Photo by Wally Pacholka
Into the Dark
Utah's Milky Way wilderness
By Christopher Cokinos
The most impressive bridge at Natural Bridges National Monument can’t be hiked to, seen from an overlook, or even found on a map—at least not on a map of the ground. The most impressive bridge at Natural Bridges isn’t made of sandstone or measured in feet. Here, tonight, the most impressive bridge is made of light, which spans vast distances and shines wildly above my head.
It’s the winter Milky Way, the collective glow of countless stars in our home galaxy—shining over the campground on this cold January night. I’ve come to southeastern Utah, to the world’s first designated “Dark-Sky Park,” to see for myself how black these skies, how bright these stars. Standing just a few paces from a campfire, with a gloved hand on my telescope, I have my head thrown back, looking straight up, gulping in starlight, gaping like a country kid seeing skyscrapers for the first time. It’s unreal.
The skies at Natural Bridges are ranked as a “Class 2” on something called the Bortle scale. Class 1 skies are an “excellent dark-sky site,” according to the Bortle scale’s explanations, while Class 2 skies are a “typical truly dark site,” where “clouds ... are visible as dark holes or voids in the starry background.” This is in contrast to the skies I have at home, in northern Utah’s Cache Valley, a so-called “rural/suburban transition,” a Class 4 sky, one where artificial light mars the horizon and even projects a dome—but one where, higher up, the Milky Way can still be seen.
But, here at Natural Bridges, I’m experiencing the darkest winter sky I’ve ever seen.
There’s no light from tall buildings, ballparks, billboards. No light from parking lots, flagpoles, schools, churches. No stray light from the nearby visitor center. No security lights glaring by a pit toilet. No glow on the horizon from towns or highways. (Blanding is 40 miles away.) In most places, we’ve grown accustomed to light carelessly cast upward, where it does no good, instead of downward, so we can see where we’re walking and driving, and be safer in our surroundings. By throwing up light into the sky—I pick that verb deliberately—we are creating an artificial day at night, as astronomer and educator Tyler Nordgren says.
Tonight, light comes from the stars and from flames eating downed piñon and juniper in the campfire grate. Of course, it helps that my partner Kathe and I are one of only three couples in the cozy, 13-site campground. Which further means no kids waving flashlights, no motor homes with TV glow, no cars driving in late, their headlights scraping across the dark like white blades.
Natural Bridges staff applied for this Dark-Sky Park designation just a year ago, and it was quickly bestowed by the International Dark-Sky Association, an organization devoted to educating the public and policymakers about light pollution.
My breath steams. I’ve been out for a couple of hours, looking through the telescope and pointing out the sights of this amazing sky. Kathe’s in the tent now, and the moon—two days from first-quarter (what most people call “the half moon”)—has slipped behind a bank of high cirrus on the southwest horizon. The sky, the air itself, deepens, as the moon descends. And the stars?
The Milky Way is close enough to touch, a wet white scrim of light, a silk scarf tossed into a narrow band of flurries. It stretches from the west, where Cygnus the Swan is setting, all the way across the sky, through the W-shaped constellation of Cassiopeia and over to the east where the bright, hard stars of Orion the Hunter have climbed. The Milky Way looks like a streak of frost on the window of the universe. We live in a wilderness of stars.
I’m seeing a sky virtually unchanged from the days of the first human beings here, who moved through 10,000 years ago, and to the more recent past—about 900 years ago, when the area was dotted with stone and cliff dwellings. And it’s the sky that prospector Cass Hite saw in 1883, apparently the first Anglo in the area to “discover” the “other” bridges—the three stone ones that led to articles extolling their scenic beauty, including in National Geographic. President Teddy Roosevelt declared the area a national monument in 1908, the first National Park Service land in Utah.
Tonight feels like celebration—arrival in a place we’ve not been before, snow flocked on stones and trees, the sky coming on like a dark wave flecked with glitter. There is in Utah—and perhaps in the entire American West—no better place to see night sky visions than here.
The story of how Utah came to host the world’s first dark-sky park is a tale of civil servants with vision. The National Park Service created a Night Sky Team, which is headed by Chad Moore. Moore focused on developing a system to measure light pollution, and in the process, released a report that discussed the pristine quality of the southern Utah skies.
In 2003, the report landed on the desk of Natural Bridges chief ranger Ralph Jones. (He’s now in Alaska). Around the same time, Jones saw a sign outside Flagstaff that declared the city as the “World’s First International Dark-Sky City.” Jones contacted the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) board member Chris Luginbuhl, of the U.S. Naval Observatory station in Flagstaff. Luginbuhl encouraged Jones and Moore to send the IDA a proposal for an “International Dark-Sky Park” program. The two park service employees and park staff did just that. IDA embraced the idea, then Jones compiled a report nominating Natural Bridges.
The park staff embarked on “lightscape management.” Jones and Moore looked at each light at night, asking first if the fixture was necessary and, if so, whether the illumination could be decreased without affecting safety. Some lights were replaced outright with downcast and shielded fixtures. Some were simply removed. Others, such as the fixture in the restroom breezeway by the visitor center, just had the number of bulbs cut back. Moore managed the funding, and they were able to change 90 percent of the lights at Natural Bridges.
“Because there is less glare, you can actually see better at night using less energy.” Moore said.
But the consequences of light pollution aren’t just related to human safety and our need for starry grandeur. Animals—from birds to bugs—that depend on dark nights are having their ecological cycles ravaged by bright lighting. “Without bulldozing a single tree, we are in essence destroying habitats by lighting the sky,” says Nordgren, who has been traveling the West leading astronomy programs. Rodents and owls can alter dark-dependent foraging behavior, and insects are drawn to light along with their predators. This can create a feeding frenzy that is unsustainable, leading to population crashes in lit areas.
Places like Natural Bridges not only are preserving stars at night, but the very cycles of life.
The moon’s surface had never looked so crisp and clear. Earlier in the evening, while dinner had been stewing, and then after we ate, I showed Kathe a few things the moon would let us see, including its own surface of dark-light crater rims—razor sharp—and expansive gray maria with names like the Sea of Crises. Then I pointed my trusty telescope nicknamed “Sigurd” (after Sigurd Olson, the nature writer)—the scope is a mean-looking, black-tube reflector with a 10-inch mirror—toward the small orange ball in the east. Mars. In my eyepiece, the planet was, well, planetary. Stars appear as points of light. Planets show themselves as disks, and I could make out tiny grayish markings on the orange ball—probably Syrtis Major, the Martian surface feature most easily visible from earthly telescopes.
For a time Kathe and I just looked up, without using the scope or binoculars, as we got reacquainted with winter’s constellations: There was the rectangular apparition of Gemini, the Twins. There was the sail shape of Auriga the Charioteer. Both constellations are home to open clusters of stars, sparse to compact sprinklings of young suns, all born from a common cloud of gas. Bright enough to see even with moonlight, the clusters filled my field of view like diamonds in black water.
Now, Kathe snug in the tent, I move my telescope from one sight to another, keeping warm as I crouch and bend to reach the eyepiece. Because the telescope’s mount has gotten balky in the cold, it’s forcing me to push and pull harder than I normally would. I curse the lurching motions—usually the scope moves smoothly in its rocker box—but under a sky like this it’s hard to be cranky for long.
I start with a sight anyone with a pair of binoculars can find—the open cluster, M35, at the bottom of one of Gemini’s “feet.” Under this dark a sky, I can even see it with my naked eyes: a clear smudge. In the scope, though, it’s a sudden swarm of stars, what astronomer and writer Walter Scott Houston called “an impressive frame of bright stars with a softly flaming background of fainter ones.” He speaks of an alluring “cosmic recklessness” to the scene that M35 presents, a scene “too beautiful to describe with mere words.” All true, but for me it’s suddenly overshadowed by a faint gray smear close by—another star cluster, NGC2158. “Yes!” I whisper, excited to have seen at least one new sight tonight.
But I’ve waited long enough, and slew the scope to the right, where Orion looms over the southeast, his “sword” that dangling blur of light. Even from the light-polluted Wasatch Front, you can see the bright stars of Orion—the two at the top, his shoulders; the two at the bottom, his feet; the three “belt” stars slung across his waist. In this sky, the sword is shockingly present, looking like a firefly smeared upon a child’s palm. It’s the Orion Nebula, a massive cloud of hydrogen and helium and hypersonic blizzards of hot gas in which stars are coalescing and switching on. Fifteen hundred light years from Earth. Fifteen hundred light years from Cedar Mesa.
I’ve seen good views of the Orion Nebula before, from my backyard and up nearby Blacksmith Fork Canyon, where I often camp. I’ve seen the span of nebula like a cape spread against the night. I’ve seen the Trapezium, the four young stars at the nebula’s center, those four bright suns (more than four! we can’t see them all!) raging their energy outward.
I’m not prepared for this. Some come to Utah to climb mountains, to scale cliff faces, to rappel down ropes into slot canyons.
But in the wild Utah skies you can climb the light years, scale molecules, ride photons, and slip into clouds of star birth that almost seem to move, they are so bright and billowy. Transfixed, I see dark lanes of dust and loops and curves and folds in the green sheen of light, details I’ve never seen before. From Natural Bridges, the Orion Nebula looks like a place. I can imagine walking the plateaus of helium, switchbacking down into hydrogen canyons, crossing streams of black dust.
The hours unspool. I find the famous “Crab Nebula,” the remnant of a large star explosion. This star was maybe 10 times as big as our sun before it exploded in July 1054 in a supernova so bright it’s recorded in rock art of the American Southwest. To me, the Crab looks like an amoeba under a microscope, though I know that at its center spins a neutron star—a pulsar. On a neutron star, matter is so dense and gravity so powerful that I’d no longer weigh 165 pounds. I’d weigh about 2.4 trillion pounds. So there’s always that to be grateful for.
Taking a break, I put my scope on Mintaka, the rightmost belt star in Orion, and head off to pee, stoke the fading campfire, and walk about for a warm-up. Fifteen minutes later, I come back to see that the turning of the Earth has centered in my eyepiece a small nebula called M78, my easiest find of the night. A squashed trilobite with two stars for eyes. In a while I find M79, a stellar retirement home that is 154,000 light years away, a gathering of very ancient stars, billions of years old.
Growing tired, I find my fingers fumble with the star charts and the telescope’s focusing knob. I aim high at Andromeda, where the most impressive galaxy of all rides the sky—M31, a great spiral that truly looks like a spaceship, like an edge-on flying saucer. I love Andromeda, its bright central core bulging like a cockpit, its light tapering to either side. I can’t fit the huge galaxy into my eyepiece view, so I sweep back and forth, giving the illusion of movement, and spot its two bright companions, like scout ships, the elliptical galaxies, M32 and M110. I sigh with happiness.
The campfire is out. A scrim of ice covers the telescope’s metal skin. My nose is freezing. None of it matters. Here, beside piñon and juniper, I’m aglow in the light of stars, more than I can count, under a sky I hadn’t counted on.
When I talked with Corky Hays, the superintendent of Natural Bridges, this afternoon, she joked that she’d “never been totally appreciative of dark night skies because my vision is so bad.” Truth is, prior to her arrival here about three-and-half years ago, she’d noticed the Las Vegas sky-glow intruding on Death Valley National Park, where she worked. Then she got to southern Utah, where the sky “was good even before [last year’s] retrofit.”
Spunky, with salt-and-pepper hair and a quick smile, Hays was happy to show me the subtle changes at Natural Bridges National Monument. An old security light on a building behind the visitor center—the kind of light with two big bulbs and no shields—is hardly used, while downcast compact fluorescent fixtures on the various buildings at the monument are the “work horse” lights now. Hays credited Moore and Jones for the success here.
Stephen Bridgehouse, a ranger at Natural Bridges, says that the changes have made a difference not just in lowering light levels, but also in promoting these crazily dark skies. “More people are coming out here with astronomy in mind,” he said, cautioning that potential visitors pay attention both to moon phases and the weather forecast.
Visitors here can also learn that they can preserve dark skies at home, by replacing “glare bombs”—lights that cast illumination up and/or sideways—with downcast lights. As well, existing lights can be fitted with shields to direct light downwards. Cut-off shields can be purchased at home improvement stores. Compact fluorescents save money and energy. Of course, keeping lights off helps too. The truly motivated can turn to the IDA for help in lobbying for local and state laws that can require such an approach to lighting.
Meanwhile, Natural Bridges staff are contemplating a brochure with sky-watching tips, more astronomy information on the monument’s Website and a possible “star party,” an event that draws telescope-toting hobbyists to stay up all night to watch and to photograph the sky. Special programming to celebrate the monument’s centennial will include a number of activities starring celestrial resources. Bridgehouse and Hays hope that a symposium and publication might result from the 2008 anniversary.
Meanwhile, people who want to learn about the night sky can attend sessions led by Nordgren in various parks. At Arches National Park this spring, he’ll be asking questions such as: “What makes the redrock country red, and is this the same as what makes the red planet red?” He’ll return to Bryce Canyon National Park, which he visited last year, from June 1 to June 25. Though Nordgren wasn’t involved in the Natural Bridges Dark-Sky Park designation, he’s excited by it. He says that it has galvanized staff at other national parks to get similar IDA designations.
With Leo the Lion rising in the east—a harbinger of warmer, early evening spring skies—I wave hello to the constellation, then take a quick, cold look at Saturn. I decide to end my night as I began, with open star clusters, which are easy to find and lovely. Looking like a charging fencer, Canis Major—a big constellation—is the home of Sirius, the night sky’s brightest star, and M41, a fine collection of gems that spreads from edge to edge in my eyepiece. Then I focus on M47, smattered with bright blue stars, and M46, a cluster of stars whose light has taken 5,000 years to travel here. Suddenly I feel less as if I’m ticking objects off a list, the way birders might check off species seen on a Christmas Bird Count. The light that left those stars is about the age of the three stone bridges of Natural Bridges National Monument themselves, features whose deep origins lie in the slow deposition of sand about 260 million years ago. Over time, water courses eroded the sandstone, punching holes through rock, creating the bridges. The dating isn’t precise but today’s bridges are a few thousand years old, just like the light that hits my eyes from the stars of M46.
Earlier in the day, we had driven from overlook to overlook, yearning to hike to each bridge but lacking time. There was Sipapu, massive and nestled in a snowy canyon. There was Kachina, at the confluence of Armstrong and White Canyons, with sunlight dropping a golden puddle of light just beyond the bridge. There was Owachomo, the most slender and delicate of the three, hiding in shadowed distance and harder to discern. Once we picked it out, we could see the bridge pulled like taffy above its wide opening.
Though I knew of their formations and though I realize rock is just a slower version of water—moving, changing, here, gone—the bridges looked permanent. They aren’t. Freezing, thawing, rainfall—these forces will doom the bridges to dust. In 1992, in fact, Kachina shed 4,000 tons of itself. The boulders that fell are as silent as stars.
It’s past midnight, so I retrieve my lens caps from the truck and sit in the front seat, draining a water bottle before I slip into the tent, exhausted and sweetened from my travels through space—my long, dark hike through and beyond Utah’s Milky Way wilderness.
Christopher Cokinos has winter camped in two places, Utah and Antarctica—though the latter, technically, was in the austral summer. His essay "The Consolations of Extinction" won the 2007 John Burroughs Essay Award. His book on the passions and eccentricities of meteorite hunters is due from Tarcher/Penguin in spring 2009.
