The Light Fantastic

How a small city in Arizona played a big part in the Dark Skies movementand in the process, became one of America's best places for stargazing.

- Leslie Camhi

MID-AUGUST, we learned soon after our arrival in Flagstaff, Arizona, is the height of monsoon season. While days were mostly sunny and, at an altitude of 7,000 feet, pleasantly temperate-especially when compared with the summer heat wave in Phoenix, a three-hour drive away-late afternoons and evenings were punctuated by fast-moving storms. One night our charmingly hip hotel, the High Country Motor Lodge (doubles from $144), went abruptly dark in a storm-induced blackout.

My son Asher, a college student, began moaning about the sudden lack of Wi-Fi, and that's when I realized this was a golden opportunity. I dragged him outdoors. The rain had stopped, and a brisk wind was dispersing the clouds that lingered around the San Francisco Peaks, pulling back the curtain on a vast, winking tapestry-pin points of light in an inky black sky.

We had traveled to Flagstaff in part to reacquaint ourselves with the night sky. Home for us is New York City, which the Swiss architect Le Corbusier once described as "a Milky Way brought down to Earth," a place where light pollution renders all but the brightest celestial bodies largely invisible.

Designated in 2001 as the world's first International Dark Sky City, Flagstaff has been working to limit light pollution since at least 1958, when it passed an ordinance remarkable in its foresight-restricting public illumination. It was prompted by scientists at the Lowell Observatory, a privately funded center for astronomical research founded in 1894 in what was then a mountain frontier town. Once Flagstaff received Dark Sky designation, the whole community came to recognize the importance of preserving its views of the stars. More subtle, perhaps, but no less powerful, was the influence of the nearby Diné/Navajo Nation, whose seasons and ceremonies have been organized around the constellations for millennia.