#3. THE AURORA BOREALIS LEGEND

If you whistle under the Northern Lights,

they will shift and dance for you.

 

In the 7th grade I wrote the first entries to my Life List: places to explore, people to meet, and things to experience over the arc of my lifetime. Actually, this was a homework assignment given to us during an assembly and inspired by the famed explorer John Goddard, click HERE for more. I did that homework assignment life list using the Encyclopedia Britannia my mother had just bought for me and my beginners collection of National Geographics. Since those early years I have been moving down that list but cannot help adding more to do as I meet other travelers and read about far away places. I feel like the character depicted in the Flammarion engraving discovering the wonders beyond the heavens: click HERE.

MY LIFE LIST

#1 Walk Olduvai Gorge, into a steep-sided ravine where Mary Leakey discovered a skull fragment of Zinjanthropus Boisei, dubbed the "Nutcracker Man" because of his huge molars, who lived 1.75 million years ago.

#2 Walk the Inca Trail down into the ancient city of Machu Picchu to feel the echoes of its people.

#3. Experience the Aurora Borealis. 60 years it took from that day to this week at Borealis Basecamp, Latitude 60.10323 degrees North, 28 miles above Fairbanks Alaska. There's a legend: if you whistle under the borealis, it will shift and dance for you.

#4. Click HERE for the whole list.

 

Since we're about to travel to Alaska...

Is it Denali or Mount McKinley?

Photo credit: NPS 

It's worthy of mention to note that in took 100 years of debate to change the name of Mount Mckinley back to it's original name: Denali just in time ...

"On the eve of the National Park Service’s 100th anniversary in 2016, the name of the highest peak in North America changed from “Mount McKinley” to “Denali.” The timing of the change not only helped mark the agency’s centennial, it shines a light on the long human history of the park, and illuminates a naming debate that has lasted more than 100 years."

I've long thought that a similar initiative should be focused on Sagarmatha, Chomolungma (goddess mother of the world). Mount Everest is so... eurocentric. 

Let's engineer a renaming campaign!!!

Sagarmatha

 

 

 Now back to the Borealis..

It was a  wait worthy of the years, but like most expeditions, there were the stops, both planned and unplanned, along the way that gave the journey an energy and life of its own. 

Here be the journal of that journey between September 27, 2022 and October 10th.

The 10 DAY BOREALIS EXPEDITION on a single page.

We land at Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport.  Senator Ted Stevens served the citizens of Alaska 40 years.      

Below photo credit: Jaeseop Song

Arrangements had been made for 4 days at the Aleyska Resort a few miles from Anchorage, in the little town of Girdwood Alaska.

I'd return in a New York heartbeat especially for a family ski trip.

Though our Borealis Expedition had many parts, they are placed solidly in context by the pristine clarity of the documentary below. It weaves many stories into our journey, the Anthabaskans, caribou, salmon, wood bison, black-taided deer, musk ox, grizzly bears, bull elk Klondike gold, all within the story of the Yukon River. Take a look.

Day 5:  Walking along 2nd Street in downtown Fairbanks we meet an engaging native elder, Anne, a river of wisdom and experience and kindness tending to her store: Beads and Things. 

She is a native Anthabaskan from Stevens Village less than a day away.  She radiates a purity from  living in the arctic according to its laws, steeped in her culture, a strong sense of honor, and strength of body and mind required for life under the Northern Lights. Later, we are standing outside, when another elder walks by, she greets him with a broad smile and tells him: "Will you dance with me?" His face radiates a shy happiness from her kind flirtation. Though I came to Alaska for the Northern Lights, I found the luminous treasure in Anne from Stevens. Click on the video link below and listen to her wisdom.

Holding her hands together Anne told us: 

 

"Take care of each other.

Because we are all one family."

 

"When someone died Grandma would say Abah, she hurt." Anne has taught us the first word of our Anthabaskan vocabulary.

Her 47 year old son, Ron Gossal Junior,  is the artist who designed this hoodie which Patricia quickly scoops up to show her design student in Santa Ana California. 

Day 8:  We meet the tall and lean Carl Ray Erhart up at Borealis Base camp who lives that same extraordinary and rich close-to-the-earth Koikan Anthabaskan way of living. He was born in Tanana Village 130 miles west of Fairbanks.

 

"My parents raised me on a totally subsistence life style... fishing in the summer, trapping in the winter. Dogs were our transportation. If you go to the Discovery Channel and look up Yukon Men, that's all about the people in my village.Mushing

 

 

 

Click HERE for Carl Erhart in his own words.

He is a competitive musher with his own team of sled dogs which he races when the snow comes. We learn about him and his way of life as he tours us on his sled, his dogs pulling eagerly on there harnesses. He is very attentive to their needs, their health well cared for as their lives are interdependent.

 

It's about the adventure and living life. I try to live each day and not worry about... money and that 'kind of stuff'.

The tour company Riverboat Discovery sponsors my kennel, they do a stern wheeler tour to the Chena River Village. It's a real genuine experience of what natives do to survive here with real Koikon Anthabaskans giving the tour." 

 

More about Carl coming soon.

 

To double our chances of experiencing the Aurora Borealis, we reserved two nights in a dome at BOREALIS BASECAMP. After dinner and a short walk we fell into a cozy sleep under a starry canopy: the Alaskan night sky... then awakened to a chime (a service to clients who which to be notified when the borealis appears). See the 3 photos below. 

 

Dome photo courtesy Borealis Basecamp

Inuit believed the aurora to be the torches of spirits illuminating a pathway to heaven for souls of people who died.**

** From https://www.saltwire.com/newfoundland-labrador/opinion/whistling-at-the-northern-lights-135097/ 

Click HERE: the Northern Lights in the voice of Dene Elder Jonas Antoine.  The Dene people are a First Nations indigenous group inhabiting the northern boreal and Arctic regions of Canada and Alaska.

Click HERE for a Northern Lights Forecast

 

Click HERE for how to Photograph the Borealis 

As in all my voyages of exploration and discovery, I returned with more questions than were answered on the journey.

#1 What is the Anthabaskan term for the aurora borealis.

#2 When the Yukon River freezes over hows does that warm the hearts of native people. I have a clue from two junior high kids while on a expedition to Utqiagvik, the northern most point in the United States.

 

A Photo credit: Al Grillo/AP    Resident of the town formerly known as Barrow, Alaska, rides her motorcycle along an Arctic Ocean beach in 2005. The town is now officially called Utqiagvik, its Inupiaq name.

Utqiagvik

"The town is now officially called Utqiagvik, its Inupiaq name. The northernmost community in the United States has officially restored its original name. In October, the people of the Alaskan town formerly known as Barrow, on the edge of the Arctic Ocean, voted to restore its indigenous name, Utqiagvik."  October, 2016

Click HERE for why we changed our town's name.