SHARP Drives: Chasing the Northern Lights With the 2024 Lexus GX 550

You don’t see them at first. Neck craned skyward, your eyes strain into the darkness. You return your gaze to the viewfinder, slow the camera’s shutter, bump up the ISO and shoot again — views from the camera and the naked eye start to diverge, producing dramatically different pictures. The colours are imperceptible at first. A light blue tint in the sky. Then, an almost imperceptible green glimmer appears, high above the silhouette of the pines. Eyes trained on the viewfinder, your chilled thumb and forefinger find the ISO dial, rotating the wheel two more detents until it stops on 3200. You draw a deep breath. The shutter clicks. And there they are: the northern lights. Aurora borealis, hidden in plain view; a night sky filled with light and magical colour explodes onto your camera’s LCD. 

Annual attendance at Banff National Park is among the highest of any national park in the world, but on this crisp fall evening, the park feels empty — wild even, now that we’ve left the warm glow of the famous Fairmont Hotel on the shores of Lake Louise. Saddled aboard the new Lexus GX 550 and loaded down with camera gear, we exit the highway, turning down a narrow dirt road lined with pine trees. Equipped with 33-inch Toyo Open Country A/T III tires — the largest standard tires ever fitted to a Lexus — the two-track is light work for the Overtrail edition, as we follow the moonlight glinting off the Vermilion River, flicking eerie shadows through the trees. Arriving at the trailhead, I step out of the vehicle, boots crunching gravel, tripod in hand. It’s cold. I pull back the sleeve on my jacket to check the time. Another hour to midnight.

The aurora borealis is most regularly witnessed around the arctic circle; places like Alaska, Iceland, and northern Scandinavia provide ample, and well-documented opportunities to bear witness to one of nature’s most spectacular shows. But in the once-per-decade year of a ‘Solar Maximum’ — when the number of the aurora-triggering sunspots in the solar cycle are at their highest levels — the vibrant aurora can be seen in regions far below the Arctic Circle — like at the 51st parallel in the heart of the Canadian Rockies. 

Now equipped with a 3.4L Twin-Turbo V6, the GX 550 represents a marked departure from the softer, more urban lines of earlier GX models and its chic LX cousins. Like a spartan warrior draped in Tom Ford, its chiseled, sharply angled exterior hides a huge degree of refinement and luxurious driver amenities like a 14-inch touchscreen display, a seamlessly integrated driver Heads-Up Display (HUD), heated steering wheel, massaging seats, and retractable running boards, while underneath, nearly nine inches of ground clearance, and state-of-the-art Crawl Control technology make a meal out of nearly any off-road task. We would soon get exactly that chance, exploring the headwaters of the Ghost River along the eastern border of Banff National Park where the lumpy front range of the Canadian Rockies rises out of the Alberta plains. 

Named to the UNESCO World Heritage register in 1984 and filled with over 2,500 spectacular square miles to explore, Banff National Park represents the crown jewel of the Canadian Rockies. With dramatic rocky peaks and pristine blue glacial lakes around every corner, the region is a veritable hiker’s paradise. But the park is also criss-crossed by fast-moving highways, twisting gravel roads, and rocky two-track jeep trails tying front country to backcountry, and making this the perfect environment to test the many multi-faceted capabilities of the GX 550. 

But you’ll need more than just an off-road vehicle and a warm jacket to find the northern lights. An understanding of the planet’s geomagnetic field movements also helps greatly, and can increase the odds of getting your camera in the right place, at the right time. More active fields yield a brighter, and more readily visible aurora further from the poles (in our case, visible as far south as Banff), and thusly geomagnetic activity is indicated by the planetary ‘K Index,’ or Kp for short, which is tied to the solar cycles and can wax and wane similarly with time. The scale ranges from zero (weak) to 9 (extremely strong / activity can be seen a long distance from the poles), and learning how to read this index is key to interpreting the many forecasts relied upon by veteran aurora-chasers. Just a few hours earlier, as we loaded gear into the GX, we were told that tonight’s index read a six on the Kp scale — very good odds, long as the nighttime skies remained cloud-free. 

And just like that, it’s over. Almost as soon as the aurora arrived, its rippling curtains of light have begun receding into the darkness of the night sky. Every new frame yields an image slightly darker, less colorful than the last. But for those few thrilling frames between, it all aligned — and as we load our gear back into the vehicle, there’s already talk of the next night’s forecast, and the next, and another infinitesimal chance at somehow being in the right place, at the right time. The chase is on again. 

The Lexus GX 550 starts at $83,500 CAD for the Signature trim. Overtrail package (as photographed) starts at $92,500 CAD. 

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