The Northern Lights Issue

We begin the year, and this magazine, in the dark. Not the gloom of a short northern afternoon at home, but the deep blue kaamos of Finnish Lapland in January, when the sun barely lifts above the fells and the sky glows cobalt at noon before fading again. It seemed the right place to start a magazine about where to stay, because here the reason to travel and the reason to book a particular bed are the same thing. You come north for the dark, and you sleep where the dark is blackest.

This issue is built around one tension. The aurora cannot be scheduled. It needs darkness, a clear sky and a restless sun all at once, and no cabin, however glazed, can promise you the third. So we have written the guide the way we would plan the trip ourselves: pick a base that puts real darkness overhead, give it several nights rather than one, and fill the short days with sled dogs, saunas and the coast, so the trip stands up whether or not the sky performs. Patience, up here, is the real equipment.

We have tried to be plain about the trade-offs. Rovaniemi is the easy gateway and the family choice, but its light is longest and its glow works against you. Levi and Ylläs give you lifts, log cabins and a full week's worth of restaurants. Push north to Saariselkä and the polar night lasts weeks, the sky goes properly black, and the glass cabins cluster. Down on the coast, Kemi rebuilds a castle from snow each winter and sends a retired icebreaker out to crush the frozen Gulf. Each earns a different kind of night.

A note on the country itself. The reindeer you ride behind belong, in many cases, to Sámi families for whom herding is a livelihood rather than a spectacle, and the far north around Inari holds their story. We have written about it as such. This is Volume Zero of Amorielli, our charter year, and we wanted the first word to be a quiet one: dress warmly, book early, stand outside after midnight, and let the light come when it comes.

Vivienne Hartwell, Editor-in-Chief