the light fantastic
Forget the northern lights – the polar night is the natural phenomenon
to witness this winter. We head to Swedish Lapland during the full
moon and find a region surprisingly awash with colour
All images by Jonathan Stokes
Twenty minutes before the plane lands at Kiruna airport, the sun dips below the horizon. It is 9.45am. It’s the last time I’ll see it before I fly back south in a few days, but this is nothing: the residents of northern Sweden make do without a single sunrise or sunset for a month each winter. When the sun finally makes a comeback in January, it does so for a glorious 29 minutes, then promptly disappears again.
Welcome to the Arctic
during the polar night.
MOONLIGHT SHADOW
I had imagined a land of complete darkness, of pallid locals scurrying about by torchlight and staying close to sources of electricity at all times. Johan Stenevad scoffs. ‘It is never dark here, you will see,’ he says as we drink coffee by the fire at his guesthouse in Kangos. With a bone-crushing handshake that signifies a human being who knows exactly what he’s doing and an enthusiasm for the outdoors that borders on obsession, Johan is the perfect man to dispel any misconceptions I might have about his homeland.
The environment – the long winters, the years where there are more months with snow than without, the geographical isolation – has led to a strong sense of community in the village. ‘I have never locked any car or snowmobile here,’ says Johan as we wrestle our bodies into snowsuits, boots and helmets. ‘Here we put a broom against the door – it tells people that we are not at home but you can come in and make yourself a cup of coffee. It is very open, very friendly, but,’ he adds with a laugh, ‘don’t screw up or you are smoked for the rest of your life.’
We clamber aboard snowmobiles and bounce out of the guesthouse grounds, juddering along a deserted icy road for a while before making a sharp turn into the forest. Banks of snow lie as if newly fluffed beneath spindly spruce. The smell of pine mingles with that of petrol. Falling snow whips into my cold-stung face as we trundle across a vast frozen bog, and I’m slightly relieved when Johan signals for us to stop. It’s only when I’ve rubbed the ice from my eyes that I notice the sky.
To the south, orange melts into gold as it meets the horizon; to the north, the deepest blue graduates to soft purple and mauve. Straight above, a few pinpricks of light mark the first stars. It’s like watching the finest sunrise ever to dawn upon the world, and then spinning round to witness the most spectacular sunset. It’s 1.30pm according to my watch; in my head, it could be midnight or midday or any hour in between. This is ‘kaamos’, an hour of magical blue light that occurs only during the polar night and. only in the Arctic.
Johan leans back in his snowmobile and stares at the huge orange moon rising above the wetlands, turning yellow and white as it climbs. ‘I run around like a crazy rat with his tail on fire all day,’ he says. ‘Then everything disappears when I head out. I don’t know how nature does it, but it is the best doctor.’
A new cast takes the stage as the light of the unseen sun fades. What I had assumed were clouds start to behave in a way not common to clouds. They shift and pulse across the sky, morphing from grey to faintly green and back. Northern lights! ‘You never get fed up with this,’ says Johan as we sit and watch, non-paying customers in the world’s largest open-air cinema. ‘I have things to do and bills to pay but if it is clear like this, I have to be outside.’
We are two days from a full moon, but it is still light enough to see by. As Johan digs a hole in the snow and chops wood for a fire, I tumble on to my back and gaze upwards. Satellites pass through a sky crowded with stars, Venus bright among them. The flash of a shooting star catches my eye, zipping across a copse of trees.
I wander into it and feel I’ve entered a dream world, walking amongst an army of ghosts sleeping through the winter. The snow on their branches has caught silver in the moonlight, turning them into skeletal fingers that reach for me as I pass. The hard crust on the snow jangles like broken glass when I step into it and sink up to my knees into the powder below. If there are any bears hibernating in here, they won’t be sleeping for long.
The moon is sufficiently bright to cast long shadows as I emerge. ‘As soon as you get this white gold,’ says Johan kicking up snow, ‘it lights up the whole world.’ We sit on reindeer skins by the fire and eat warm cinnamon buns and coffee poured from a leather pouch. The drowsy warmth and the firelight work like a charm, and I instantly feel safe and comfortable, cocooned from any possible misadventure. My eyes can’t quite decide what to settle on: the flickering flames or the snow sparkling in the moonlight. ‘A long time ago, life was not about getting money for a new car or electronic devices but about food and warmth,’ says Johan, clearly sharing the mood. ‘If you had that, you were happy.’
He might be extra happy to know that he’s been proven right beyond doubt: the polar night is categorically not dark.
THE WHOLE OF THE MOON
Åsa Säfström is another Swede to shun the concept of indoors. I meet the guide and activity operator 120 miles north of the Arctic Circle in Abisko, a town that has earned itself a reputation as the best place in the world to see the northern lights. At a time and in temperatures that have most people racing home and turning up the thermostat, visitors here clamber into cable cars and rattle up the mountain to the Aurora Sky Station, all the better to observe the phenomenon.
Tonight, however, we are not joining them. We are hunting a celestial body of a different kind – the moon. It’s -20°C and Åsa is extolling the merits of winter camping as we head out into the national park that stretches from the town. The day has been overcast and dreary, mottled with low cloud, and I wonder if there’s much chance of moonlight. ‘The coffee is not ready any quicker if you stress the pot,’ says Åsa. ‘We have to be patient.’
As we clip our feet into snowshoes and make our first steps onto deep snow, the skies above Abisko do what they do best – they clear. The landscape is suddenly revealed. Lumps of ice drift and gurgle in the natural harbour of Lake Torneträsk, triangular mountain peaks visible on the far shore. The moon is bright enough that I have to shield my eyes to face it. There is no need for torches as we pad through a forest of birch trees to the lakeside, our wide shallow footprints crossing those of an Arctic hare.
‘So many people ask me how I can live here in the dark – but, look, it is not dark,’ says Åsa as we drink hot lingonberry juice and admire the view. ‘When you live in the city, you don’t notice the moon. Here everyone knows if it’s a full moon or a half moon or no moon. My son is two years old and even he loves it. He always cries the moon, the moon, the moon – come and see, mamma.’
I can understand the mania. It is a distinctly peculiar sensation to see your own shadow in the snow, solid and black as if painted, and know there is no sun to cast it. We sit lost in the spectacle, watching beams of light slink over the mountains and listening to the doleful horns of trains carrying iron ore through Abisko on their way from Norway to China. At midnight, the spell is finally broken and the clouds close in once more.
The moon is on its slow trajectory towards the horizon when Åsa and I head out again the following morning. We are venturing much deeper into the national park, far from roads and train tracks, to witness in glorious isolation the highlight of the polar night: the full moon. There’s a pinkish tinge to the sky as we head out on snowmobiles, following the valley away from the lake. A helicopter whirrs in the distance, used by Sami herders to bring their reindeer down from the mountains for winter. A line of six elk stalks across a frozen field beneath it, prancing away in a panic when it gets too close.
After a couple of hours, we cross the path of the reindeer migration, the snow churned up by thousands of hooves. It’s almost too much for Åsa’s huskies, who sit in the back of a trailer with ears pricked skywards, eyes desperately searching for the source of the intriguing smells that hang in the air.
They’re happy to be out and snuffling the ground when we stop for lunch in a lavvu, the teepee-like tent once used by the Sami during the migration. We sit by the fire and eat flatbread and parsnip soup. ‘The Sami thought that the northern lights were spirits with unfinished business on Earth,’ says Åsa, gesturing to the hole at the top of the tent. ’They would bring their children into the laavu and close the snow hole so they couldn’t get them. If they grabbed you, you were part of the northern lights forever.’
It’s eye-stingingly, throat-chokingly smoky inside the lavvu with the hole open; with it closed, I think I’d rather take my chances outside with the spirits. Beyond the tent flaps, a fat moon has slowly started to climb through the darkening sky, the North Star blinking above it. It’d be easy to get caught in its magic once again but we must head on – there are a few miles to go before we reach our overnight cabin.
We arrive in late afternoon. The snow around the hut is piled metres high, a sure sign that no humans have passed this way in a while. Indeed, as Åsa gets the fire going inside, I turn through the pages of the visitor book, finding the last entry scrawled in September. With a reindeer stew cooking on the stove,we head out to enjoy the polar night for a final time. Clicking boots into skis, we set off across a frozen lake under the light of the full moon. Åsa skims gracefully ahead as I skitter and wobble in her tracks. Mysterious crunches and snaps accompany us – perhaps the ice cracking, or an elk somewhere in the trees.
‘It is better to do activities with nature than a head torch,’ says Åsa, letting herself glide to a stop. ‘It is more pure under the full moon.’ She pauses to fully take in our surroundings before we make our way back, and takes a good lungful of the chill air. ‘You have space for a memory like this your whole life.’
After a dinner sat in our thermals and chatting over candlelight, we make up our bunk beds and I creep under the covers, listening to the crackling stove. I take a last look out of the window. The moon is over the mountain, illuminating patches of ice on its slopes like a million lanterns. I lie there and imagine it’s looking over me. In no time at all, I am fast asleep.
This feature first appeared in the ‘Out There’ digital issue of Lonely Planet magazine. All copyright owned by Lonely Planet.