When the Stars Align

There is a paradox in the quest to find the best stargazing towns in Colorado: in the age of artificial light even a small town’s electric glow can blot out the brilliance of the night sky. Light pollution obliterates the view of the Milky Way from eighty percent of American backyards and porches. To find the darkest skies available, we must leave town and get into the wide-open spaces.

My task was to identify those Colorado towns that are isolated enough for the starriest skies to be visible from just past the last stop sign, but big enough to offer the traveler basic accommodations. 

My search for the darkest skies began with the glow of a computer screen. The interactive light pollution map places the layers of the Bortle scale over the Earth. Without going full astro-nerd, the Bortle scale categorizes the darkness of the night sky into classes. A Bortle Class 1 is the darkest, found only in the most remote places, where, under the right conditions, the Milky Way can cast a shadow. A Bortle Class 9 is an inner city sky where no stars are visible. Erie, Colorado is a Class 5. In our search for the best stargazing towns we are looking for reasonable access to Bortle Class 1 or 2 areas.

nightsky at Dinosaur National Monument, photo by Dan Duriscoe via National Park Service

Maybell

The northwest corner of Colorado offers one of the few Bortle Class 1 areas in the state that is reasonably accessible by paved road — lonely Highway 318. Here sits the tiny town of Maybell, the smallest of our five towns with a population of 76. Maybell has one old time gas station and an RV park. There are no other towns within 30 miles of Maybell in any direction.

Winters in Maybell can get brutally cold. In February 1985, Maybell recorded a low temperature of 61 below, the state record, and the fourth coldest state record in the country. Even Minnesota has never been that cold.

The most vivid night sky I’ve ever seen was during a night sleeping under the stars at the base Vermillion Falls, 48 lonely miles to the west of Maybell. From my cot, snug in my sleeping bag, I gazed at that star-filled sky for hours with the rush of that waterfall in the darkness — a magical experience.

Just to the west of Vermillion Falls, the road will take you to the east edge of Dinosaur National Monument, itself a great place for stargazing. But for the darkest skies in the area, take one of the dirt roads leading north towards Wyoming. This is the stomping grounds of a herd of wild horses that still roam these hills like ghosts of the Old West. There is a free Bureau of Land Management (BLM) campground in beautiful Irish Canyon where Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid once hid from the law.

Mount Zirkel Wilderness, photo by Jeremy White via uncover colorado

Walden

To the east from Maybell and across a mountain range lies the small ranching community of Walden, population 606. Walden is nestled in North Park where the headwaters of the North Platte River flow north into Wyoming. Walden is a ranching and cowboy town — low on tacky tourist attractions, but high on western authenticity. It’s also a moose haven with the giant beasts often seen in the area.

For the best stars, head north from town by road towards Wyoming, or west by trail, into the Mount Zirkel Wilderness. To the east of Walden, Highway 14 passes through a long stretch of Bortle Class 2 territory which extends even to the east of the Continental Divide into the upper Cache La Poudre River canyon. Here we find the closest Bortle Class 2 skies to the Front Range metropolis.

dark night skies near the town of Nucla, photo by Derick Wilson via Darksky.org

Nucla and Naturita

You may have never heard of these twin towns, but they happen to be Colorado’s newest official dark sky communities. Nucla and Naturita, population 585 and 485 respectively, are located part way between Telluride, Colorado and Moab, Utah in an area where the Rockies transition into western red desert.

This area was used in the mid-20th Century for uranium mining to fuel our nuclear arsenal, but the name “Nucla” is coincidental. The town was founded as a utopian cooperative decades before the A-Bomb was constructed. The founder considered the new settlement to be the economic “nucleus” of the area and thereby named it Nucla.

In 2021 the twin towns became dark sky communities, which is an official designation granted by Dark Sky International, a global organization that works with communities to reduce light pollution by advocating for and funding dark sky-friendly lighting.

A community does not have to sit within a dark sky area to qualify as a dark sky community. The goal is to reduce light pollution where it exists. But, in the case of Nucla and Naturita, these towns happen to be located in one of Colorado’s most expansive dark sky regions — the southern half of the Western Slope. The underrated canyonlands to the west of these towns along Highway 141 in either direction will take you into Bortle Class 1 territory within some beautiful desert landscapes.

Milky Way above silver cliff, photo by Scott Dankoff via Darkskyscolorado.org

Westcliffe and Silver Cliff 

Steve McAllister, Acting Director of the Smokey Jack Observatory near Westcliffe, CO, moved to the area years ago partly because of its dark night skies. He’s an amateur astronomer. Westcliffe and Silver Cliff, population 435 and 609 respectively, were the first towns in Colorado to pursue and achieve official dark sky community status nearly 10 years ago.

As McAllister explained to me, the late Suzanne Jack (aka Smokey Jack) noticed through the years that the stars in the area had become less vibrant compared to the way they shined in her youth. She decided to do something about it. Through her advocacy, not only did these towns become official dark sky communities, but the Smokey Jack Observatory was constructed in her honor.

These ranching communities in southern Colorado’s beautiful Wet Mountain Valley have come to embrace this idea as one that preserves the sense of remoteness that locals treasure while also drawing visitors to the area to help keep the local businesses going. In town, there is now a “planet walk” which is a walkable scale of our solar system with interpretive signage.

This area has a reputation for strange phenomena appearing in the sky over the stunning Sangre de Cristo Mountains. When I asked about that, McAllister said he had not personally seen anything unexplainable. I told him of the time my daughter and I were climbing the Great Sand Dunes at night (an annual tradition) when we heard a low rumbling sound followed by two uniform flashes of light coming from the direction of Westcliffe, like a huge jet engine followed by enormous spotlights. “The military does conduct exercises in this area, sometimes at night,” said McAllister.

There have been many stories of UFO sightings and unexplained lights in the sky from this area. But regardless of what aliens or secret government aircraft might be lurking in these skies, the star viewing from the Wet Mountain Valley is phenomenal because of a combination of dark skies and the gorgeous backdrop of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

As McAllister told me, come to Westcliffe and Silver Cliff for the mountains, but stay for the stars. Either way, you won’t be disappointed in visiting this out-of-the-way but highly under-rated part of Colorado’s high country.

It was from McAllister that I learned some new things about stargazing. “The best time to see the Milky Way,” he said “is from late June to August” when the earth is tilted towards the center of the galaxy from our vantage point in one of the galaxy’s outer bands. We also discussed the effect that the moon and atmospheric conditions have on stargazing. The brightest light in the sky is the moon. You’ll want to time your stargazing for when the moon is busy on the other side of Earth by looking up the moonrise and moonset times for your destination.

I can attest to how much the moon impacts star viewing with a personal experience in Utah’s Canyonlands National Park years ago. I had gotten myself stranded shirtless and shoeless on the wrong side of the Green River during a solo kayak expedition down the Green River. There I was, doing twenty-minute sessions of calisthenics on a rock ledge at night to stave off hypothermia like some sort of alien dancing around on a strange planet. For half the night a nearly full moon lit up the canyon in a monochrome silver glow. The moonlight was beautifully bright and I could see everything almost as if it was daytime.

When that moon finally floated behind the canyon rim the sky exploded with stars! The Milky Way appeared like a white tapestry over the canyon. For as bright as the moon made the canyon before, now I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face and those formerly silver canyon walls became black voids below what seemed like a billion points of light arcing from one rim to the other.

I endured the night and was given a lift back to the other side of the river the next morning by a party in a canoe. But I’ll never forget seeing those stars that night with all the time in the world to contemplate my place in the universe and the unanswerable questions that viewing the starry night sky inevitably brings to mind.

The border between New Mexico and Oklahoma, Doug Geiling

Springfield

The darkest skies in all of Colorado are not found above the Western Slope, or deep inside a high-country wilderness. There is a little-appreciated corner of Colorado, right along the New Mexico state line where tendrils of the Rocky Mountains extend eastward in the form of pinion pine-topped mesas and little hidden canyons clear into Oklahoma’s panhandle. It is here, in the extreme southeastern part of our state, where the darkest skies are to be found. I convinced my middle school-aged daughter to join me on a road trip to this blank spot on the map and hopefully experience the most stunning night sky available in our region.

Springfield, Colorado, population 1,325, is a town that needs some love. It has a gorgeous city park with an enormous water tower. But for a town of over 1,000 residents it was remarkably quiet for a Saturday evening, and it seemed that half of Main Street’s storefronts were boarded up.

I was ghosted by the mayor of Springfield who previously agreed to meet with me, but didn’t answer or return my calls when we arrived. We got a laugh out of that and, after a dinner at Springfield’s only open restaurant, we headed for the remote tri-state boundary between Colorado, Oklahoma, and New Mexico. It’s a surprisingly scenic spot at sunset requiring a journey of many miles down a series of dirt roads through a checkerboard of private ranchland and parcels of the Comanche National Grassland.

Our late-night destination was the tiny hamlet of Branson, Colorado, population 57, situated just two miles north of the New Mexico state line somewhere a long way east of Trinidad and a longer way west of Springfield. Branson has no services, but I found a rental cottage operated by Jodi Doherty, a teacher at the local K-12 school.

Doherty spoke with me the next day about the history of this unique and little-known corner of Colorado. Her husband, she said, is a fifth generation Coloradan with a family history going back almost to the time of the Goodnight-Loving cattle drive which came through this area a century and a half earlier and was dramatized in the 1980s TV series “Lonesome Dove.” I learned from Doherty that there are other people who have come to stay at her wonderful little guesthouse just to see the brightest stars around.

But to get to the absolute darkest night skies available in Colorado, we had to double back to the east to a place even multi-generational locals have never heard of called Jesus Mesa. Access is on the New Mexico side, but the mesa extends north into Colorado. On this mostly dirt road drive, we met not a single other vehicle. A breakdown here would have meant an overnight in the car and a long wait the next day to flag down the first local rancher to come through on that lonely road.

Arriving at midnight just a short walk from the state line we thought luck was on our side. Cloudy skies from evening storms earlier were finally clearing just in time for the stars to shine bright. We stepped out of the car into the blackness between a cholla cactus and a pinion pine, looked up to the night sky… and saw a scattering of stars and no sign of the Milky Way. It was a bust. The one condition that did not line up for us was particulate matter in the lower atmosphere kicked up by high winds during the previous day. It was enough to turn our Bortle Class 1 sky into the equivalent of about a Bortle Class 5, similar to what we see on a clear night in east Boulder County.

It just wasn’t meant to be on this trip. But that’s why we seek these places. The elusiveness of the greatest sights on Earth are part of what makes the pursuit of them so alluring — and so rewarding when “the stars align.”

And when the stars don’t align, we remind ourselves of the old adage that the journey is the destination. We go and we do these things for the experience, the adventure, for the wonderful unexpected moments, and for the time we spend with the loved ones we travel with.

“Most people from Colorado have no clue about this area,” said Doherty. As we spoke, she told me of the school where she helps teach a senior class of just eight kids, of the multi-denominational church where my daughter and I noticed everyone seemed to meet on that windy Sunday morning, about how her husband is both the town pastor and “tech guy.”

She spoke of how often they’ve sold gas out of their garage to strangers who have under-estimated the distances between services in this most remote part of the state. Doherty never mentioned that Branson, Colorado, and her husband Brad, were in the national news recently for one of those uniquely uplifting small-town American stories. Do yourself a favor and search YouTube for “A Football Field of Dreams.” You won’t be disappointed.

No, we didn’t get to see the best stars this time. But the next day I watched my daughter smile while standing in the wind on the rim of an extinct volcano in New Mexico as she looked out over the great open space of this amazing western land. We would not have gone to Capulin Volcano if we did not decide to search for the stars at Jesus Mesa. These are the moments that remind us of why we explore.

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