Checking the Northern Lights off the Bucket List

I have chased a lot of dreams in my life, and been lucky enough to achieve many of them. Seeing the Aurora Borealis, also called the Northern Lights, has been high on that list since being stationed in England in the late 1990’s and realizing they existed.

While I never got the chance to see them then, BJ and I did get a chance to see them in February 2016 on a trip to Iceland. They were so faint we couldn’t even see it with the naked eye, but it was not a peak time of year, nor had there been any recent solar activity. We could see something wispy moving in the sky at 2AM, and until he set up his camera with a long exposure, we didn’t know what we were seeing. The photos came out incredibly, and gave us a goal of seeing a better show.

Fast forward to December of 2023 and they were predicting for 2024 to be an active year in the solar cycle, so we planned our travels to get another opportunity to see them. Our goal was to spend as much time in the northern US to see them, and to avoid the hot weather we had endured the last two summers RVing in Florida and Texas!

In May of this year, and there was great solar activity, even in the south, since it is a peak year. After seeing incredible photos from that Friday night, we had the crazy idea to jump in our truck without the camper and drive from Central Florida to Georgia/South Carolina, in hopes of a repeat show. We spent 24 hours in that truck, visiting Savannah, Tybee Island and even Hardeeville, South Carolina area. We are pretty sure all we got was sea fog and the glow of city lights, and some stiff necks and back pain from having slept in the truck for a few hours at a rest area before heading back home.

When we left in June to travel cross country, we had tentative timelines to be in certain areas, but nothing set. I even downloaded the Aurora app (you can read more about it and other apps we love in our recent blog post of Smartphone Apps We Love. I checked the app daily and it is one of the few I have set to give me alerts and notifications.

We spent a week in South Dakota and a month in Washington with no luck, but our luck changed when we got to Wyoming. Our first area we stayed in was in Powell, and we saw it faintly, but didn’t realize it until later, so didn’t get any good photos. We spent a few weeks in Cody and got to see it a couple of times. Grand Teton, Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks were also a bust for us.

We then traveled across the northern US and into Maine, watching reports and were still disappointed.

And then we spent a week in the Cape Cod area of Massachusetts and hit the jackpot. Our Thousand Trails campground was surrounded by farmlands and at the west end of the Cape Cod peninsula, which meant dark sky area. Timing was perfect with some solar activity and we got an amazing show right after sunset, and then again around midnight. We were awestruck by the show. If we weren’t expecting it, it would have been scary since there was an eerie pink glow to the sky to the naked eye. With camera filters, we saw pinks, greens, blues and purples and watched for hours.

While we still have hopes of being dazzled with a light show visible to the naked eye, we know we will need to head a lot farther north and closer, or into the arctic circle, to achieve it. But we certainly checked it off our 2024 Dream Board!