The Dark Rangers on America’s loneliest road

In July 1986, Life the magazine described US Route 50 as the “most lonely road in America”.

Below a single depressing photo, the magazine featured this description of the two-lane highway:

“It is totally empty,” says an AAA advisor. “There are no points of interest. We do not recommend it. ”The 287-mile stretch of US 50, which runs from Ely to Fernley, Nevada, passes through nine cities, two abandoned mining fields, a few gas stations and an occasional coyote. “We caution all drivers not to drive there,” says the AAA representative, “unless they are confident in their survival skills.”

It was a colossal dissent, but Nevada tourism officials couldn’t be happier. Suddenly, Lifethe non-endorsement of his depressing little highway gave him a brand, and with that he managed to popularize the road among a certain group of dark travelers. The state put up signs announcing the new name – HWY 50, THE MOST SOLITARY ROAD IN AMERICA.

Just three months after the publication of that article, US 50 obtained an attraction that even the most tired AAA advisor would have agreed that, at least, counted as one. point of interest. A few kilometers away from the highway, a 76,000-acre plot received a private label upgrade. In October 1986, Congress passed a law establishing the Great Basin National Park.

The park was designed to serve as a representative sample of the entire Greater Basin region – a huge river basin spanning five states, including almost all of Nevada. All water found in the Great Basin drains or evaporates internally, never reaching the Pacific Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico. In other words, what happens in Vegas is in Vegas.

The park itself is less than 480 km from the Las Vegas Strip, the brightest spot on our entire planet when viewed from space. But the most lonely road in the country doesn’t see many lighthouses. The nearest town to Great Basin – Baker, Nevada – has just 68 inhabitants.

“We are very rare,” creaker Annie Gilliland told me when I met her near the visitor center. “This is one of – if not The darker place in the Lower 48. ”

Annie is a “Dark Ranger”, part of an elite squad of the park staff that conducts regular astronomy presentations.

“I love it,” she told me, smiling. “It makes me look like a superhero.”

The Dark Rangers are royal guardians of the galaxy, charged with ensuring that the lighting within the park remains low so that visitors are not distracted from the sky above. In Great Basin, the stars are the main attraction.

Before my meeting with Annie, I spent the day walking some short trails and drove to the park’s Wheeler Peak Scenic Drive. The scenery I had seen was quite pleasant, but most of it, at least in my eyes, was the same type of maritime pine forest that can be found throughout the Great Basin region.

If someone went home when the sun went down, the Great Basin could simply look as “Great” as the Great Plains. That’s why rangers like Annie encourage visitors to stay close. Here, they have a saying …

Half the park … it’s getting dark.

I had heard about the skies of the Great Basin and scheduled my visit to arrive on the night of the new moon – the darkest night possible. It was also a weekend night, which meant that Annie would host one of her popular astronomy lectures. When the sun went down, a small crowd began to form in the parking lot. Flashlights were forbidden – Annie wanted our eyes to adjust naturally.

When the stars finally made their debut, the canopy shining overhead didn’t strike me as something that should be referred to as a “dark sky”. Cave of the Wind was Dingy. This was the most brilliant sky I have ever seen.

Rising from the east, the Milky Way slowly streaked the horizon of the Great Basin – it looked like the skies had been torn apart. This was not a faint constellation where you have to struggle to connect the dots just to see a shape that vaguely resembles a bear chasing twin crabs. This was an unmissable interstellar Grand Canyon, a huge strip of light so bright that it cast shadows on the ground.

I was paralyzed. It was difficult to understand that all these thousands of stars were there all the time, hidden from view. I realized that all the other supposedly beautiful starry nights in my life were symphonies with no notes. At Great Basin, I was finally able to appreciate the complete composition.

An astronomer would tell you that I was still seeing only a small fraction of the universe. The human eye, under the best conditions, can see less than 5,000 of the billions of stars that shine only in our galaxy. While trying to apprehend them all, I wondered if the limiting factor was not the eye, but the human brain. Throw in a few more dozen bright white pins and it felt like my head was going to explode.

When I occasionally lowered my gaze to rest my neck for a few minutes, I could see the heads of a hundred other tourists stretched to the sky, their eyes wide with wonder. Annie installed telescopes in the parking lot for anyone who wanted to take a closer look. When I approached to spy on Jupiter, I met a Scout troop from Farmington, New Mexico, who had come to the park to earn their merit badges in astronomy. I asked one of the Boy Scouts if the sky was different from what he used to see at home.

“I can’t see any of that at home,” he said. “It makes me think, our world is so small, and the galaxy out there is so great.“

At an age when most children think they are the center of the universe, the stars of Great Basin helped to remind this child that he was not. That none of us is.

For most Americans, this type of cosmic perception is increasingly difficult to obtain. More than two-thirds of the country lives in areas where the Milky Way cannot be seen from their backyards. Although today we know much more about the cosmos than any generation in history, we Watch let alone that.

When the International Dark-Sky Association announced in 2016 that it was recognizing Great Basin as a “Dark Sky Park”, program manager John Barentine told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that Great Basin was “as close as you can get to what the night sky should be before the invention of electric light”.

It is easy to forget that the era he was referring to was not really long ago. Lights have only obscured our view of the sky a century and a half ago – Thomas Edison’s company only started selling light bulbs in the 1880s and it took a long time for cities to become the bright metropolises we know today. But our world is getting brighter and brighter. The most dire forecasts estimate that by 2025, there may be no dark skies in the Lower 48.

Before it could be certified as Dark Sky Park, Great Basin first had to adjust its fixtures down. The lamps around the visitor center have been adapted to use low-voltage red lights, a color that allows our eyes to be better adjusted to the dark. (That’s why everything from the digital alarm clock numbers to the interior of the submarine’s control rooms is illuminated in red.)

Most importantly, the park strived to never use more light than necessary. When something was not in use, it was turned off. It can be easy to deal with light pollution. It can literally disappear at the touch of a button. Light pollution is reversible.

Parks, with the responsibility to preserve our natural resources “intact”, have an ecological responsibility to consider the impact of light. Artificial light sources can cause massive interruptions in circadian rhythms of animals in parks and impact the relationship between nocturnal predators and their prey. Lights can also disorient species that depend on the moon and stars as navigation lanes.

Every year in Florida, millions of baby sea turtles die when they waddle in the direction of artificial light sources along the beach, confusing the brightness of condominiums with the light of the moon. Frogs, who croak at night to find a mate, may never to understand it is night if it is very clear outside. If males are unable to make their baby-making music, females will not mate and the frog population will die.

In addition to the environmental impact of light pollution, seeing the stars in the Great Basin reminded me that the night sky in itself it is a resource that is worth preserving. The vision of what is beyond our world can be as powerful and transformative as any scenario found on its surface. Unfortunately, protecting that vision is beyond the power of some Dark Rangers. The vision of what is beyond our world can be as powerful and transformative as any scenario found on its surface.

Penguin Random House LLC.

Share this:

Related