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For background information on what the Arctic Circle is and stages of darkness check out my explanations at the end of this article.
What Does the Arctic Circle Indicate?
How Is It Still Light Out Even Though the Sun Has Set?

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I arrived at the airport in Bergen around midnight. I had left San Francisco almost a day before and I was exhausted, hungry, and hot. My sleepy brain took awhile to successfully put my bike back together but once it did I set off into the darkness to ride to my hostel. I rode in the peaceful dark, following the signs into Bergen. I had thought that booking myself into a hostel in the mountains would be beautiful and nice for hiking. I didn’t think about how miserable it would be to haul my bike up there on very little sleep. I also didn’t realize that the hostel had another week on off season hours so it wouldn’t open for a few more hours. I was exhausted and, in the dark of the early morning, I fell asleep in the hostel garden. That would be the last night I fell asleep in the dark until I arrived in Boston over two months later.

Norway is a very long country. Most people live in the south and many visitors stay in the south. Bergen is typically the farthest north that people have visited unless they were seeking out the northern lights. I started in Bergen and headed north from there. I arrived in mid-May when the sun sets at 22:17 and it is properly dark around midnight. Nautical twilight, the first phase of night when it is dark enough to require artificial lights, was a little over four and a half hours long.

As the sun rises my body wakes up. While it isn’t necessarily difficult to go back to sleep, I found it difficult to adjust to the local time. I have never experienced jet lag before and I didn’t understand why I was unable to recover. I never quite got into a rhythm near Bergen. It was much hotter than San Francisco and I lost my appetite. I still had issues with the sun in the mornings and I didn’t even consider going to sleep until it was dark. I didn’t know how to get over the jet lag and accompanying exhaustion and I grew more frustrated each day.

Eventually I threw in the towel and caught the bus from Førde to Trondheim. The night bus passed over the mountains in the dark. By the time I arrived in Trondheim it was light out again. For the next two weeks I rarely saw the sun as it was overcast and rainy most of the time, but I didn’t see darkness either. It was always grey and cloudy; the shade of the grey changed over the course of the day. I no longer had problems sleeping. I think my body instinctively wakes up as the darkness changes to light each day. Once there was no more darkness this instinct never kicked in and I had no trouble getting a full night of rest. I usually went to sleep around midnight or one am and would wake up around ten am. I usually rode until ten pm. Sometimes I rode much later. I rode until after midnight on more than one occasion and it felt no different from riding during the day. It didn’t particularly matter since the only real difference between day and night was the temperature and it was easier to deal with the cold by riding to stay warm.

I crossed the Arctic Circle on 1 June. After this the rain died down and the sun slowly introduced herself. I learned that while it gets darker at night (I didn’t know this before because of the constant dreariness) it never gets dark enough to need a lamp. My headlamp sat unused in the bottom of my pannier for the entirety of my trip. If the surf was good at 2am, that’s when people went surfing. If the rain let up for a few hours in the middle of the night, someone would take advantage of it to get out for a hike. I loved the freedom the light offered me. I have always embraced my nighttime adventures but the absence of darkness was completely liberating.

I learned to tell time by the sun while inside my tent. I knew my orientation and could feel where the sun’s heat warmed my frozen body. I never felt rushed as I often have on other bike trips because I wanted to make camp by dark. I lingered on beaches, read my book in bus shelters as it rained, and had lazy breakfasts in my tent that lasted until noon. The ferries and grocery stores were my only connection to a world that relied on a clock but since I always carried at least one day of extra food and I wasn’t in a rush to get anywhere, even these weren’t strong ties to the clock driven world. Early on I would spend my evenings watching the sun sink lower in the sky as it created the beautiful colors of sunset for hours while never getting dark. As I went farther north and it grew closer to midsummer, my midnight entertainment gave way to full on daylight.

I eventually forgot about darkness but I still felt the night. It grew colder as the sun sank lower in the sky where its warmth was often blocked by a mountain. It was quieter at night. The sheep were asleep and the infrequent passing car disappeared. Norway is quiet during the day but at night you truly feel alone in this magical place.

Many people take a day trip up north to experience the midnight sun. I think that the midnight sun requires more than just a night to embrace. It isn’t as simple as not seeing darkness at night. It means shedding the whole notion of day and night and that requires rethinking your whole connection to society. It is completely liberating. The clock is essential to how we think about western society. In my world of overworked highly educated American tech professionals, racing the clock and never winning is something that people brag about. They are always losing the race against time, always too much work and too much responsibility to break out of the work mindset. When time ceases to be a presence in your daily life, you have overcome the rat race. 

This isn’t to say that life is completely timeless. There is still a rhythm to nature and the world is very well connected which means that the clock will never truly disappear. I still knew when it was night and when it was noon. I would go to sleep around one am each night and wake up around ten am. I rode from noon until nine or ten pm with lots of breaks thrown in. The timing was not much different from my life back home but here, in a land without darkness, it suddenly seemed normal. I can imagine living in total darkness is similarly liberating.

I made it to Nordkapp for midsummer, then took the bus all the way south to Tromsø then farther south to Rovaniemi, the capital of Finnish Lapland located just south of the Arctic Circle. I rode south from here and I could tell that I was much farther south than before. The sky would dim at night and I rarely rode past eleven pm. It was still very light out by anyone’s standards but I could tell that this freedom I had for a few weeks was fading. As I rode south and the days passed by I was gaining darkness at a rate of roughly 5 minutes per day. This may not sound like much but each day brought more twilight and eventually, my first dark night in months.

I rode to the Helsinki airport in the dark, just as I had ridden from the Bergen airport in the dark. It seemed fitting that I’d slip in and out of Scandinavia under the cover of a dark sky. The solo night ride has been the place where I seek out freedom and adventure for years. I went to Scandinavia seeking freedom and adventure, found it in spades, and as I left, I knew I would continue that search. Just as the night ride ends as the sun comes up, the summer night ends as the Earth continues around the sun. I can keep that spirit of liberation alive and continue to embrace the night, even in the dark.

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What Does the Arctic Circle Indicate?

The Arctic Circle where the sun is above the horizon for at least 24 consecutive hours once a year and below the horizon for at least 24 consecutive hours once a year. At the circle the sun will stay above or below the horizon through the nights of the solstices but as you go farther north the period for which the sun stays above the horizon stretches over many months. For more info check out wikipedia.

How Is It Still Light Out Even Though the Sun Has Set?

The angle of the sun to the horizon is always changing. When it is above the horizon, at any angle, we call it daytime. Once the sun starts to dip below the horizon some degree of light can still be seen. When the sun is between 0 and 6 degrees below the horizon we are in civil twilight. 6 to 12 degrees is nautical twilight and 12 to 18 degrees is astronomical twilight. Anything over 12 degrees is nighttime. Civil twilight is still generally light enough that you can see without artificial light. Nautical twilight is when most stars become visible. Astronomical twilight still has some light from the sun but it is dark. The farther north you go, the shallower the arc of the sun so even though the sun may be below the horizon, it still does not get dark.