A smattering of crisp, white clouds lingers west of Grand Canyon National Park. And as the desert sun sets, smoke from a far-off fire turns the sky as red as the surrounding Supai sandstone. Venus slowly emerges from behind the clouds like a beacon of the night. Jupiter and the evening star push toward the horizon, racing the crescent moon in a perfect isosceles triangle. Their setting leaves an inky black sky bustling with activity. Faint stray meteors streak at zenith, and satellites crawl across the sky like ants on their ardent paths.
If you sat here on a moonless night like this and counted through until dawn, you could tally thousands of stars.
“The place you are in is special — keep that in your mind — in contrast to the places that most of us live,” says International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) astronomer John Barentine, who manages the Dark-Sky Places Program. “Every human being once shared this experience of looking up into the night sky and seeing it filled with stars.”
Before the spread of electricity, humans across the planet knew the stories written in the skies. Sitting around smoldering campfires, people looked to the stars and relived the tales of their heroes. Now these experiences are confined to star sanctuaries like Grand Canyon National Park.
In 2016, while the nation celebrated a century since the inception of the National Park Service, the agency recommitted itself to protecting a resource overlooked by many in America — the night sky.
