The Dark Rangers of the Loneliest Road in America

In July 1986, Life magazine US Route 50 described as the ‘Only Road in America’.

Below a single depressing photo, the description of the two-lane road appears in the magazine:

“It’s completely empty,” says a AAA adviser. “There are no attractions. We do not recommend it. The 507-kilometer line of US 50, which runs from Ely to Fernley, Nev. Walk, walk across nine villages, two abandoned mining camps, a few petrol pumps and a sweetie. “We warn all motorists not to drive there,” the AAA representative said, “unless they have confidence in their survival skills.”

It was a colossal disciple, but tourism officials in Nevada could not have been happier. All of a sudden, LifeThe non-endorsement of their depressing highway has made it a brand, and managed to popularize the road among a certain set of gloomy travelers. The state has put up signs advertising the new name – HWY 50, THE ONLY ROAD IN AMERICA.

Only three months after the article was published, US 50 got a draw that even the most rogue AAA adviser would have agreed to at least as a point of interest. A few miles off the highway, a 76,000-acre piece of land received its own trademark upgrade. In October 1986, Congress passed a law establishing the Great Basin National Park.

The park was intended to serve as a representative example of the entire Great Basin region – a massive watershed that spans five states, including nearly the entire Nevada. All the water found in the Great Basin is drained or evaporated internally, and never moves to the Pacific Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico. In other words, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

The park itself is less than 300 miles from the Las Vegas Strip, the brightest spot on our entire planet when viewed from space. But the country’s loneliest road does not see many headlights. The nearest town to Great Basin – Baker, Nevada – houses only 68 people.

“We’re pretty rare,” ranger Annie Gilliland told me when I met her near the visitor center. ‘This is one of the – if not the darkest place in the lower 48. ”

Annie is a “Dark Ranger”, part of an elite group of park staff who regularly lead astronomy presentations.

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

The Dark Rangers are guardians of the galaxy and must ensure that the lighting in the park remains low so that visitors are not distracted from the sky above. At Great Basin, the stars are the star attraction.

Before meeting Annie, I took a few short walks that day and drove up Wheeler Peak Scenic Drive in the park. The scenery I saw was pleasant enough, but most of it was to my eye anyway the same kind of pinyon gin forest world that can be found all over the Great Basin.

If one were to go home when the sun went down, the Great Basin might look just as “great” as the Great Plains. That’s why rangers like Annie encourage visitors to hold on. Here they have a saying …

Half the park … is after dark.

I heard of the sky of the Great Basin and arranged my visit so that I would arrive on the evening of a new moon – the darkest possible night. It was also a weekend evening, which meant Annie would be giving one of her popular astronomy talks. As 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 debuted, the canopy shining over me did not strike me as something to be referred to as a ‘dark sky’. Windgrot was dark. It was the clearest sky I had ever seen.

The galaxy rose from the east and dashed along the horizon of the Great Basin – it looked as if the sky had been torn apart. It was not a vague constellation where you have to struggle to connect the dots, just to see a shape that vaguely looks like a bear chasing twin crabs. It was an incredible interstellar Grand Canyon, a massive ray of light that was so dazzling that it cast shadows on the ground.

I was handed over. It was hard to comprehend that all these thousands of stars were up there all the time and hiding. I realized that all other so-called beautiful starry nights of my life were symphonies with notes missing. At Great Basin, I was finally able to appreciate the full composition.

An astronomer would tell you that I only see a small fraction of the universe. Under the best of circumstances, the human eye can see less than 5,000 of the billions of stars that shine in our galaxy alone. When I tried to take them all in, I wondered if the limiting factor was not the eye, but the human brain. Throw in even a few dozen more bright white pins and it feels like my head will 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 crowing to the sky, with wide eyes of amazement. Annie set up telescopes in the parking lot for anyone who wanted to take a closer look. When I took one step to look at Jupiter, I met a group of Boy Scouts from Farmington, New Mexico, who came to the park to earn their astronomy merits. I asked one of the scouts if the sky was different from what he was used to seeing at home.

“I can see nothing of this,” he said. ‘It makes me think, our world is so small, and the galaxy there is so big.”

At a time when most children think they were the center of the universe, the stars of the Great Basin helped remind this child that he was not. That none of us are.

For most Americans, it is more difficult to gain this kind of cosmic insight. More than two thirds of the country live in areas where the Milky Way cannot be seen from their backyards. Although we know much more about the cosmos today than any generation in history, we do know see much less of it.

When the International Dark-Sky Association announced in 2016 that it recognized the Great Basin as a ‘Dark Sky Park’, program manager John Barentine told the Las Vegas Review Journal that the Great Basin ‘was as near as the night sky could appear before the invention of electric light’.

It’s easy to forget that the era he was referring to was actually not that long ago. The lights only obscure our view of the sky for a century and a half – Thomas Edison’s business first sold light bulbs in the 1880s, and it took a long time before cities changed into the glittering metropolises we know today. But our world is getting brighter and brighter. According to the most gruesome predictions, there will be no more dark air in the bottom 48 by 2025.

Before it could be certified as a Dark Sky Park, Great Basin first had to adjust its lighting devices downward to the right. The light bulbs around the visitor center have been installed to use red lights with low wattage, a color that better enables our eyes to fit in the dark. (Therefore, everything from the numbers on digital alarm clocks to the inside of submarine control rooms are illuminated in red.)

Most importantly, the park never uses more light than necessary. If something is not used, it is turned off. This is how easy it can be to address light pollution. It can literally disappear with the push of a switch. Light Pollution is reversible.

With parks, conserving their natural resources “intact,” it is an ecological responsibility to consider the impact of light. Artificial light sources can cause major disruption of the circadian rhythms of animals in the parks and affect the relationship between nocturnal animals and their prey. Lights can also disorient species that rely on the moon and stars for navigation modes.

Every year in Florida, millions of sea turtles die out as they waddle toward artificial light sources along the beach, confusing the glow of apartments as the light of the moon. Frogs, which quarrel at night to find a mate, may never realize it’s night when it’s too bright outside. If the males cannot feel like making their baby music, then the females do not mate, and the frog population dies out.

Aside from the environmental impact of light pollution, the stars at the Great Basin reminded me that the night sky self is a resource worth preserving. The view of what lies outside our world can be just as powerful and transformative as any scenery that appears on the surface. Unfortunately, protecting the view is beyond the power of some Dark Rangers. The view of what lies outside our world can be just as powerful and transformative as any scenery that appears on the surface.

Penguin Random House LLC.

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