Opportunity At The Ends Of The Earth

From Chicago there are direct flights to a lot of places in the world. A short flight will put you in some of Canada’s major cities. In 4 or 5 hours you can be at a beach resort in Mexico. In 6 hours you can be in Reykjavik, Iceland. Or you can go to one of the great frontiers on the planet, our 49th state, Alaska. It’s such a far flight that my mind played tricks on me. It kept thinking I was in another country. I was told that’s a common experience of people from the lower 48.

It’s hard to get your mind around how vast Alaska is. From the eastern most portion where the cruise ships all go through the Inner Passage, to the western most part in the Aleutian Islands, it’s 2,500 miles. To put that in perspective, that’s roughly the distance from New York to Las Vegas.

Much like my trip to Patagonia, northern Alaska is a place you have to really want to get to. After our 6 hour flight from Chicago we stayed overnight in Anchorage. The next morning our guide picked us up at the hotel and we drove 8 hours north to Fairbanks where we stayed a second night. The next day we drove another 8 hours north to the tiny town of Wiseman, AK, which has a sign stating that it’s 62 miles north of the Arctic Circle. To put this in perspective, when I went to far southern Patagonia to the exquisite Torres del Paine National Park, I was actually 1,000 north of the Antarctic Circle. So Wiseman, AK, population 12, is extremely far north.

Wiseman is in the North Slope Borough which is the northern most county of Alaska. It covers roughly the northern 1/4 of Alaska. It’s one county but it’s roughly the size of Oregon. This vast territory has a population smaller than Jefferson County, Iowa, where we spend our summers.

There’s only one road north after you leave the exurbs of Fairbanks. It’s called the Dalton Highway. It’s 414 miles of mostly dirt road from Fairbanks to Prudhoe Bay. There are some side roads and some roads in other parts of northern Alaska but if you’re going into the northern interior of Alaska, there’s only one road and it wouldn’t even be here if they never built the Alaskan Pipeline.

I’d come here to see the Brooks Range, the farthest north mountain range in North America. In my mind I saw vast pristine valleys between spectacular mountain ranges. In hindsight I feel foolish that I didn’t know these great mountain landscapes are only the warmup act. The Auroras are the big show! And what a show they are!

The landscape is beautiful though by fall it was covered with the early snows of winter and so was uniformly white, especially towards the northern end of the Brooks Range. But after sunset the Aurora comes and it is a truly heavenly show on earth.

Now I’ve told you all this so that you have the setting. Our small group of 3 people and 2 tour guides is out in the middle of the Artic night in a place where there are no services and no homesteads. There’s one dirt road and nothing for hundreds of miles. It’s as dark as it gets anywhere on the planet, and as quiet. It’s September but the nighttime temperature was 5. That’s not a typo.

And the sky if filled with lights. The lights of heaven coming down on our heads. I know, that sounds religious but it felt religious. I understand that it’s a natural phenomenon and I did not think that God had sent it, but that’s what it felt like in my heart. We were filled with wonder. The lights were dancing. In the photo you can see mountains and they are green because in the dark Arctic night, the only light was from the Auroras and they were mostly green.

In the middle of the night, our small group was huddled next to our van on the side of the road photographing this awesome phenomenon. At night the big semi trucks rule the road. They light the road with big bright white lights mounted on the top of their cabs and come barreling north on the hard packed dirt as fast as they dare. Standing there with my camera on a tripod, I saw this truck coming from a long way off. To shield the huge cabin mounted light on the front I set my tripod up at the back of the van and pointed up the road to the north. As the truck came roaring past I opened my shutter for a long exposure and caught the trails of the running lights under the Auroras as the driver carried his load north in the night to Prudhoe Bay.

Over time the memory of the cold fades as does the memory of being blasted by the truck’s wash as it blew by. But capturing the light with my camera allows me to preserve the best part of this experience forever.