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I want to show you something — a remarkable view you cannot see until long after sunset, unless you stand in the vast middle of nowhere, without your phone or your Netflix series or your irrational fears of the wilderness just beyond the edge of your flashlight’s beam. Turn off the light.

The silhouette of the Sawtooth Range looms on the horizon, sheltering a well of Central Idaho from the sky-glow of distant civilizations. Your eyes adjust to the dark and the vista above draws them up to a black dome dazzled by many thousands of points of light. You wade into its depths, into its apparent three-dimensionality. There are galaxies behind stars behind planets. A single meteor streaks across your peripheral vision and there, a satellite, a mere speck of light, tracks a steady path along its orbit. Wonder buoys familiarity. You know this place you’ve never really seen before. You sense in it a kind of origin, and under the reassuring arm of the Milky Way, you feel recognized.

Few people live beneath — or have seen — a night this star-rich. Light pollution affects more than 80 percent of the world’s population in some way. Excessive artificial lighting bathes thousands of cities in radiance that obscures all but the brightest celestial objects. Night skies appear muddy and nearly starless.

But life needs darkness. Unnaturally bright nights can lead to depression and insomnia in humans. Brighter nights interfere with nocturnal animals’ hunting, foraging, and mating. City lights throw off the navigational systems of migrating turtles, are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of millions of birds annually, as well as declining populations of insects fatally drawn to the gleam.

Preserving the few remaining dark places in the world is the mission of the Tucson, Arizona-based International Dark-Sky Association (IDA). For more than 30 years, it’s pushed against the sprawl of artificial lighting, and its efforts are beginning to pay off. Today, it’s reviewing a record number of applications from locations worldwide requesting to be certified as a dark-sky place by meeting criteria that include public education and steps to reduce light pollution.

Are these places really that dark? To find out, I spent a few evenings in July 2019 in the Central Idaho Dark Sky Reserve, a 1,416-square-mile patch inside the Sawtooth National Recreation Area. It’s one of 14 IDA-certified dark-sky reserves in the world and the only one in the United States. “It’s in the handful of places left in the continental U.S. where I would describe the quality of the night sky as being nearly pristine,” says John Barentine, IDA’s director of public policy. Later, I spoke with some of the people dedicated to studying and preserving dark skies and potentially capitalizing on them to boost rural economies.

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Originally posted by pianojuggler:
The northern parts of the Washington coast get dark. There's a mountain range between the coast and any city of size.

One year we were at Ruby Beach and after the sun went down we could not see a darned thing. A dozen of us and nobody thought to bring a flashlight. We literally felt our way the quarter mile up from the beach to the parking lot.