Yuko’mming to the Northern Lights
Maybe not everyone gets my joke in the title… so let me spell it out… Are You Coming to the Northern Lights mushed together sounds like You coming to the northern lights… and add the province, Yukon, in there and squish it even further; say it with me… Yuko’mming to the Northern Lights?! Woohoo!
Okay, so it’s never as clever when you have to spell it out, but oh well!
This fabulous tour I went on with my Mom and Canadian Classics Tours was an amazing adventure! The tour included flights and accommodations (and to be honest, I don’t think you could have done it much cheaper if you went without a tour, because I tried!) Here is a little break down of the expenses:
Flights alone costed around $600 (out of Calgary) and since I am living in Toronto, I also had to fly to Calgary.
Accommodation was 4 nights at the Coast High Country Inn which is around $150/night (warning all hotels in Whitehorse have thin walls, so bring ear plugs if you are a light sleeper).
We went on a City Tour (say around $20/person), we went to the Wildlife Preserve (For Adults 18+, $15 if you walked around which would be quite the hike! Or $22 if you took a bus tour) and the Takhini Hot Springs is $12.50.
The Grand Finale every night of course being the trip to the Northern Lights viewing center which also had a campfire, washrooms, and cabin to keep warm in, drink hot chocolate or coffee and eat snacks. I am not sure of the price of this if you were to go without a tour, but let’s just say you rented a car and bought gas and drove into an area about 30 minutes away with no lights; a rental car for 4 days would be around $180-200 plus gas which was at about $1.44/liter so you are looking at approximately two tank fills which would be around $120.
Food, of course, is purchased in both cases (side note, I found it very easy to eat Gluten Free in Whitehorse which was a great surprise)!
Add that all up and you are at about $1570 if you try it all on your own! The tour through Canadian Classics Tours was $1500 and you don’t have to worry about booking everything, so it is a great value!
Our first tour took us to the Hot Springs, which were under some serious renovations which made it difficult to get an awesome photo, so I will instead show you some beautiful animals that we saw at the Wildlife Preserve. We were able to see some unique Animals that you may not normally be able to spot in other parts of Canada including Buffalo, Moose, Caribou, Arctic Fox (in the bottom right of the collage), Musk Ox and a Sliver Fox (the black coloured fox in the solo photo below):
The second day’s tour took us on a Fall Colours tour to Carcross the morning hours allowed us to see frost melting with water droplets and frost on the same pedals, it was stunning!
Can we just pause for a moment at these stunning reflections? I was able to capture these on the way to Carcross;
We stopped at the Carcross Desert which was an incredible moment with pine trees growing right out the Sand next to the gorgeous fall coloured mountains. We snapped a group photo at Emerald Lake of this amazing crew who was just as excited about photography as I was! And lastly we stopped by the Carcross Beach to admire the sand with the lake next to the snow capped mountains, so amazing! I couldn’t believe my eyes!
The grand finale, the stunning Northern Lights, aka the Aurora Borealis, can you believe these exsist?! On the left photo you can see the stars of the big dipper! Make sure your brightness is turned up to see the photo of the Milky Way in the middle top and I snuck behind some trees to catch a great shot of the Northern Lights. The bottom right photo had to be one of my favourites though because it looked almost like a rainbow!
This was definitely my all time favourite Northern Lights capture of the trip! I call it “Night Bird” and also include the big dipper in the top left of the frame, gorgeous wouldn’t you agree?!
