{"id":16000,"date":"2026-02-09T19:09:52","date_gmt":"2026-02-10T03:09:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/?p=16000"},"modified":"2026-02-12T21:51:03","modified_gmt":"2026-02-13T05:51:03","slug":"everything-is-frozen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/2026\/02\/09\/everything-is-frozen\/","title":{"rendered":"Everything is Frozen"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Seeing the Northern Lights requires two things: solar activity and clear skies. We’ve been lucky on the clear skies so far – one of the advantages of visiting in February is that there are more clear nights – but a downside of clear skies is that a lack of clouds leads to MUCH colder nights; tomorrow will be our third straight day where temps are around -20F. Solar activity hasn’t been particularly high, but there is still enough that the lights are visible in the evenings, with occasional bursts that light up the horizon for thirty minutes at a time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Aside from late night light shows we didn’t do much today given the cold. Once it had warmed up to a still-deadly -10F we hopped in the car and took a drive to see the snow-covered landscape, the F-35s at Eilsen Air Force Base, the art and taxidermy at the Knotty Shop<\/a>, Santa’s Workshop in North Pole (which ironically is south of us), and then we resupplied in Fairbanks before returning to our warm room for another evening of Aurora photography.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Aurora<\/p>\n

Around midnight last night the lights were getting good, so I strapped on all of my Arctic gear and trekked into the woods, camera frozen to my hand, to snap some photos.<\/div>\n\n\n\n

\"Aurora<\/p>\n

I fell asleep around 1am, but luckily Audrey stayed awake and got me out of bed when the lights brightened again at 1:30.<\/div>\n\n\n\n

\"Aurora<\/p>\n

Audrey made a timelapse during our last trip in 2018 and I was jealous, so it was my turn to try one on this trip. If you look closely you’ll see the stars move along with the lights.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Seeing the Northern Lights requires two things: solar activity and clear skies. We’ve been lucky on the clear skies so far – one of the advantages of visiting in February is that there are more clear nights – but a downside of clear skies is that a lack of clouds leads to MUCH colder nights; … Continue reading “Everything is Frozen”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[79,30],"class_list":["post-16000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal","tag-northern-lights","tag-photography"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16000","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16000"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16000\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16015,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16000\/revisions\/16015"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}