“Don’t give away my secrets!” he says, and I won’t. He can see the green of it already and can intuit what it will be like in an hour, sometimes making the call to drive his guests out to a more opportune spot before the lights fill the sky. His eye is trained for that first tiny flare in the distance that often looks white to visitors, like a cloud. Joe has spent his life under these skies, and since starting his business, become especially attuned to them, relying on a combination of scientific forecasting and personal observation to hunt out the best times and places to view the aurora. It’s the phenomenon that fills the night sky with formations of green, pink, and rarely, red light, which can flicker out after an hour or go on for many, in the night’s smallest hours. The Northern Lights, the aurora borealis, or ya’ke ngas-which literally translates to “sky stirring” in Joe’s language, Denesuline -are all names that gesture toward the delicate beauty of what they describe. While North Star Adventures offers everything from day hikes to snowmobile excursions to canoe trips on the nearby Mackenzie River, its signature experience is one that brings visitors-around 2,500 at this point, by Joe’s count-to the Northern Lights. The company, proudly Indigenous owned, boasts “50,000 years experience,” drawing upon Joe’s Dene heritage. It’s from Yellowknife that Joe operates his tour company, North Star Adventures, which he started in 2007. It looked like it was coming down, coming down to get me.” (Joe has observed and named five formations of the aurora, and that’s one he now calls the fishnet.) “Me and my brother were going, yeah yeah, whistle, but we tried it, and all of a sudden-” he looks up, and looks over his shoulder at his remembered co-conspirator “ holy-! We ran inside the tent. The lights overhead were constant, and his grandparents taught him to whistle them down-taught him that the lights were the presence of his ancestors, and if you called them this way they would hear you.
At night, the tent got so warm, Joe remembers sitting around in his underwear, listening to his grandmother speaking, sharing history in the form of stories. Joe and his little brother were put to work, banking snow around the base of the tent for insulation, stockpiling the wood, and making snares. Each winter, they were up on the trapline for a week at a time, living in a canvas tent in -40 degree weather, where they trapped martin, wolverine, rabbit, fox, and lynx for fur-and once, memorably, a wolf (he escaped). Joe was raised by his grandparents in Indigenous communities both in Deninu Kue, located on the south shores of Great Slave Lake, and in Yellowknife on the north, until he was five. The lights have changed many visitors’ lives and have even shaped his own, transforming him from a bookish kid into his alias: the Aurora Hunter. A once-in-a-lifetime sight for many of us is as common as a sunrise to Joe, although he has not lost his sense of wonder. Night after night, Joe is in the audience for one of the most spectacular shows on Earth-the aurora borealis. With a similar latitude to Reykjavík, Yellowknife rests in the crown of the Arctic Circle, the ring that overlaps the auroral oval. A warm guy for such a cold place: Yellowknife, Canada, where Joe has lived most his life, is very north a city on the shores of the Great Slave Lake, North America’s deepest, the winter ice so thick you can drive a car across it. Getting close to T-shirt weather.” Even over Zoom, Joe has a knack for putting you at ease: a tall man with a warm presence, whose face is often spread into a smile. “It’s warming up here,” Joe Bailey says with a grin.
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