Chasing the Northern Lights in Yellowknife
“Don’t give up,” says the young woman in a bright red parka standing at the front of our tour bus.
We’ve just arrived at Aurora Village on the outskirts of Yellowknife—capital of the Northwest Territories and, you could say, a capital place for viewing the northern lights.
Like our guide, we’re all dressed in fur-trimmed parkas, warm pants and insulated boots—ready to spend hours outdoors. At 9 p.m. the temperature is -20 C, but our rented clothing from My Backyard Tours will keep us toasty even if it plummets to -40, as it often does during the Yellowknife winters.
Most of us on the bus have endured long flights from far away, including from Japan and South Korea. Others, like me, have flown here in just a few hours from Southern Canada.
But we’re all after the same thing: the aurora borealis. We’re chasing those magical, mysterious and notoriously unpredictable lights that shimmer in the sky many nights of the year in northern latitudes.
Dave Sandford, Expedia
Yellowknife is located under the aurora oval, an area around the north magnetic pole where the aurora is most active. Winter nights here are long, dark and usually clear because of the semi-arid climate. The tourism office for the Northwest Territories claims the territory has “front-row seats” to “the world’s best aurora,” which appears during an average of 200 nights of the year. All this bodes well for seeing the lights, but there’s no guarantee.
As our guide suggested, perseverance will be the key. The trek to the lights won’t be easy… or balmy.
As we stroll through Aurora Village, our boots squeaking with every step on the crisp snow, I’m so enchanted that I almost forget about the lights. We found ourselves standing in a forest of white birch and black spruce trees with 18 traditional Dene teepees. Each teepee is lit from within and casts a golden glow. The teepees are where we can warm up by a wood stove and enjoy a hot beverage while taking a break from chasing the lights.
For the next four hours, we watch and wait. Around midnight, Arvin Landry, a Dene man, comes to our teepee with more wood for our stove. We seize the opportunity to ask him about the lights.
Dave Sandford, Expedia
Landry tells us his great-grandparents taught him the aurora are the spirits of people or animals they were close to on earth. “When we have family or friends or pets that pass, the auroras help us to feel good about what they left behind,” Landry recalled. “Things like love, honesty and truth, rather than feeling sad and lonely.”
He also tells us how to connect with the lights.
“Take a deep breath, close your eyes for a second and something will come to you. And it’s probably going to make you cry, probably going to make you happy, probably going to make you excited.”
But that night, we wouldn’t get the chance; by 1 a.m. the lights have still not appeared, so we pile into the waiting buses and head back to the Explorer Hotel.
Daytime is not downtime in Yellowknife; there’s simply too much to do. The next day, my group heads back to Aurora Village where Candace Balsillie, an Indigenous woman, guides us through the forest on snowshoes. Occasionally she stops to collect small branches covered with moss, then shows us how to use them to start a fire.
After dinner at the lively Woodyard Brewhouse, we try our luck with the lights again—this time from a cozy cabin outside Yellowknife. While waiting for the aurora, Bucketlist Tours owner Tracy Therrien tells us her story. She’s Métis but lost some connection to the culture when her grandmother married a white man and stopped speaking her native tongue. Therrien didn’t learn the language, but she’s still proud of her heritage—including the harvesting of fur-bearing animals. She points out that if native people didn’t trap beavers, muskrats and other animals, there would have been no fur trade and maybe no Canada—at least not the one we know.
Dave Sandford, Expedia
At midnight, Therrien serves fresh-baked Bannock and chowder she made with fish caught in Great Slave Lake. Delicious! But the northern lights let us down again; they appear briefly, but only faintly.
If there’s one outdoor sport that’s associated with Canada’s North, it’s dogsledding. Before there were planes, cars and snowmobiles, everyone used dog teams to get around. Arriving at North of 60 Aurora Adventures, we hear the barks and yelps of 50 dogs raring to run. “We’re doing this to keep the heritage alive,” says co-owner Kelly Clark. She has a familial connection to the sport; her husband’s grandfather, Danny McQueen, was a well-known dogsled racer in the 1960s.
Four of us bundle into a sled while the musher stands at the back. Suddenly we’re off, and a dozen dogs harnessed in pairs are pulling with all their might. “Hee!” yells the musher as we race across a frozen lake, the dogs’ warm breath condensing in the frigid air and creating tiny white clouds.
Of course, snowmobiling is popular too, so a few members of the group went with Trailblazer Tours for an adrenaline-filled adventure on forested trails and frozen lakes.
Dave Sandford, Expedia
On our third and final night, we head back to Aurora Village and our patience pays off! A green swirl illuminates the dark sky above a snow-covered lake. Soon, the lights stretch overhead from one horizon to the other, silently shifting, ever moving.
We look up in awe, thrilled by their colour, intensity and artistry. They were worth the wait.
Disclaimer: The writer’s travel was organized and hosted by Expedia. Use their mobile app or visit www.expedia.ca to plan a similar journey.