Colorado towns work to preserve a diminishing resource: darkness

By Jack Healy

New York Times

WESTCLIFFE, Colo. >> As people around the world stepped into their backyards or onto rooftops to peer up at the annual spectacle of the Perseid meteor shower early Friday, few of them had a view like Wilson Jarvis and Steve Linderer.

At 2:30 a.m. as the light show was peaking, the two men sat on a grassy bluff here in the Wet Mountain Valley of southern Colorado, swaddled in blankets against the chilly mountain air and looking up at the stars in the torrent of the Milky Way. Every few seconds, a tiny chunk of space ice cast off by Comet Swift-Tuttle would blaze through Earth’s atmosphere, silently streaking through the darkness.

“There’s one!” the men called out.

“And another!”

“I saw that.”

Night skies like this one are disappearing across much of the world, nibbled away by the ever-expanding glow of city lights. U.S. skies are no different. Four out of five Americans live in places where they can no longer see the Milky Way.

But here, the tiny neighboring ranching and railroad towns of Westcliffe (population 568) and Silver Cliff (population 587) have decided to tap into the dwindling natural resource of darkness. The old silver mines that once made Silver Cliff Colorado’s third-largest town are long closed, and many ranchers are retiring. But there is still the night.

So for more than a decade, the two towns and a local dark-sky nonprofit have been dialing down the dimmer switch. They have replaced streetlights and passed rules requiring that outdoor lights point down. The group built a small observatory with star guides who tee up its telescope and take people on a tour of the night. They coax homeowners to hood their porch lamps or dim a bright light outside their house.

“People out of ignorance go with whatever’s cheap or whatever’s brightest,” said Ed Stewart, a board member of the local dark-sky group. “You multiply that by 200, 300, and there goes the sky.”

He said advocates met with homeowners’ associations and held stargazing parties to sell the virtues of the night. When they gaze over the valley and see winking floodlights on a ranch or home in the hills, they see their next targets of persuasion.

“You can’t just go up to someone and say, you’ve got a bad light, and legislate the problem away,” he said. “People resist that, especially in Colorado.”

The mayor of Westcliffe, Christy Patterson, said she once got a phone call complaining that her garage light was too bright. “I didn’t even have the light on,” she said.

In 2012, Stewart said a new store opened in town that flouted the area’s nighttime sensitivities and became a glowing eyesore. He said people in the community wrote letters to the editor, urging the store’s manager to change the lighting until, finally, the store relented.

“We feel like they’re a part of the community now,” Stewart said.

Last year, the International Dark-Sky Association, a nonprofit working to stop light pollution, rewarded their efforts by designating the two towns among a handful of dark-sky communities. Lovers of the night cheered — they had put their community on the map by blotting themselves out.

A trickle of amateur stargazers have taken notice and have started to visit, telescopes in tow.

When you drive into either town, the streets are not pitch-black. Streetlights and porch lights glow along the main street, where photos of 40-acre ranches are posted on the front windows of real estate offices. But viewed from the mountain pass above the towns, Westcliffe and Silver Cliff look less like an island of light than a constellation in the dark valley.

“There aren’t many towns, even small towns, where you can stand in town limits and see the Milky Way like that,” Linderer, 69, said from his camping chair. He and his wife, Margaret, who baked chocolate chip cookie squares for Friday’s stargazing, moved here a decade ago.

“I moved here because of this,” said Jarvis, 71, who retired here from Houston three years ago.

“So did I,” Linderer said.

To the west, toward the Sangre de Cristo range, a pack of coyotes yipped as another streak flashed across the sky.