Ogilvie River, North Yukon
Ogilvie
If you evaluate location purely in terms of geomagnetic latitude, Dawson City is one of the best aurora towns in Canada. It’s a quirky place with colorful history and it has all the services for a winter shoot, yet it hasn’t really been discovered as a base for aurora shooting. Similar to Fairbanks and Yellowknife, wintertime temperatures in Dawson can be very cold. I stage my Dempster Highway trips from Dawson, and though the town’s immediate area isn’t particularly scenic, there are lots of interesting features and foregrounds.
An hour out of Dawson the Dempster enters the Ogilvie Mountains and continues through dramatic scenery for several hundred kilometres. Tombstone Park is one of my favorite landscapes, though I’ve yet to capture aurora above those jagged peaks. Like the Dalton Highway in Alaska, the Dempster is a remote road driven mostly by truckers in the winter.