Hunting the Aurora Borealis in Alaska (2025)
I'm going to be honest with you: none of us really knew what we were signing up for.
Sure, we'd seen the photos. The ones that look almost fake, green curtains rippling across a black sky, their reflection shimmering on frozen lakes. But photos are one thing. Actually dragging yourself out of a warm bed at 9 PM to go stand in the Alaskan dark at -whatever degrees is a completely different commitment.
We did it anyway. And I'm so glad we did.
First Things First: Why Alaska?
This is always the first question people ask. And the honest answer is: because nowhere in the continental US gives you this.
Alaska sits at the top of the world, literally. Fairbanks, where we went, sits at roughly 64° north latitude. To put that in context, that's further north than most of Scandinavia. Most of Iceland. The city of Fairbanks is actually inside what scientists call the "auroral oval", a ring-shaped zone that permanently hovers around the magnetic poles where aurora activity is most concentrated. You don't go to Alaska to hope for the northern lights. You go because the odds are genuinely in your favor.
But aurora viewing also needs two things: darkness and a clear sky. November is one of the best months because Fairbanks gets very little daylight, around 5 hours by mid-November, which means the sky is dark for a long, long time every night. And interior Alaska (away from the coast) tends to stay relatively dry and clear compared to, say, Anchorage, which gets hammered by Pacific weather systems.
So: high latitude, long nights, clear skies. That's why Fairbanks. That's why November.
But Why Is Alaska So Cold, Really?
Okay so here's the thing. When you land in Fairbanks in November and the air hits you like a wall, your instinct is to blame the snow or the wind. But it's actually more interesting than that.
Alaska's extreme cold! especially interior Alaska, away from the coast, comes down to a few compounding factors.
It's far from the ocean. Coastal places are moderated by water: the ocean absorbs heat in summer and releases it slowly in winter, keeping temperatures from swinging too wildly. But Fairbanks is landlocked, sitting in a broad river valley surrounded by mountains. There's no ocean nearby to take the edge off. This is called a continental climate, and interior Alaska has one of the most extreme versions of it on Earth. Summer temperatures can hit 90°F. Winter can drop to -40°F or colder. The same place.
The sun angle is brutal. Even when the sun does show up in November (for those 5 precious hours), it barely clears the horizon. It's not overhead, heating the ground directly, it's skimming sideways across the sky at a low angle, like someone shining a flashlight at a wall from across the room. The energy is spread out, diffused, barely warming anything.
Temperature inversions trap cold air. Here's the sneaky one. In Fairbanks, cold, dense air settles into the valley floor and just... stays there. Warm air sits on top of it like a lid. The result is that sometimes it's actually warmer up on the hillsides than down in the city, the opposite of what you'd expect. And the cold air at the bottom just sits and gets colder. Some winter nights in Fairbanks record some of the lowest temperatures of any inhabited city on Earth.
The Drive Up: 2:30 AM from Home
The trip started the way all slightly unhinged adventure trips start! in the middle of the night.
We left home at 2:30 AM, drove straight to O'Hare, parked at the ORD parking station (pro tip: it's a 3-hour direct drive from our place, so we just went for it), and caught our flight out at 6:00 AM. By 3:15 PM, we were touching down in Fairbanks, Alaska.
Three hours behind. That was the first thing we had to wrap our heads around. Fairbanks runs 3 hours behind Illinois, so our bodies were completely confused for the first day. We landed at 3:15 PM local time, which felt like early evening back home, but the sky outside already had that almost-dark quality that high-latitude November does so well.
We grabbed food somewhere along the way, nothing fancy, just that first vegetarian meal that hits different after a long travel day, and then checked into our place. We'd booked the Bushplane Hangar Home on Airbnb, which sounds more intense than it is. It's a whole home, slept the seven of us fine (3 bedrooms, 1 bath), and it had this incredible name that made us feel like real Alaska adventurers before we'd even stepped outside.
Night One: Aurora Hunting Spot #1
Nobody slept.
Okay, that's not entirely true, we tried. But when you've come all this way specifically to see the northern lights, lying in bed while there's a sky outside feels criminal. So at 9 PM, we were out.
Aurora hunting, it turns out, is mostly just... looking above your airbnb sky. Which sounds anticlimactic. But there's something genuinely meditative about it, you're standing in the dark, eyes adjusting, neck craned upward, waiting. Talking in low voices. Laughing a little at how cold this state is.
We stayed out until 2 AM.
Did we see anything that night? Jackpot! We saw it on our first night!
So How Does the Aurora Actually Work?
Before I tell you what we saw, you deserve to understand what you're actually looking at when the sky lights up. Because once you know, it hits even harder.
The northern lights are, at their core, a collision.
The sun is constantly throwing stuff at us, not just light, but a stream of charged particles called the solar wind. Electrons and protons, traveling at a million miles an hour, constantly flowing outward from the sun in every direction. Most of this just bounces off Earth's magnetic field, which acts like a giant invisible shield around the planet.
But at the poles, the magnetic field lines converge and dip down toward the surface. This creates two "gaps" in the shield, one at the north pole, one at the south. Solar wind particles slip through these gaps and spiral down along the magnetic field lines into the upper atmosphere, about 60 to 200 miles above Earth's surface.
When those charged particles collide with gas molecules in the atmosphere, mostly oxygen and nitrogen, they transfer energy. The gas molecules get excited (in the physics sense, their electrons jump to a higher energy state). Then, almost immediately, they release that energy as light. That release is the aurora.
The color depends on which gas is being hit and at what altitude:
- Green is the most common. That's oxygen, at around 60–150 miles up.
- Red is oxygen too, but higher up — above 150 miles, where the atmosphere is thinner and the collisions are rarer and longer-lasting.
- Blue and purple are nitrogen, lower in the atmosphere.
- Pink, the pinkish fringe you sometimes see at the bottom of a green curtain, is nitrogen again, mixing with oxygen at lower altitudes.
The KP index is how scientists measure aurora strength on a scale of 0–9. KP 1 or 2 is a quiet night, barely visible. KP 5 or above is a geomagnetic storm, that's when you get the dramatic, full-sky displays with multiple colors. We checked the KP forecast every day through an app named Aurora. On our best nights, it was sitting at 4–5.
The shape of rippling curtain and pulsing bands, comes from the structure of Earth's magnetic field itself. The lights aren't just scattered randomly. They follow the field lines, which is why they appear in arcs and folds and waves. When the solar wind is especially strong and gusty, the whole display starts to move, shimmer, chase itself across the sky. That's when it stops looking like a natural phenomenon and starts looking like something that shouldn't be possible.
Thursday: Denali National Park
Day two. We decided to actually do some daytime things.
Denali National Park is about two hours south of Fairbanks. We didn't do a major hike — November is not hiking season, and we were saving our energy for 2 AM aurora runs — but we drove in, got our national park pass, and just looked.
Here's the thing about Denali (the mountain, not the park): at 20,310 feet, it is the highest peak in North America. But that number doesn't really communicate the scale, because height-above-sea-level isn't the same as how imposing a mountain feels. Everest is taller in absolute terms, but Everest sits on the Tibetan Plateau, which is already 15,000 feet above sea level. Denali rises from a base of about 2,000 feet. That means the vertical rise from base to summit is roughly 18,000 feet, more than any other mountain on Earth when measured from its base.
Standing there, you can see it from a hundred miles away on a clear day. And it still doesn't look real. It looks like someone pasted a mountain from a different, larger scale of reality onto the horizon.
We didn't say much. We just looked for a while.
That night: Aurora Hunting Spot #2. KP index was looking good. We were getting better at this.
Friday: The Art of Doing Nothing (Productively)
Friday was our loose day. No Denali. No ice caves. Just the city, some wandering, some shopping, some eating.
Fairbanks is a small city — about 30,000 people — but it has a surprisingly functioning food and arts scene considering it's surrounded by wilderness and frozen for most of the year. There's something about living at the edge of survivable that makes a place feel real in a way that more temperate cities sometimes don't.
We walked around. We found things. We ate things. Aurora Hunting Spot #3 that night.
By this point we had the rhythm down: layers on, drive out, engine off, look up, wait. We'd stopped needing to talk about what we were doing. We just did it.
Saturday: Hot Springs, Santa Claus, and the Weirdest Museum We've Ever Been In
Saturday was the day for the quirky stuff.
We started at Santa Claus House in North Pole, Alaska — and yes, North Pole is a real city. It's about 14 miles south of Fairbanks. The entire city has legally committed to the Christmas theme: the street signs are candy cane striped, the streetlights are shaped like candy canes, and there are reindeer. Santa Claus House is part gift shop, part tourist attraction, part genuine local institution. You can write a letter to Santa from there and apparently get a response. We bought some things. We felt no shame about it.
Then we drove 17 minutes up to Chena Hot Springs, and this is where the trip really hit its peak (daytime division).
Why Are There Hot Springs in Frozen Alaska?
This one messes with people's heads. Alaska is cold. Why is there boiling water coming out of the ground?
The answer is that surface temperature and underground temperature are completely different things. Geothermal heat is generated by the decay of radioactive elements deep inside Earth's mantle — uranium, thorium, potassium — a process that has been running continuously for billions of years and has nothing to do with what's happening at the surface. The deeper you go, the hotter it gets, regardless of what the weather is doing up top.
In most places, groundwater sinks into the earth, gets heated by this geothermal energy, and either stays underground or rises slowly back up. But in volcanically or tectonically active areas — like much of Alaska, which sits on the Pacific Ring of Fire — that geothermal heating is much more intense. Groundwater can be superheated and forced back to the surface rapidly. The result: hot springs.
Chena Hot Springs sits in a geothermal zone that pumps out water at around 156°F naturally. The resort moderates it down to a comfortable soaking temperature for the outdoor pools.
So what you're doing when you sit in those pools is this: you're sitting in water heated by radioactive decay happening miles below you, while the temperature above your shoulders is well below freezing, and there are snow-covered trees all around you. It's one of those experiences that sounds impossible until you're in it.
We stayed in the pools for a long time. Longer than we planned. The steam rising off the water in the cold air, the silence of the surrounding forest — it was the most relaxed any of us had felt in a long time.
The Aurora Ice Museum: Staying Cold on Purpose
Also at Chena Hot Springs: the Aurora Ice Museum, which is kept at a constant 20°F year-round. The whole thing is carved from ice — the sculptures, the bar, the walls, the furniture. It's kept frozen by a system of refrigerant pipes embedded in the floor, which is a kind of surreal irony: using electricity to keep ice frozen inside a building that's surrounded by naturally frozen Alaska.
They serve drinks in ice glasses. The glasses are actually ice. You hold them and your fingers go numb but you keep going because the whole experience is too absurd and wonderful to stop.
We lasted about 20 minutes, which felt like an achievement.
Dinner was Lemongrass Thai (388 Old Chena Pump Rd, Fairbanks) — warm, good, exactly what we needed after a day of deliberately being cold — and then Aurora Hunting Spot #4.
The Aurora Itself: What It Actually Looks Like in Person
I've been building to this. Let me try to describe it properly.
The first thing you notice is that it starts small. A faint greenish smear on the northern horizon, almost like light pollution from a distant city. You squint at it. Someone says is that it? Someone else says maybe? You watch it for a minute and it doesn't move and you wonder if you're imagining things.
Then it moves.
The smear brightens. It starts to develop structure — a band, an arc, something with a shape. It climbs higher in the sky. And then, if you're lucky, if the KP index is cooperating and the solar wind is doing something interesting, it starts to dance.
That's the only word. The aurora dances. Bands of green fold and ripple like fabric in slow motion. The edges brighten and fade. A spike shoots upward. Pink appears at the bottom, where the greens are most intense. The whole thing expands and contracts like something breathing.
The thing that photographs can never capture is the movement. A photo shows you a frozen moment of beautiful color. But the aurora is in constant motion — slow enough that you can follow it, fast enough that you never want to look away. It's hypnotic in a genuinely primal way. Something in your brain recognizes that it is watching something real and rare and happening right now, and it will not let you be bored.
We stood there for hours across multiple nights. Nobody complained about the cold while the lights were up.
The best display we got was on one of the later nights — high KP, clear sky, no moon. Full curtains of green rippling from horizon to horizon, with spikes of pink and just a wash of red at the edges. It was the kind of thing where you stop taking video because you realize no video will do it justice and you just want to use your eyes.
I've tried to describe it to people since we got back. I can't. You just have to go.
Sunday: The Long Way Home
The last morning was early and quiet. We were up at 3:00 AM (local), out by 4:00 AM to catch a 5:55 AM departure. Reverse the math: that's a very early morning even by Alaska standards.
The drive back to ORD from the airport, arriving mid-morning Illinois time, was that specific post-trip quiet where everyone is tired and a little sad and also still kind of somewhere else in their head.
Practical Notes (Read This Before You Book)
Check road conditions every single day. Go to 511.alaska.gov. November roads in Alaska ice up fast and unexpectedly. We were driving out to aurora spots in the dark on rural roads. You do not want a surprise on those roads at 1 AM.
The time difference is 3 hours behind Illinois. This sounds obvious. You will still get confused. Your body will be wrong for the first two days.
For aurora hunting, you don't need a tour. Drive 15–20 minutes outside Fairbanks, away from the light dome over the city, find a pull-off with a clear northern view, turn off the car, look up. That's the whole thing. Check the KP index beforehand — there are free apps for this. Anything above 3 is worth being outside for.
What to Wear: A Completely Serious Guide to Not Being Miserable
This is the section I wish someone had written for me before we left. Because we got some of it right, and some of it wrong, and the wrong parts were very obvious at 1 AM in a field.
The core principle: you are not hiking. You're standing still. And standing still in -10°F to -20°F for two to four hours is a completely different physical challenge than moving through cold. When you move, your body generates heat. When you stand and stare at the sky, it doesn't. Dress accordingly.
The layering system — bottom to top:
Base layer (against your skin): This is the most important layer and the one people most often get wrong. Do not wear cotton. Cotton absorbs sweat and holds it against your skin, which will make you cold faster than almost anything else. Go with merino wool or synthetic moisture-wicking fabric — something that pulls moisture away. A merino wool long-sleeve top and merino wool long underwear for the legs. This is non-negotiable.
Mid layer (insulation): A fleece or down layer that traps warm air close to your body. For the upper body, a heavyweight fleece or a puffer jacket works well. For the legs, fleece-lined pants or a second layer of thermal leggings over your base layer. If you run cold, do both.
Outer layer (wind and waterproof shell): Wind is what turns cold into dangerous. An insulated, waterproof outer jacket on top — something with a good hood. For the legs, insulated snow pants or a waterproof shell over everything else.
Extremities — this is where people get caught out:
Hands: Regular gloves are not enough. You want liner gloves (thin, touchscreen-compatible) worn inside insulated mittens. Mittens are warmer than gloves because your fingers share heat with each other. The liner gloves mean you can actually operate your phone camera for a few seconds without taking the mittens fully off. We learned this the hard way.
Feet: Insulated, waterproof winter boots rated to at least -20°F or -30°F. Wool socks underneath — again, not cotton. If your feet get cold, the whole night is over. There is no recovering from cold feet when you're standing in a field at midnight.
Head: A proper winter hat that covers your ears completely. Or a balaclava, which covers your whole face and neck except your eyes. Honestly, the balaclava is the move — it sounds extreme until you're wearing one and you realize your face isn't hurting anymore.
Face: If you're not using a balaclava, a neck gaiter pulled up over your nose and chin makes a significant difference. The skin on your face loses heat fast and you stop noticing it's numb until it becomes a problem.
One more thing: hand warmers. The little disposable chemical packs you shake and they heat up for 6–8 hours. Stuff them in your mittens, your boots, your pockets. They're cheap, they're light, and they are the difference between "this is magical" and "I need to go back to the car."
The total effect when you're fully geared up is that you look completely unrecognizable. Which is fine. Nobody's judging anyone's fashion at 1 AM in an Alaskan field.
How to Photograph the Aurora on Your Phone and Why Your Camera Sees It Better Than Your Eyes!
Here's something genuinely fascinating that we only understood after the first night: the aurora is visible to your eyes, but your phone camera sees it better.
This is not a camera trick or a filter. It's physics.
Human eyes are optimized for daytime. Our color receptors, the cone cells, need a certain threshold of light to activate properly. In very dim conditions, we switch to rod cells, which are more sensitive but can't distinguish color as well. This is why everything looks grayish at night. The aurora, even when it's strong, is diffuse light spread across a huge area of sky, not a concentrated bright source. Your brain can see the movement and the general greenish glow, but it tends to flatten the colors and lose the detail.
Your phone camera, on the other hand, has no such limitation. The sensor doesn't get tired, doesn't switch modes, and, crucially, can collect light over a long exposure. When you leave the shutter open for several seconds, it accumulates all that light and produces an image far more saturated and detailed than what your eyes perceived in real time. This is why aurora photos from phones often look almost more vivid than the real thing felt. The camera is being honest about the light; your eyes were just less efficient at collecting it.
So here's how to actually shoot it on your phone:
Step one: turn on Night Mode. On iPhones, Night Mode activates automatically in dark conditions you'll see a yellow moon icon appear in the top left of the camera app. On Android (Samsung, Pixel, etc.), look for "Night" or "Pro Night" mode in the camera options. This is what allows longer exposures.
Step two: stabilize your phone completely. A long exposure means any movement, including your hand shaking from cold, will blur the image. A small, cheap mini tripod that fits in your bag is worth its weight in gold here. If you don't have one, set your phone on a flat surface, a car roof, a fence post, a rock. Anything that keeps it completely still while the shutter is open.
Step three: use a timer or voice command to take the shot. The act of pressing the shutter button physically moves the phone slightly. Set a 2-3 second timer so the phone settles before it takes the photo.
Step four: adjust exposure time if your phone allows it. On iPhone, you can slide the exposure duration manually in Night Mode, try 5 to 10 seconds for a static aurora, and 2 to 3 seconds if it's moving fast (longer exposures will blur a fast-moving aurora into a smear). On Android Pro mode, look for the shutter speed setting (SS), the same logic applies.
Step five: don't use flash. Obviously. But worth saying because sometimes phones decide to be helpful.
Step six: keep your phone warm. Cold kills phone batteries faster than almost anything. Keep your phone in an inside pocket against your body when you're not actively shooting, and take it out only when the lights are doing something worth capturing. We lost one phone battery completely on night two from leaving it out too long. A portable battery pack in a warm pocket helps too.
One honest note: video is harder than photos for aurora. Video doesn't get the benefit of long exposure, so it tends to look more like what your eyes see, a vague greenish glow rather than those saturated curtains. For video, some phones have a dedicated Night Video or Astrophoto Video mode that helps, but the results are still more modest. Our best aurora memories are stills, not video.
And our very best aurora memory is just standing there, phones down, watching it move.
Alaska is the kind of place that makes you feel simultaneously very small and very lucky. We came for the lights. We left understanding why people come back to this state for the rest of their lives.
Go in November. Drive out into the dark and look up.
You'll know what we mean when you get there.
Questions about the trip? Drop them in the comments. Happy to share everything we know.
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