2015/02 Yukon trip - Journey to Takhini |
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Journey to Takhini |
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We’d planned to go up to the Yukon for my birthday, but we couldn’t get a reservation for then, a stroke of luck, as the Yukon had a major dump of snow on that day. Our major reason for going was to see the Northern Lights so cloudy nights are best avoided. We’ve seen the lights before by accident from the USA; the most memorable occasion being from a tent in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters wilderness with the local wolfpack howling in the background. But those viewings were just of a green curtain close to the horizon, about all that’s usually visible from that far south, and we had hopes of better from the Yukon, a thousand miles further north.
Until I did the research for this trip I thought the lights were visible all over the far north, but in fact the North American ‘auroral zone’ is a band around the magnetic pole. The band swings south from central Alaska to northern Ontario and back up to Labrador. When a solar flare or an uptick in the solar wind causes an auroral storm the band gets wider and the lights become visible further north and south.
Just to give you something new to worry about, there was a solar flare and a major auroral storm back in 1859, visible as far south as Hawaii. The only electrical systems we had back then were a few telegraphs, but the storm was so strong that the wires were sparking and setting fire to the operators’ notepads. Imagine what a repeat of that would do to today’s iPhones and Internet and electrical grids. Google the “Carrington event”.
For the week before the trip I was looking at the forecasts for aurora activity and for the Yukon’s weather. Both seemed to be highly variable and of course totally beyond our control; we would get whatever there was during our three nights there.
We left for the Yukon on a surprisingly warm morning, flying from Vancouver up the coast and then turning east to Whitehorse. Off to the west we could see a massive snow-covered mountain, probably Mount Logan, Canada’s highest at 19500 feet. When we landed at Whitehorse the city was basking in sunshine and just at freezing point, a heatwave for that area.
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Takhini River Lodge |
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A van driver met us at the airport and took us and a younger English couple, Andrew and Cassie from Guildford, to Takhini River Lodge, about twenty miles out of town. She
took us slowly along slippery roads, the Alaska and Klondike highways, before turning off just before Lake Lebarge to take the narrower Takhini River Road. The lake was made famous by Robert Service, the Yukon poet.
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee
His classic poem tells the story of a promise to a dying man that he’d be cremated rather than buried in the cold ground, funnier than it sounds.
The lodge is beautiful, set in what used to be farmland, with a backdrop of rounded, ancient mountains. The forest around the lodge is mainly aspen with stands of spruce and pine. Christiane met us at the door; we four were the only guests that day.
She and Jean Marc are French, from Alsace, and she spoke English with a soft, almost German accent. They had built the lodge and the adjacent dog-sledding business less than a decade ago. She fitted us out with clothing suited to the temperature, parkas, bibbed trousers, and insulated boots. We’d brought our Minnesota clothes with us just in case, but these were both warmer and much heavier duty.