Northern Lights' southern sojourn

 

I did not plan on the rare occurrence. I really just wanted to see the redwoods again. How could that not take my total focus on a trip to California’s far northwest? 

A text from my friend’s best friend changed the course of the evening. A massive solar storm would send the aurora borealis thousands of miles further south than usual. That meant we might see it from our campground. 

Word from places already dark held promise. To the east, people in Ohio and Tennessee posted pictures of vivid aurora borealis. Immediately scanning the sky, the lack of any clouds in a region known for voluminous fog seemed fortuitous. If the Northern Lights reached Arcata Bay, we would see them.

After chasing astronomical wonders in annular and total eclipses, I had expected any view of the Northern Lights would wait until I managed a trip to Alaska or northern Canada. Maybe rare event would shake up the short trip to the Redwood Curtain, or so I hoped. After total dark, the waiting didn’t take long. 

Around 10 p.m., the pitch-black night suddenly grew reddish-purple to the north. The solar storm had come. The aurora borealis arrived and would only grow stronger in the next three hours. Even in the lights of the RV park, it was clearly visible. 

We told everyone we passed, and only one or two people knew to look for the northern lights. Even teenagers that would not normally borther to look skyward were taken with the sight. It brought a strange unity to strangers who would normally passed without speaking. 

At first it seemed like a high, thin patch of clouds. The stars stayed visible through the reddish haze. But the haze grew bolder. 

Streaks appeared in the cloud, sharp columns. Some streaks solidified into curtains. Another display brewed on the horizon, where a blanket of neon green emerged. The solar wind was running strong.

Here the iPhone shined at taking pictures more brilliant than the naked eye. The Android did not acquit itself so well. 

The radiance grew and dimmed for hours. It was impossible to look away, knowing it might not be seen this easily again. Once I felt completely exhausted, the time to look away arrived. In fairness, the brilliance had dimmed somewhat. I found it entirely too easy to fall asleep completely satisfied. 

A Saturday night stab at northern lights in Chico proved less successful. The sky would not comply. It was simply too bright, the darkness of the coast absent in a town of 70,000 people. The few places dark enough to reveal a fuller sky, mostly small parking lots, were already crowded. So we called it off. 

But a lifelong hope had been met in the wilds of California’s redwood coast. The collision of two beautiful natural spectacles – a grove of impossibly tall trees, a the light display put on by solar wind pushing electrons across the earth’s magnetic field. 

Rarely had lack of plans turned out so well.