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What is a dark sky worth?
In an overly electrified world, a lot. Clear, star-encrusted nights are becoming rarer, but this natural resource is still found in abundance on the Colorado Plateau, and the National Park Service wants to keep it that way.
This week, Canyonlands National Park was designated a gold-tier Dark Sky Park by the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA), a Tucson, Ariz.-based nonprofit dedicated to protecting night skies and their cosmic views from unnecessary light pollution.
"Canyonlands is one of the naturally darkest places in the lower 48 states that is at all accessible," said IDA's program director, John Barentine.
The designation is not simply a reflection of the park's darkness, but also of officials' commitment to celebrating the rich spectacle across the canopy of night.
"It is about the effort to keep the conditions that way, making sure their lighting is good," he said. "We want it to be about people's effort and not just about pointing out a place and handing them a ribbon."
For most Americans, the billion-star Milky Way galaxy is no longer visible, washed out by city lights. How this diminishes the human experience is incalculable.
"The night sky is a primal element of our human heritage, perhaps the ultimate cultural entity. It is the eternal backdrop of human history, inspiration of thought and belief, source of some of the deepest questions human beings have posed about themselves and their place in the world," NPS officials wrote in a 2003 report that affirmed the parks' role in preserving dark skies.
Wes Shook, a Bluff resident, applauded Canyonlands' dark-sky designation, noting than even in sparsely populated San Juan County, dark skies face threats. From his home, he can see the glow of a gas processing plant 14 miles away.
San Juan County is already home to the nation's first designated dark-sky park, Natural Bridges National Monument, designated in 2007, where Shook has volunteered on star-gazing programs.
He has tried to persuade local leaders to seek designation as the nation's first dark-sky county, but without much success.
"It's one of the only places in the nation where you can step out and see 7,000 stars, not that anyone has ever counted them," Shook told San Juan County commissioners at their May 5 meeting. "It's beneficial to the county to promote this. We already are, but we need to go a step further. This would increase rates of visitation."
Shook's proposal met with disapproval that day, and one meeting attendee suggested he move to Canada. Commissioners wondered if such a designation would "hammer" the county with new regulations on lighting and limits on growth.
"From our standpoint in San Juan County, we have dark skies. That's good enough for me. I don't need someone from Tucson, or New York or Switzerland to stamp us a dark-sky community," Commissioner Phil Lyman said.
One person in the audience suggested drivers would have to turn off headlights at night.
"What is it you people want?" that person demanded.
"I'm pushing to save it before we lose it like the other stuff we had," Shook said.
Dark-sky designation goes only to communities that ask for it and carries no regulatory weight, Barentine said. Two Arizona communities, Flagstaff and the Kaibab Paiute Tribe, have received recognition as dark-sky places.
To win such a designation, a community needs to embrace practices that minimize impacts associated with lighting. In many cases, retrofitting fixtures promotes safety and lowers costs if lights are turned off when not needed, according to Nate Ament, NPS' Colorado Plateau dark-sky coordinator.
"When you retrofit a drill rig, you are making the rig safer too because there is not as much glare. When you explain it, they realize it's a win-win," Ament said.
"You are going to see a lot of places retrofitting to LED, which is great," he continued. "It's important to do retrofits in the right color spectrum. The blue-white light spectrum is disruptive to nocturnal animals. The solution is to use amber, the warmer end of the spectrum, yellowish-orange."
Fidelity Exploration and Production Co., which has been drilling for oil beyond Canyonlands northern boundary, has shown a willingness to cut glare from its operations. This would enhance darkness at nearby Dead Horse Point State Park.
Ament is part of NPS' Dark Sky Team, assembled in recent years to document effects of light pollution at the nation's darkest parks. The effort began in southern Utah's national parks and is expected to expand to cover 55 NPS units. The team has documented how lighting from Moab, Blanding and Monticello reaches into the sky above Canyonlands, eroding views of thousands of stars.
To achieve the dark-sky designation, the park retrofitted nearly all its lights with "night-sky friendly" fixtures.
Canyonlands Superintendent Kate Cannon said the designation, which is to be commemorated with an astronomy event Sept. 18 at Island in the Sky, recognizes the value of natural darkness to humans, not just animals. On some nights, it's possible for the sky to be jammed with 15,000 stars, compared with the 500 visible over many cities.
"The Milky Way stretching across the park's incredibly dark night sky is a sight many visitors will never forget," she said.
Other dark-sky parks on the plateau include Utah's Capitol Reef National Park and Hovenweep National Monument, Arizona's Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument and New Mexico's Chaco Culture National Historical Park.