Norway Day 3 - Tromsø
The northern lights, (Aurora Borealis for any of you science snobs), has been on my bucket list forever, and was the main reason I made my way up north to Tromsø. The plan for the day was do a bit of exploring in the morning, and in the evening I had booked a visit to an Alaskan Husky breeding farm to chill and wait for the lights with the pups and some traditional Norwegian food for dinner. We got to the farm, and they fit us with arctic jumpsuits and as we were circling around to enter the dog kennels, the sky was swirling with the lights. Given that the lights can come and go with no warning and in the blink of an eye, we immediately ran to the viewing deck around a fire.
I’m not sure how to really describe the experience, I was exuberant. The only regret I had was not having a tripod to take super clear pictures, but - wow, I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face. The lights in person are so striking, but not in the way you’d imagine. Most of the pictures you’ve seen, and indeed the ones I am going to post below show bright green streaks through the sky with the occasional red/blue/purple. In real life the lights are not as colorful, the striking colors is how our cameras pick up the lights because it is on wavelengths that our eyes can’t see. That does not at all take away from the experience however, seeing the lights dance slowly across the sky, almost like the flow of water snaking its way across a landscape, is really beyond anything I’ve ever experienced before. We got so incredibly lucky, not only did they flair up right as we exited the building where we suited up, but on a night that was forecasted with a KP (simplified down, a scale that has to do with solar activity) of 2 of 9, our guides later admitted to us they were not super optimistic we’d see the lights - however they were more active than the forecast of 2 would have indicated.
After the lights died back a bit, we got to visit with the pups, over 300 Alaskan Huskies that are bred for dog sled racing, including the Iditarod. To my slight disappointment, the dogs weren’t just all all 300 hundred in an open pen, because as our guide put it “that’s how you get 1,000 huskies instead of 300”. The dogs were grouped into houses with 2 dogs each, typically by gender. We also got to visit the puppy pens, which was amazingly fun, even if the pups were pretty tuckered out as it was past bedtime. I didn’t get that many great pictures with the dogs due to both the lighting conditions and the difficulty of getting hyper dogs to hold still for photographs. The dogs were smaller than I imagined honestly, but so much fun to hang out with and play with the ones that came out of their pen. Again, apologies for the quality of these photographs, but I figured I’d share as some of them are fun
