and lakes laced together with tributaries.
It’s a realm that unfolds beneath the ski planes taking off now from the lake, a moth-eaten monotone of snow-bedraggled forests and ice-plugged waterways; nothing moves below, bar the occasional skidoo track weaving an arabesque through the glacial armour. In spring, the lake will thaw and houseboats trapped near the shoreline will be loosened from winter’s grip.
Floatplanes will arise from a watery runway above a flood of meltwater swirling jade in mimicry of the aurora.
This mercurial landscape is bred in the marrow of First Nations elder Ernie Sangris, whose Dene forbears lived off the land, celebrated the songbirds’ return in spring – “They go phwee, phwee, telling you it’s time to wake up” – and communicated with their ancestors when the aurora flared on dark nights. Today, he bathes in their solace in turn.
“Your grandma, your grandpa, they’re dancing for you. They tell you, ‘Don’t worry, be happy while you’re still here on Earth.’ They’re telling you: ‘We’re okay, we’re happy, we’re waiting for you, no rush.’ It gives you a better knowledge and respect for who you are, for yourself.”
Leaden afternoon skies foretell a night devoid of such ancestral communion; the moon is a fog lamp veiled in cloud. At sunrise, the horizon throbs with lashings of amethyst, tangerine and amber. Dawn has brought forth a mighty aurora.
There’s one last opportunity to see the lights. On my final day in Yellowknife, I head out of town to North of 60 Aurora Adventures, where Larry Clarke, a Chipewyan man from the Lutsel k’e Dene Band, and his wife, Kelly, run dogsledding and aurora tours. Larry’s love of dog-mushing runs generations deep; his grandfather, Danny McQueen, was a Canadian dog derby champion.
“He used to live on the east side of Great Slave Lake, so he would have to come 100 miles across (the frozen) Great Slave Lake, race for three days, and then go home with his dogs,” Larry says.
The route I take is far less onerous. Four spirited dogs propel me across a sun-struck lake. Trees on the shoreline fly past liked bared teeth and ice showers my cheeks in a blaze of silver.
Long after dark, Kelly tends the woodstove and watches for the lights through the windows of the aurora-viewing geodome.
This wilderness wasn’t always home for her: she met Larry in high school in her native Alberta, and was tempted to move back here with him 25 years ago. “If you don’t like the cold, if you don’t like the dark, you’ll fade away here,” she says.
But it’s the light, rather than the people, that blooms then fades; it hides when you seek it, and reveals itself in mysterious ways.
Is that a shimmer of light Kelly sees through the snow-rimmed windows? We rush outside just in time to catch it: an emerald splash striking the darkness, the ancestors’ fleeting solace.
In the know
The Explorer Hotel is in Yellowknife; rooms from $232 a night.
Bucket List Tour runs five-hour aurora-viewing tours; from $C125 ($143).
North of 60 Aurora Adventures offers skydome aurora-viewing from $C125; dog-sledding experiences from $C90.
Air Canada flies to Vancouver with onward connections to Yellowknife. For the best fares book international and domestic sectors simultaneously.
Catherine Marshall was a guest of Northwest Territories Tourism
and Destination Canada.
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The five best places to see the Northern Lights
1. Norway
The Northern Lights can be as fickle as they are fascinating, with weather, location and timing each meaning the difference between a life-changing moment and a night spent looking at your watch. That doesn’t stop Hurtigruten from stamping an aurora “promise” on its Norwegian coastal cruises between September 26 and March 31. This voyage is a spectacular union of colourful fishing villages, immense wildlife and Indigenous Sami culture and is memorable even if the lights can’t be seen. However, the cruise line is so sure they will on a journey of 11 days or more, it will give passengers a free six or seven-day Original Coastal Express Classic Voyage if they’re left in the dark.
2. Sweden
There are few accommodations as architecturally arresting as Sweden’s Arctic Bath Hotel and Spa, a series of cabins floating on the Lule River in summer, and frozen into it during winter. There are opportunities for Northern Lights viewing at every turn, whether you’re in bed gazing through skylights, or in the spa, which is built around a plunge pool open to aurora borealis-streaked skies. Photo safaris are on the list of activities, for those wanting tips on how best to capture the drama overhead.
3. Finland
Want northern lights viewing that is pretty much guaranteed? Head to the town of Rovaniemi (the official home of Santa Claus) in Finnish Lapland and check in to the North Pole Igloos Hotel. This movable, pop-up glamping concept is the northernmost hotel in the world, and it’s only open for one month of the year, in April. Arrive by helicopter then bed down in heated igloos made entirely from glass, allowing you to be at one with nature and see the aurora from your bed.
4. Iceland
The aurora is spectacular from the ground, but glimpsing it from the air takes the experience to a whole new level. Look out the window of your plane if you’re flying overnight close to the Arctic Circle; you’re above the clouds, so don’t have to worry about them obstructing the view. Travellers who fly on Icelandair can get a taste of the phenomenon before they even reach Iceland when flying on the company’s Hekla Aurora plane, its livery depicting an Arctic winter landscape and its interior set aglow with LED lights that mimic the aurora.
5. Canada
A leader in responsible wildlife tourism, Natural Habitat Adventures runs weeklong Northern Lights tours across Churchill, a part of Canada that enjoys some of the most intense auroral activity on Earth. Days are spent snowshoeing, igloo-building and dogsledding, while evenings are dedicated to finding the best vantage point to witness the lights – perhaps from inside heated glass domes with 360-degree views, from an isolated cabin deep in the boreal forest, or in a teepee warmed by a fire at a dog musher’s camp.
