Cold Lake, Alberta Trip

I have wanted to make a trip up north to see the Aurora Borealis in all its glory since seeing it in 2003 here in Portland. I felt that flying into Edmonton, Alberta would be a good start to get as close as convieniently possible to the North Magnetic Pole. The trick was getting a combination of:

Space weather/Aurora activity (somewhat predictable a week or so in advance, somewhat more predictable 2-1.5 days in advance...)
Good clear terrestrial weather
availiable decently priced flights
dark sky (ideally 1/4 or less moon.)
freedom to travel on a lark (no kids yet)

So, we figured we had about a 25% chance.

All this sort of came to a now-or-never head in January of '07, and Lisa and I decided to just go for it. Actually, I decided to go for it, and Lisa has a good sense of humor. Fort MacMurray and Cold Lake seemed to be promising places to stay.. the north-easternmost easily accessible locations. Fort MacMurray had the advantage that we could fly all the way in. Cold Lake had the advantage that we ran across the website for the Hamilton House. This looked really nice and interesting, so even if we didn't see any Aurora, we figured it'd make a very nice vacation.

I borrowed Fred's Nikon FE, and picked up some Kodak Ultra Color 400 color print film and color slide film. We packed up every bit of warm clothing we had.

We flew into Edmonton, Alberta on Horizon, then rented a car. Expecting a bunch of advice on gelled oil, frozen batteries, tires stuck to ground, I asked the car-rental lady if there was anything special about driving in the extreme cold up there.

Yeah. Don't hit any moose! Seriously, they're big animals and will do a lot of damage to the car, and maybe you! But it's not the season, and you don't have much to worry about.

The drive from Edmonton to Cold Lake seemed to take forever. Well over 200 miles.. only about a mile on freeway, the rest on 2 lane roads. Good thing they're very nice 2 lane roads with very little traffic. We did see a lot of extremely oversized load trucks with oil-sands related equipment. These would take the shoulder + 1.5 lanes. We didn't get stuck behind too many. The car we rented (some mid-size chevy.) was actually pretty solid feeling on the road and had a decent amount of power at speed, so passing wasn't bad. There was no snow on the road, it's so dry it blows right off.

We didn't see any Aurora. Most nites were cloudy/snowing most of the time, and there was very bright moonlight almost directly overhead. I had not thought about just how high the full moon is at night in winter in the north.. I made the utterly stupid assumption it'd be down near the horizon like the sun (it's opposite, of course, a full moon being on the other side of the world than the sun.) I hate to even admit this. At least no metric conversions were involved. When we got home and looked at the space weather, there were no substantial auroras anyways. The camera might have caught a tiny glow at one point, I'm not really sure.

I did spend many hours standing out in the cold at night. It is cold up there, but very dry. As long as you're dressed for it, it's not bad. If I do it again, I'll take a thermarest pad to stand on, because my feet got cold while standing, even with the Sorells. No problem with the camera, but my cellphone battery was not happy at all (I was calling Fred to try to get space weather reports.) If you take a digital or highly battery dependent camera, you'll have to keep it warm.

I took many shots, bracketing between 10 and 60 seconds with the shutter locked open. I couldn't believe how well it picked color out of the trees, under moonlight. In fact, the color the camera got was much nicer than what I remember seeing in the daytime with my eyes. Perhaps the light reflected off the very-high moon was whiter than the light coming in at low angle during the day? More likely I was just so tired in the mornings my own eyes greyed everything. Fred cussed at me a little for not shooting some on the slide film.. he said the stars would've been points (actually, short lines.) I suspect if I'd tried to use the slide film I would've wound up with nothing.

Orion and his dog. Very appropriate because the Hamilton House has quite the hunting lodge theme, with bearskins in every room, a few of them pretty impressive. I was thankful all the bears were asleep there in January.

The hosts of Hamilton House, Brian and Debbie were really great, and the stay was very enjoyable. Their place is beautiful, and there's trails right out the back yard. We had a beautiful little separated cabin. We did a lot of skiing.. Brian had a nice pair of classic base Fischers I borrowed, and the snow was fantastic. It was like skiing on air. I've been ruined for Oregon skiing forever. We hope to go back some time and introduce our kids to what perfect winter is like.

The car gave us no trouble at all in the cold. It was down around -19C most of the time if I recall correctly.. that's about -2F. Modern cars just work. The driver's side windshield washer did quit coming back into Edmonton, but I suspect it was watered deicer rather than the car's fault.

I locked the shutter open here and ran around in front of the camera in the moonlight. Unfortunately, everyone is going to assume it's a photoshop job. The camera may have picked up a little Aurora here. Look to the lower righthand corner, squint real hard and use your imagination. Humor me a little.


We stopped briefly in Smoky Lake on the way, Lisa's in front of the sign for scale. I wonder if they'd sell me advertising space? Smoky Lake has a pumpkin festival Check out the picture of the 1137 pound Pumpkin! I haven't pulled 1000 pounds of produce out of my garden in 3 years.	We also stopped in Vilna to see the World's Largest Mushrooms. Depending on how you define "a mushroom", we may have them beat here in Oregon.



Here's Lisa on skis in the frozen North.	Inside cabin at Hamilton House. Very cozy with the gas fireplace. Note the bear in the lower left.