Love in the lights

It’s no secret that I’m a lover of the light. I’ll take any opportunity to spend a night under lady Aurora, and I’ve made it my business to learn and understand as much as I possibly can. I’ve scoured the north looking for prime locations and I’ve interviewed people who live under the midnight sun to gain as much insight as I can into what happens during the polar winter, thumbing through page after page of scientific research in the process. In the beginning of winter, 2016, whilst on the Svalbard archipelago just a short distance from the North Pole I cast my eyes upon a northern lights research station during a quad bike expedition. During that trip I truly felt the love of the Firefox, and that’s what I want to share with you right now.

Just outside of Longyearbyen in a valley named Adventdalen - Advent Valley - where the northern lights research station sits on a frozen, empty tundra. If you follow the valley you reach Adventfjorden, then Isfjorden - Ice Fjord. Nestled away at the end is that small town, Longyearbyen, which is an old coal mining town on the island of Spitsbergen. It’s a Norwegian town, and the only other inhabited settlement is the Russian mining town of Barentsberg. Despite Pyramiden also being permanently inhabited as well, it doesn’t really count. There’s always a minimum of one person in Pyramiden because of a technicality. The thing is, Svalbard is an unincorporated part of Norway, that meaning it isn’t part of any Norwegian county, but it is administered by the Governor of Svalbard, appointed by Norway in accordance with the Svalbard treaty. That means many thing administratively, including no tax, freedom of movement (it is outside of the Schengen area, the Nordic Passport Union, and the European Economic Area,) and it has some quirky laws to boot, including the mandatory carriage of firearms outside of any settlement and the fact that it’s illegal to die here. The rationale behind these two laws are that it is inhabited by far more polar bears than people, and they’re often quite hungry so a firearm is required as a last resort means of protection; and it’s illegal to die because nobody can be buried here. There’s a graveyard in Pyramiden, but it sits outside of town on a mountainside. Thing is, being a high-Arctic archipelago, the ground is in a constant state of permafrost. The frost line raises and lowers slightly from season-to-season, and if a body is buried here it will be pushed back up through the surface within a short number of years, and not decompose.

With that small amount of background into Svalbard covered, here’s my Aurora story.

When I was in Svalbard for this mission the snow was falling but hadn’t settled in the valley, nor in Longyearbyen. The town was freezing, but not yet the winter wonderland one often associated with the arctic. These huskies were waiting eagerly for snow to fall so the switch could be made from trollkart to sled, but it was a couple of weeks off yet. It also meant I got very, very missy jumping off the kart to take this photo! For me it meant two things - when I needed to get to the edge of town to escape the light, albeit very minimal, it was an easy walk. On the downside, I wouldn’t see any polar bear tracks in the mud as easily as I would in a blanket of snow.

That evening I showered and cleaned the mud off my camera when I got back to my room at the Coal Miners Cabins. The clouds had moved in and loomed over the town, lit ever so gently by the calm light of town with a slight orange hue. The arctic wind howled and the temperature of -5 was so much lower in reality with the wind chill - the wind from the north comes straight off a seemingly endless expanse of deep-blue ocean with nothing to slow it down, and the wind from every other direction is hyper-cooled as it rushes past glacial ice. Neither of these options bode well for the comfort and warmth of a British travel photographer standing static in what is almost the North Pole. With my ideas of capturing the northern lights seemingly lost for the night I took my memory cards and my laptop to the restaurant opposite and tucked into a delicious burger before backing up and going over my photos from the day.

I wasn’t the only one in there. Aside from the polar bear keeping me company and helping with the retouching, there was a small group at the back who were enjoying themselves after a day hiking, bare-footed as it’s compulsory to remove your outdoor shoes when entering anywhere because of the mud and slush outside and they’d gone to the extra length of removing their hiking socks. After not very long at all the door burst open and a lad came in and shouted to the group at the back something indecipherably Norwegian. One word stood out to me. Nordlys. Nordlys is the Norwegian for northern lights - I knew that one! I closed the lid of my laptop and scooped it up in a swift movement and headed for the door, almost stumbling over my own shoes on the way out as I slid them onto my feet. My eyes took a few seconds to adjust and there was a faint glow in the sky at a small patch of parted clouds. I rushed into my room across the street and switched the laptop for the camera, donning a warm jacket and hat as I headed back out the door. I walked just a couple of hundred metres to the edge of town and away from the light whilst watching the clouds parting but the Aurora fading.

I stood and waited, checking the Aurora forecast and desperately hoping that glimmer of light wasn’t all I would see. The first time I ever saw the northern lights in Iceland I was in Þingvellir and in my rental car at that moment the song ‘Pray’ by Take That was playing, and it became something I associated with the lights, so I was humming it whilst craning my neck skyward waiting eagerly for something to happen. It felt like a lifetime, but it was probably about an hour later that this happened::

From the east, as is common at polar latitudes, the sky erupted in colourful light which first peeled around the mountains and stretched in ribbons across the sky. It darted back and forth, dancing as it moved. It spread out in all directions and got stronger and stronger until it filled the night sky and illuminated the whole ground. The depth of the Aurora suddenly changed and seemed to cascade onto me as a corona.

I was spinning my camera in all direction on my tripod as I tried to capture this explosion of light above me. A shimmering curtain of light spread across the mountain to my right.

I decided to try and include myself in some shots and after a little trial and error trying to pre-determine my focus point before I stepped into it I tried a few different poses on for size. One of those poses was the ever-popular heart hands. I held my hands high over my head towards the northern lights in the shape of a heart, showing my love for the light.

It’s a terrible photo really, but it’s one that means something to me now. The Aurora that night was spectacular, and afterwards the clouds drew back in at breakneck speed and rain began to fall, quickly turning to sleet. But before that happened, after I’d taken my selfie, I was scanning the skies and shooting the Aurora as it’s shape shifted. My mind was blown as I was taking a series of photos of one particular spot in the sky. I was watching on as my camera fired away continuously and I reeled back as I thought to myself, ‘I could’ve sworn I just saw a heart.’ I stopped the camera and checked, and to my disbelief I discovered it wasn’t a figment of my imagination, but I actually had seen a heart in the northern lights.

Did lady Aurora return my gesture and give me a heart back? I reckon so, and it was definitely the most amazing demonstration of the power of nature and of solar energy I’d ever seen. I was tucked up right in my sheets with the heater on recounting the show I’d just seen and decided that I’d make a point of researching the northern lights and sharing my knowledge as far and wide as I could because although the information was out there on how to find the northern lights, it was not concise and easy to take in. I wanted, from that point, to show people how to have the experience I’d had. And I did.