On the Road: Up late with the northern lights

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So here’s what happened.

Early in the evening I got an email alert that there was going to be an outbreak of northern lights and they would likely be visible all over Alberta. Excellent, I thought. I had planned to be on the road early enough that I could get to the open country out by Hanna sometime just after dawn so maybe, on the way, I might see a little bit of aurora action.

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But then, about a half hour later, another email alert came in. This one elevated the possibility of aurora from “likely” to “certain,” so I thought, OK, maybe I’ll lay down, sleep for a few hours and then get rolling sometime after midnight. True, I’d be tired by the time I got to Hanna but driving through the dark hours with the northern lights shining down could be kinda cool.

Fully dressed, I flopped on the bed, set the phone alarm and tried to sleep.

Now I am nearly narcoleptic when it comes to unplanned naps but forcing myself to sleep, well, I just can’t make that work. So instead of taking off at around 1 a.m. like I had planned, I was out the door by a quarter past 10. I was well past Strathmore before the alarm on my phone went off.

The sky was fairly calm as I rolled along with just the occasional pop of green light on the northern horizon but it was absolutely gorgeous anyway. A nearly full moon lit the countryside in a dim facsimile of daylight and it was bright enough to drive the side roads using only the truck’s running lights to brighten the gravel in front of me.

In truth, I often do that at night, drive with minimal headlights. I do that to preserve a bit of my night vision so I can see what’s going on around me. I only do that when it’s safe, of course. I might be dumb but I ain’t no fool!

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And that’s what I was doing when the northern lights flickered on.

The flashes of red and green started hesitantly at first but then increased in intensity like some great hand was cranking up a rheostat. At my favourite little bisected slough east of Strathmore, they were a shimmering curtain of colour. By the time I stopped by an irrigation canal closer to Rockyford, they were rolling in arcs and swirls.

The entire sky was alight from east to west and even a bit to the south, the green glow reflecting off the surface of a canal making it look like it was ready for St. Patrick’s Day and intensifying the colours of the fields and pastures around it.

The moonlight helped that, too. In fact, the countryside was so bright my exposures weren’t a whole lot different from what I might shoot in late evening. The intensity of the moonlight meant my cameras could autofocus without any problem. Exposure was simple, too. With the camera clamped to the truck’s side window, I could just aim, compose and shoot.

Which I did as I rolled along.

I stopped for some harvest machinery in a field near Rockyford and then again by a pond in the Wintering Hills. Going over the summit and dropping down toward Dalum and the Red Deer River valley beyond, I stopped at the side of the highway to photograph the green swirl of aurora above a slough with drowned aspens and the moon was so bright, I could see even into the shadows.

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But once I hit the summit and started down the other side, the sky really came alive.

At the top, a farm lit by moonlight lay still under a curtain of green, that, just a few kilometres further on started to fill the entire sky. And at Dalum, it did.

Dalum is such a neat little place. Not a lot there, just a community hall and a few houses and workshops. But there is also a pretty little Lutheran church. Which was lit up perfectly to go with the northern lights.

Normally, I’m not a fan of sodium vapour lights. Their yellow glow can make things look kind of sickly. But here at Dalum, with the green of the aurora swirling across the star-filled sky and the bright daylight colour bouncing from the moon, they worked perfectly.

The shadows, the light, the colours, all came together. Just… beautiful.

It was now 2:30 in the morning and the aurora showed no sign of letting up. If anything, in fact, the colours seemed to be getting more intense. Above the hoodoos down in the river valley near Lehigh, the sky was more purple than green. And over by Dorothy, the greens were turning neon bright.

By 5 a.m. I had made it to Delia and the moon was starting to get pretty close to the horizon. The grain elevator there, which looks like it might still be in use, sat in a perfect place between the aurora to the north and the moon to the southwest. Looking at it from the other side, it was framed by the green and violet waves of the flickering light a hundred kilometres above and the glow of Delia’s main street down here on the ground.

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The blackness of the sky was beginning to shift toward blue over at Craigmyle but the aurora was still going strong. The moon, however, wasn’t. It had nearly completed its journey across the southern Alberta sky and was settling into a bank of clouds just above the western horizon.

Thanks to the extra thickness of the atmosphere it was now shining through, its light had taken on an amber tint and it made the mist coming off a pond just north of town look like fire-lit smoke. Above it, in the paling sky, only the brightest stars remained shining.

Dawn started to glow just after 6 a.m. but it was another 45 minutes until the sun finally touched the eastern horizon. By then I had made it to Hanna, the place I’d set off for nine hours before, and the day that I had originally planned was just beginning.

And beginning well.

At Fox Lake, just west of town, I found a bald eagle silhouetted against the sky and over the traffic noise coming from nearby Highway 9, the sound of white-fronted and Canada geese flying by. A mixed flock of starlings, grackles and blackbirds flew in and landed near the eagle who, apparently, didn’t care for the company and took off.

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By 8 a.m., the sun was bright and lit the tawny grass where an antelope was standing on the hills near Dowling Lake. And it cast long shadows from hay bales in the rolling hills back toward Craigmyle. A flicker perched on the makeshift water pipe cross on top of dainty little St. Peter’s Lutheran Church, all alone among the grassy drumlins north of Delia.

This was the countryside I had come to see, this rolling, glacier-built landscape between the Hand Hills to the south and the start of the aspen parkland to the north. Here and in the Rumsey Hills a bit further to the northwest, the majority of the land is native grass with copses of aspens and plenty of both big and small bodies of water where I’d hoped to find the beginnings of the fall bird migration coming in from the north.

But, man, I was almost too tired to look.

When I’d left the house, now over 10 hours ago, I’d had in the back of my mind that I would find somewhere to pull over to have a snooze. And I passed plenty of good places to do just that. But with the moon lighting the way and the aurora continually dancing overhead, every time I did stop, I ended up taking pictures and trying to shoot video.

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No regrets about that but I had borrowed a nice telephoto zoom lens from my friends at The Camera Store and I’d come out here planning to try it out. Now, nearly 30 hours after I’d stumbled out of bed on Monday morning, I was ready to go back home to hit the hay again. My enthusiasm for using the lens, the reason I’d taken off in the first place, was starting to wane.

But my bed lay 250 km to the southwest so I kept rolling and looking for things to shoot along the way.

There weren’t a lot of birds coming through yet, what with migration just getting going, but I did find a few things that needed a long lens to frame up. At McLaren Dam, north of Michichi and kinda toward Rowley, there were hundreds of young ducks and geese gathered on the shallow end. A couple of pelicans and cormorants, too.

And up on the deeper end of the reservoir I found a pie-billed grebe and a whole whack of yellow-legs along the shore. With them, a blue heron was hunting. Thanks to the long lens I was able to get it stabbing its pointy beak into the shallow water and coming up with a small fish.

On the land around the dam, I found a gopher peeking through the grass surrounding its burrow and, close by, a pair of whitetail does that raised their white tail flags and took off, leaping over fences as they went.

All lovely but by noon, the sky had clouded over and all the nice light was gone so, passing through Drumheller and grabbing a fine hamburger sandwich from the omnipresent Scottish food franchise with an outlet there, I headed back to town. By 3 p.m. I was home.

And by 10 p.m. I was back in bed, nearly 40 hours after I’d last been there. By 10:15, I was asleep. In my dreams, as I slept, the moon lit up the night.

And the aurora danced in the sky.

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