Winter Adventure - Arctic Circle Tour with Ronn Murray Aurora Tours

Aurora around the moon

Stats

Difficulty: Moderate                                                                                   Time:  Full-Day

Summary

This is a “bucket list” trip of a lifetime!

Ronn Murray and his wife Marketa run Aurora Tours out of Fairbanks, AK.  We chose to go all out and took their Arctic Circle Tour on 10 Mar 2014; this was the next to last of these
tours for 2014.  For us, the trip started at 4pm and we returned home at almost 7am.  The clouds were heavy most of the night, but we had a wonderful time and came home with tons of great photos.  Not only did they take us to good locations, they shared some of their tips to night photography learned over years of night shots.

Note:  This trip can only be done in the winter

Opinion

We didn’t get much of an Aurora since there was cloud cover for most of the night, but in spite of that this is a must-do, once-in-a-lifetime experience!

Trail Advice

Bring your best camera and a tripod is a must!

Take a nap before the trip.  It is a very long night and you’ll need the sleep

Dress warmly and wear good thick boots, hat, and gloves.   After standing outside taking pictures for 30 minutes, the cold just soaked right through our boots and our fingers were never warm and downright frozen more than once.  Frostbite is a real possibility and when they tell you about listen.

Bring a Ziploc type bag large enough for your camera.  You will need it for cold protection (Ronn will explain) and hand/foot warmers.  Ronn had hand warmers and plastic bags for us on this trip, so you will be okay if you forget it.

Bring caffeine if you drink it.  Food and water are provided, but very little caffeine.  However, caffeine has another effect and remember our warnings about the outhouses.

Go to the bathroom before you leave.  After the trip starts, the only bathrooms are outhouses and they can be pretty bad.

Suitability

This trip is suitable for all ages and some physical limitations.  However, I wouldn’t recommend you bring really young kids on this tour.  13+ hours in a car or the cold and so late at night would be pretty hard for most children. 

People with physical limitations can do this trip, but you will need to be able to get into and out of a large van and be able to handle some snow and possibly ice.  There isn’t a lot of walking required.

Starting Point

When you schedule your trip with Ronn (Arctic Circle Tour), he will tell you where to meet him and give you directions.  If you stay in a hotel in downtown Fairbanks he is likely to pick you up, but if you are not close enough he will tell you where to meet him.

The Adventure

Chris loves auroras and has been dying to got to Fairbanks for auroras.  When we chose to go to the World Ice Art Championship in Fairbanks this year, we decided to book an aurora watching tour during that trip.  Chris decided to use Ronn Murray Photography and Tours at least in part because he’s been using their aurora prediction tools to look for auroras in Homer, AK.

Since we don’t do this very often, we decided to go all out and take their Artic Circle Tour.  They have several other shorter tours and workshops, but we wanted to do it all! Our goals for the trip were two fold--cross the Arctic Circle (check) and take photos of auroras (check).  We weren't counting on four hours of camera instruction, which came as a very pleasant surprise and a great way to spend six hours in a vehicle.

Ronn and his wife Marketa, both professional aurora photographers, lead the tour.  They picked up 5 of us -- 2 couples and one man -- in their 8-seat van at the Hampton Inn in Fairbanks at 3:45pm and we were loaded an gone by 4pm.

Uphill climb

The route we followed went from Fairbanks to Fox to the Arctic Circle National Park Stop (Milepost 115) and back.  We started with overcast, which we kept most of the night.  However across the evening, night, and morning, we had wind, humidity, blowing snow, and calm conditions across those 230 miles.  Snow, 30 mph+ winds, and a semi tractor-trailer coming down a hill at you leaves you with lasting impressions.  Oh, and we lost cell coverage about 30 minutes into the trip.

During the trip, the temperature hovered around 0 degree F with variable humidity and winds, either of which made it feel 50 degrees colder.  That’s the coldest either of us has been in a long time.  Especially since our boots and gloves were not quite warm enough and could not keep up.  The crazy thing about weather in Alaska: you're always balancing being too hot with too many clothes or too cold with too few.  By the way, that weather is unusually warm for that part of Alaska.

Ronn and Marketa provide dinner; Marketa makes a great sandwich and also provides chips, cookies, and an apple as well as two bottles of water and a bottle of juice.  They also pull out the coffee, tea, and hot chocolate late in the evening. 

Trans-Alaska Pipeline

Our fist stop for the day was at a the Trans-Alaska Pipeline Viewpoint.  We’ll cover this stop more thoroughly in a separate blog, but it is interesting and good for a few photo opportunities.  It’s also relevant since we pretty much followed the pipeline all the way to the Arctic Circle.

Welcome to the Dalton Hwy

Our next stop was at the entrance to the world famous Dalton Highway (home of the Ice Road Truckers).  This is just pure bragging rights and photo-op since very few people every get that far north.  As a side note, the ubiquitous “they” don’t like tourists driving on the Dalton Highway; it is considered too dangerous.  In fact, the car rental places make you sign an agreement saying you won’t take their car on that highway.  The road is dangerous, but not necessarily because it is icy or slippery (although it can be).  One of the biggest dangers is the trucks.  The road had many tight turns and steep inclines.  In many places, the truckers need to be going very fast down a hill so they have enough momentum to get UP the next hill.  If a tourist is toodling along at slow speeds they can either get hit or cause significant difficulty for the truckers.  One piece of mandatory equipment Is a CB radio so you can find out if a truck is coming that can’t slow down and pull off the road to get out of his way.  There are many pull-offs on the road.

Dr. Seuss trees

Then we stopped at a pullout a few miles up the road.  The trees in this area were buried in snow: bent and twisted under the weight.  Ronn thought they looked likes something out of Dr. Seuss J   We stayed here for several minutes while we took photos of the trees.  Since time-change had just happened, this was the first time in 2014 the trees could be seen in daylight.  

By the way, as you can see from the pictures, we were getting very worried about whether the sky would clear so we could see an aurora if one put in an appearance!

More frozen trees

We pulled off again fro more frozen trees just a few more miles up the road where we got a different perspective and spent several more minutes taking pictures.  At this point the sun was setting and it was getting darker.

Yukon River Bridge

The next stop was in full dark (8:45pm) just across the bridge over the Yukon River.  Ronn took us on a short walk to the bank of the river where you can get a nice photo of the bridge and the pipeline running under it.   The river was frozen over, but the weather this winter was relatively warm and it was not sufficiently frozen for them to build an ice road over the river.  In colder years, they do build an ice road because it can handle more and faster traffic than the bridge.

Chris and Carol at the Arctic Circle

We arrived at the Artic Circle at 10:30 pm.  At the winter solstice the Arctic Circle has a full 24 hours of dark and at the summer solstice it has 24 hour of sunshine (you just might see a version of this trip without the aurora in the summer or autumn of 2014).  This was the first place there was a possibility of auroras, but it was totally clouded over.  You could just see the moon glowing through the clouds.  We took a lot of tourist photos and then Ronn gave us his first talk about taking good aurora pictures.  I won’t repeat his advice here (I don’t want to steal his thunder If you take this trip), but I will say I learned a lot.  Chris and I have done a lot of night shot experiments, but we have had only intermittent success with auroras.  After this trip I expect our success rate to go through the roof.  He also gave us some good tips on taking pictures of the Milky Way.

At this point we’d gone as far north as we were going to.  We waited a while, took more pictures, and hoped for the sky to clear.  It didn’t.  Ronn was somewhat optimistic though and said it wasn’t at all unusual for there to be several different weather zones between Arctic Circle and Fairbanks.

Snow in the trees

We headed back toward Fairbanks, pulling over at every good viewing spot to see if the sky was clearing.  We stopped for long periods of time at each spot but no luck…  In fact, we passed through a couple of snow squalls and at least one gentle snow fall; it wasn’t looking good at all.

Finally, an aurora!

Finally, at the last good stop before we had to enter Fairbanks we stopped one last time.  From the fogged up windows it looked like there might be visible stars.  We piled out of the van one last time and lo-and-behold, STARS!!!!  The sky was lovely and dark.  The only light seemed to be coming from the ¾ moon low on the horizon.  No auroras.  But Ronn (and Chris and I) have some experience with auroras that aren’t visible to the naked eye, so they took a couple of test photos to see if there was anything out there.  We pointed east and there it was!  Faint on the horizon and near the moon.  We all set up and started taking pictures like mad.  Ronn went from person to person and helped us make sure we were getting the best pictures our cameras could take.  In fact, he helped Chris and I fix a focus issue that would have ruined our shots.  Then, one of us turned around and took a photo to the east.  The aurora was even better in that direction!  Then one of us looked straight up and there was the aurora directly overhead with the Big Dipper nestled in the center.

Aurora and the Big Dipper

A faint aurora looks nothing like the photos you see.  It looks more like high, thin, white clouds.  But the camera can see what your eye cannot and even faint auroras can be really awesome.  This aurora gave Ronn and Marketa their 21^st night in a row of auroras: pretty impressive even for a Solar Max year.  (At the time of this writing, they were at 25 nights and still counting.)

Overall we got some very nice pictures.  The aurora was never truly amazing -- no dramatic ribbons in the sky -- but it was very nice and a perfect end to our aurora hunting night.  By the way, it was 4:30 am when we started photographing auroras.  We were there for just over an hour.

One final piece of advice:  allow a very light day on the day after taking this trip.  It takes a while to recover from the all-nighter.  At least it did for us.

This was a great trip and even without auroras I’d recommend it.   With auroras it was fabulous!

References: Google Dalton Highway Arctic Circle Stop and you'll get a ton of hits.  All the large travel sites seem to have a guide and you'll get a feeling for what you're getting into.

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