Chasing the Northern Lights

It all starts in Stockholm, one February evening in 2020. From up high, the city glitters by the water; we stay only long enough to board the night train heading north.

One night on the train later, snow has covered everything. In Luleå, on the Gulf of Bothnia, the sea is frozen: icebreakers wait at the quay and kites glide over the pack ice. Nearby, in Gammelstad, the old stone church is surrounded by hundreds of little red cottages, the church town where families once came to sleep on Sundays.

From Luleå, the train takes us even further north, to Abisko, 200 km north of the Arctic Circle. Lake Torneträsk, frozen for 70 kilometres, becomes our playground: ice fishing, snowmobiles, and across the lake the perfect silhouette of Lapporten, the “Gate of Lapland”. At night we wait on the ice, then at the top of Mount Nuolja: a first green veil rises over the lake, shy at first, then it starts to ripple. Our very first aurora.

In Jukkasjärvi, on the banks of the Torne River, the Icehotel is rebuilt every winter from the river’s own ice: carved rooms that will melt away in spring. The next morning, hoarfrost has covered everything; from the drone, the taiga is nothing but a mosaic of white spruces. On the road, reindeer cross without hurrying — here, we are the ones passing through.

We head back south through an endless forest, where a moose watches us for a long time between the pines. In the evening, from a small red house by a frozen lake, the aurora returns one last time above the Milky Way. The cold bites our fingers on the tripod, but nobody wants to go inside.

February 2022: this time, the journey begins in Oslo, under a winter sun: the Holmenkollen ski jump, the opera house that seems to slide into the frozen fjord, the brick city hall by the harbour.

The train takes us from Oslo to Bergen, on the other side of the mountains. Two days on the west coast: the wooden alleys and colourful houses of Bryggen along the harbour, then snow falling at night on the lit-up façades.

The train brings us back to Oslo, from where we fly to the Far North.

A flight to Tromsø, and two years after Sweden, we are back above the Arctic Circle. In the afternoon, the peaks glow pink above the fjord; when night falls, the sky explodes. The solar wind, a stream of particles torn from the Sun, slams into the upper atmosphere: oxygen lights up green, and along the lower edge of the curtains, nitrogen traces violet fringes.

By the water, a herd of reindeer grazes on whatever the snow leaves uncovered, indifferent to our presence. The winter light stays low all day long: it paints the mountains in pink and pale blue, and turns the frozen pebbles of the shore into jewels of ice.

On the island of Kvaløya, the sea itself has frozen into plates that crack under our feet, between red and yellow fishermen’s houses. In a birch wood, a pair of moose stare at us for a moment before vanishing. The peaks rise out of the water like white teeth.

The waterfalls have frozen into organ pipes of ice along the road. Late in the day, the clouds tear open and shafts of light fall onto the fjord. Then, above the lights of a village, the aurora settles over the mountains, like a curtain drawn across the night.

The Lofoten are a granite wall rising out of the Norwegian Sea. In Reine and Hamnøy, the fishermen’s red rorbuer cling to the rocks, the drying racks sag under cod, and a surfer braves the icy water. The Gulf Stream softens winter here, but the storms show no mercy.

Already time to leave the Lofoten. We drive back east, from bridge to tunnel, to Narvik, at the head of its fjord, from where we will head back south.

The plane takes us back to Oslo for one last day. In the museum, Viking treasures; outside, the low March sun sets the glass façades of Aker Brygge and Tjuvholmen ablaze, by the fjord.

February 2025: for Finland, we set off from home, in Paris, and without flying. On a Friday afternoon the train leaves the Gare de l’Est, changes at Mannheim and drops us in Hamburg that same evening.

First stop: a night near the central station, then a full day in Hamburg. We wander from the city hall to the brick canals of the Speicherstadt, all the way to the Elbphilharmonie, whose glass wave towers over the port on the Elbe. In the evening, after the Kunsthalle, we board the night train to Stockholm.

The night train drops us in Stockholm on a Sunday morning, five years after our first journey. Under a perfectly blue sky, we find the spires of Gamla stan again, the city hall by the frozen water, then the Vasa, the 17th-century warship that sank on its maiden voyage. In the late afternoon, we board the overnight ferry to Helsinki.

A night on the Baltic, and the ferry from Stockholm drops us in Helsinki in the morning. We spend the day in the city, where the white cathedral towers over Senate Square under an icy blue sky.

The next day, we pick up a rental car at Helsinki airport and head due north: we will drive all the way up, and all the way back. Our first night in Kemi, at the head of the Gulf of Bothnia. The Sun is at the peak of its eleven-year cycle, and the auroras have never been so generous: from the very first evening, the sky blazes above the forest. When the aurora passes right overhead, its rays seem to converge on a single point: the “corona”, the perspective of the Earth’s magnetic field lines.

A long drive north, to the far reaches of Inari municipality, a few kilometres from Norway. Our base camp for a week: a cabin on the shore of frozen Lake Jääjärvi. At night, the aurora fills the whole sky, then twists into spirals above the pines; by day, we snowshoe across the fells in complete silence.

From Jääjärvi, a detour to the far end of Norway, a few kilometres from the Russian border. The Varanger fjords stretch out under a low sky; in Kirkenes, the monument to the Soviet soldiers who liberated the town in 1944 stands near a van painted with “Stop War”. Even the end of the world cannot escape History.

The wildest night of all. For more than three hours, the whole sky turns pink and red above our cabin at Jääjärvi. That red is oxygen again, but very high up, above 200 kilometres, where the air is so thin that it only glows during the strongest geomagnetic storms. At some point we stopped taking pictures, just to watch.

Another day in Norway: we follow the Tana, the border river between Finland and Norway, all the way to its fjord on the Barents Sea. Here the trees give up: there is only tundra, herds of reindeer belonging to Sámi herders, and on the shore, a lace of ice left on the sand by the tide.

The way back begins: we leave Jääjärvi along the long road that crosses Lapland from north to south, down to Kemi. From the air, a channel of black water splits the white forest; the trees, laden with snow to their tips, look like frozen sentinels.

Back in Kemi, on the coast, where the Baltic is locked in ice. We thought the adventure was over, but on the last evening, well south of the Arctic Circle, the aurora rises once more, immense, green and purple. Like a promise: the quest is not over.

The whole of Finland to cross again in reverse, from the Gulf of Bothnia to the Baltic. In Helsinki, we return the car and board the boat to cross the Gulf of Finland.

At midday, the ferry leaves Helsinki and crosses the Gulf of Finland: here we are in Estonia. A last stop in Tallinn’s old town: ramparts and red-roofed towers, Town Hall Square, cobbled lanes and the domes of Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, between the Hanseatic world and Russia. The next day, a plane takes us home to Paris.