Northern Light(s)

I’m back in Colorado, back “at home”. And yet, as I was leaving Alaska on Wednesday night, I cried. 

Colorado is “home” for me, or as close as “home” can get, I guess. But in Alaska I left a piece of my heart: a big piece of my heart. 

As my plane landed in Colorado shortly after dawn yesterday morning, with my beloved mountains in sight on the horizon — those mountains that made me fall in love with this place over six years ago, those mountains where I go to explore and adventure and seek reprieve and immerse myself in Nature and connect with myself more deeply — even those gorgeous mountains paled in comparison to what I had experienced for the previous nine days in Alaska. 

As I sat on the bus driving me home from the airport, all those lanes on the freeway, traffic, construction, buildings, signs of human activity everywhere one looked, despite the mountains in the background — it all felt jarring. 

It felt familiar and like “home” but at the same time also jarring. 

On my last night at my friends’ place in a small cabin outside Fairbanks, on Tuesday night I got to see the northern lights, the aurora borealis, at last. The last gift to me from that beautiful, wild place that is “real Alaska”. 

I want to go back. Back to Alaska, to those single-lane highways that wind themselves for hundreds of miles through forests and mountains and rivers and lakes. Back to those ethereal lights — not only the aurora borealis, but also that delicate, oblique, long, almost transparent sunlight. 

My closest climbing buddy, who is also a mountaineer, went to Alaska almost a decade ago and climbed Denali. He’s told me about Alaska many, many times, he says he keeps thinking about it, wants to go back. Now I get it, I really get it. I want to go back, too, ASAP. 

It’s hard to put into words, it feels like words don’t do it justice. Like the pictures I took: as good as they can be, they simply don’t do it justice. That wilderness, that awe-inspiring wilderness that comes right up to the highway, right up to the cabin door. Nature everywhere, nature reigns. 

It’s extreme. I haven’t been there in the wintertime, when it must be really extreme, but I can imagine it. Cars there have a cable coming out of the engine compartment for the engine heater that one plugs in during the winter months. 

I probably couldn’t take it in the wintertime there, I think my mental health is too dependent on sunshine. But in the summertime time I’d go back there in a heartbeat. 

Of the nine days I spent there, a whole week was cloudy, rainy, overcast, cold, even snowing in places. It was trying. After a few days of it, I was tired and really wished for sunshine. And yet, I still found it beautiful, I still felt its refreshing, healing, liberating effects on me, I still enjoyed it and can still feel the magic of it now. 

That northern light, the northerns lights, the untamed wilderness — Alaska. So refreshing, so liberating, so healing. 

Incredible.