Digital billboard gives Vancouverites live taste of Yukon's midnight sun
Photographer spends hours on Dawson City’s dome beaming images of sunset to the south
Imagine driving down a highway in Vancouver under a night sky and coming upon a billboard with a live image showing sunny Dawson City, Yukon.
Tourism Yukon is hoping this new marketing idea will entice people to make the trek north so they can experience the magic for themselves.
There is the mystery that is part of the Yukon that is being portrayed with this project.- Alistair Maitland
This is how they did it: a marketing agency working with Tourism Yukon — Cossette — hired a photographer to climb to the top of Dawson's famous Midnight Dome every night for 13 nights, capture a picture of the sun above the horizon every 10 minutes between 10:30 p.m. and 1 a.m., and beam those images straight to digital billboards in Vancouver.
"The idea of … showing images live from another part of the world, I just think it's such a fantastic idea," said Alistair Maitland, the Whitehorse-based photographer hired to do the project.
"You can see the clear difference. You are in Vancouver at 10:30, 11, midnight and it's dark. And that's going on up there? What else is up there? There is the mystery that is part of the Yukon that is being portrayed with this project."
Maitland took the photos in mid-July. Expecting cellphone reception might be a challenge, he was originally instructed to climb halfway up the Dome. The plan was to use his phone as a Wi-Fi hotspot and send the images south on his laptop, but trees growing on the side of the forested hill obstructed his view.
"I was getting tired of being afraid of bears and stuff like that, so I gunned it up to the top of the Dome and 'lo and behold … you can get some cell reception," he said.
Tourists and spooky things
Not only was the view better, but it's less likely for bears to venture to the top of the Dome, where people regularly congregate.
That doesn't mean his experience spending hours at the top of the Dome around midnight for 13 days didn't come with its share of spooks.
"There was one night though that I was the only one up there … and I just looked in my frame and I saw this white substance moving into the frame and literally felt like it was the White Walker coming after me from Game of Thrones," said Maitland, referencing the supernatural, humanoid monster on the show.
"Suddenly all this fog just blasted over the top of the Dome and yeah, I'll admit I was getting a little frightened, because it just came out of nowhere."
But he usually wasn't alone — people from all over the world visit Dawson's Midnight Dome every summer and Maitland had the opportunity to play de facto photographer for them, too. He'd invite people to get into his shot when he had the time.
This gave him the opportunity to meet tons of interesting people, including one man who drove a motorcycle to Dawson City to take pictures of the midnight sun with his grandfather's antique camera.
While Maitland says he has no idea whether a project like this has been tried before, he said Yukon is the prime place for it.
"I think we are right on the cusp of being super-remote compared to the rest of the world," he said. "But at the same time, we are on the edge of technology that we can use to our advantage."
With files from Sandi Coleman and Meagan Deuling