GOING DARK: Nevada's night skies among world's starriest
By John M. Glionna, Las Vegas Review-Journal, December 1, 2019
PHOTOGRAPHY by Chase Stevens
TONOPAH — The sun has just now set, casting the western horizon of this old mining town in a rich, glowing crimson as Russ Gartz strides out of a convenience store, prepared for yet another dark sky mission.
“Look!” he calls out, like a boy in the back seat on a family vacation. It’s a cry of pure astonishment, like he’s spotted something he’s never before seen.
“The moon!”
He points to a crescent disc that appears over the left shoulder of nearby Mount Brock. “Hah!” Gartz says. “Hello, there!”
Far from the big city, where chronic light pollution drowns out the night skies above — those silent luminaries of mythology, wonder and surprise — the 58-year-old Gartz is one of Nevada’s rural star-gazers.
On a recent early-winter evening, he’s at it again — dressed in a red cap, two pairs of socks (two of everything, actually), ready for temperatures to dip into the high 20s.
Gartz likes to arrive early, so he can position his telescopes and binoculars just so, welcoming each new point of light as it appears in the darkening sky. He’s like a dutiful social host, extending a hand to greet each arriving celestial guest at his regular evening star party.
He starts up his old truck, hurrying to take his observational post just outside town. From there, he gazes up into the distant realm he calls “the heavens,” suggesting that Gartz regards any communion with these night skies as a near-religious experience.
Usually, Gartz is on the lookout for such otherworldly celebrities as the Orion and Cassiopeia constellations or the seven sisters of the Pleiades, a nearby star-cluster that appears even to the unaided eye.
But he says he also likes the moon for it’s mysterious cultural references, reciting the poetry of Maleva the Gypsy from the 1941 film “The Wolf Man.”
“Even a man who is pure of heart and says his prayers by night,
May become a wolf when the wolf bane blooms and the autumn moon is bright!”
In a state well-known for the shimmering lights of the Las Vegas Strip, Nevada is getting some international recognition for something decidedly darker.
It’s the state’s night skies.
Because rural Nevada has some of the blackest nighttime skies on the planet.
Earlier this year, the isolated Massacre Rim Wilderness Study Area, in the state’s far northwest reaches, was named as an International Dark Sky Sanctuary, only the seventh place on Earth to receive such a designation.
Out there, the night skies are so dark, astronomers say, you can see your shadow by the light of the Milky Way.
But amateur star-watchers like Gartz say Southern Nevadans don’t have to travel that far to appreciate the nighttime darkness. From tiny Ely and Gerlach to the Great Basin National Park and even Tonopah, the heavens shine just as brightly.
The group Friends of Nevada Wilderness wants to help many forsaken high-desert communities use those dark skies to attract tourism and is developing brochures and advertising campaigns that each could use to promote themselves.
For five years, since it started its summertime Star Train, Ely has already drawn tourists from as far away from Australia and China. At $41 per adult, the rides, which run 60 miles to the Great Basin National Park, also bring business to local hotels and restaurants.
Kyle Horvath, director of tourism for White Pine County, estimates that the economic boost from all of the Nevada Northern Railway’s specialty theme rides is $3 million annually, a figure he says will rise “significantly” in the next few years.
Leading the way are the nighttime star-gazing rides, whose success has convinced the county to invest in other after-dark activities. They include nighttime photography seminars, sponsored hikes and family events at local night viewing parks.
“New construction is required to use lighting that does not pollute our night skies, which bring a unique niche to our area,” he said.
Gartz is a guide at the Tonopah Star Trails and Star Park, which hosts summertime events known as Star Parties. He sees the money and wonder stars bring into town.
Once, a French couple asked him to hold their baby daughter as they looked through his telescope. On another night, a British tourist found the Andromeda galaxy without even using a star map.
In winter, when the visitors leave town and the temperatures plummet, Gartz sets up his telescope in his front yard for a one-man star party. Stargazing is like fishing,” he says.
“You can plan all you want, but you never know what the weather will bring.” Yet star-gawking is a lot like fishing in another important way. Said Gartz: “You’ve got to be patient.”
A retired government worker, Gartz moved from California to Carson City and then again to Tonopah for the wide-open spaces his spirit craved. He has ruddy features and a gray-haired ponytail. In his spare time, he writes comic book fantasy novels about vampires and witches.
But it’s out here beneath the stars that his imagination really runs wild.
Look at any map that plots the United States at night and you’ll see that most of the nation is dominated by light, so much so that an estimated 80 percent of Americans can no longer see the Milky Way.
The West is different, a place where the night is filled with delicious darkness. And Nevada skies are some of the darkest out there.
In 2017, travel writer Oliver Roeder designated Gerlach, Nevada, in the Black Rock Desert as “The darkest town in America” in his search for the nation’s least-lighted places.
“On NASA maps, you can see the lights from Las Vegas, Reno and Salt Lake City. Then there’s central Nevada,” said Nichole Andler, chief of interpretation for the Great Basin National Park. “It’s like a big hole in the middle of things, just really dark. It’s wonderful and something Nevadans should be really proud of.”
The reason? The lack of a human footprint.
Most of rural Nevada is undeveloped, with ranchers and farmers clustered around water, a commodity in short supply. The Silver State is also dominated by mountains and an array of higher, clearer altitudes — almost Martian in its unpeopled loneliness.
Melodi Rodrique is a physicist at the University of Nevada-Reno who uses remote access to the Great Basin Observatory in her astronomy class. She relishes her occasional drives to the Great Basin and its high-altitude observatory.
“There’s really nothing out there,” she said. “You drive and you drive and you drive and you don’t see anybody or anything. There’s nothing but beautiful desert.”
But it’s not just scientists who are drawn Nevada’s rural darkness.
Great Basin National Park attracts 10,000 night-sky visitors each year, many of them attending its annual astronomy festival.
Yet some believe the state can take better advantage of its natural wonders.
“There are people worldwide who care about dark skies,” said Shaaron Netherton, executive director of the nonprofit Friends of Nevada Wilderness. “And we’ve got them right here. They could provide an economic boost to a lot of small towns.”
Netherton is producing brochures with new night sky tourism slogans, such as designating Nevada’s isolated stretch of U.S. Route 6 as “The starriest road in America,” a play on the old Highway 50 campaign, which boasted the road’s loneliness. Then there’s a tour she said could be called “Park to Park in the Dark.”
Several months ago, the International Dark Sky Association selected Nevada’s Massacre Rim as an elite night sky sanctuary, following a joint application by Netherton’s group and the Bureau of Land Management. The site now joins similar sanctuaries in New Mexico, Texas, Utah, New Zealand and Chile.
But the area, located 150 miles north of Reno near the Oregon and California borders, is so isolated, with so few roads, that most stargazers must hike in to find their viewing spots.
All across the Outback, rural Nevadans get a kick out of introducing their city cousins to real darkness.
“I like to take people out to the black Rock Desert, set up chairs for the sunset and then lay down on blankets and just watch the stars,” Netherton said. “Out there, you have a 360-degree view of the heavens.”
Andler, Great Basin National Park’s chief of interpretation, said the number of tourists who visit the park just to see the night stars increases every year. On those trips, she’s often asked, “What’s that fuzzy thing in the sky? They’ve never seen the Milky Way before. They’re spellbound by the dark bands and dust clouds and the fact that there’s so many stars.”
Yet some rural Nevada old-timers have been enjoying the view for decades.
James Heidman helped organize the Tonopah Astronomical Society, which once boasted 15 members until people moved away. Now 73, he’s lived in Tonopah for 26 years and likes to search for what he calls “deep sky objects.”
“One night, it was so dark out there, the air was as still and crystal clear as can be,” he recalled. “Jupiter has 50 or 60 moons, but only four of them are good-sized. On most nights, you can see them as mere points of light. But that night, we could see them as actual discs. It was pure wonder.”
Some night sky waters have even explored deep space from within the big-city limits.
In 1997, Las Vegas lawyer and amateur astronomer John Mowbray photographed the Hale-Bopp comet as it hurtled over Red Rock Canyon at a brisk 43,000 miles an hour.
Mowbray’s story of capturing the elusive comet shows how mystical such nighttime encounters can be.
He said his father had just recently died and he felt a bit philosophical as he ventured out to Red Rock Canyon at dusk to set up his tripod and camera. The evening was both cloudy and windy and he eventually decided to call it a night.
“Then the clouds parted and I went crazy,” he recalled. “I shot five rolls of film and drove to the local Walmart, where a nice lady and I worked together to develop the images.”
Mowbray will always remember that night, and others like it, being out there, alone, just him and the stars. “You stare up at the Orion Nebula, where stars are formed, knowing that the light hitting your retinas was generated 650 years ago,” he said.
“And you have to ask, ‘Does it even exist anymore as I’m seeing it now?’ It’s like a time capsule. And it puts a whole lot of things in your life into perspective.”
On a recent October night, Gartz is finally in position, at a viewing spot on the old Mizpah Mine site, overlooking downtown Tonopah.
His usual post at the star park on the southern edge of town was suddenly drowned out by the lights of the high school football fields, so he has moved on.
The night is cold and his hands burn as he adjusts his telescopes, casting around in his orange tackle box for lenses and screws.
At long last, as a nearby dog barks, he’s ready.
“It’s showtime!” Gartz says. “Let’s look into the skies!”
He points out the Cassiopeia constellation, which he likens to “a bent question mark.” Along with the setting moon, he directs his telescopes toward Jupiter, where its four visible moons can be seen lining up like planes preparing to land at McCarran International Airport. Saturn — even its glorious rings — are also clearly visible.
By 8 p.m., it’s so dark, even this close to town, that Gartz negotiates by flashlight. “That fuzzy stuff is the Milky Way,” he observes. He points out a shooting star.
To answer questions from curious tourists, Gartz carries a trusty amateur astronomy guide. He also has an iPad with a “Star Walk” application breaks down the complex map of stars into mythological figures as the ancients might have imagined them.
“Each night, the heavens expose just how little I know about them,” he says. “But the views are endless and there’s always time to learn.”
As the night wears on, he continues his search of those Seven Sisters. But his quarry seems lost amid the endless pin-pricks of glimmering light. The Ursa Major Constellation, known as the Big Dipper, Ursa Major, sits on the northern horizon like a huge starry ladle.
“Where are my Pleiades?” he said. “I just saw you two nights ago.” Finally, success.
“The Pleiades!” he cries out. “Ah! There you are!”
After a few hours, Gartz packs up his telescopes. He could stay out here all night, a rural star gazer content to be out under Nevada’s dark skies.
But he has to work in the morning.
“Nature,” he says softly, “is the ultimate cool.”
