Feeling Small in Big Country With Stargazing Zion

Dark Skies, Bright Eyes

With dwarfing canyons and eons-old rock formations, Zion is an easy place to feel small in all the best ways. The hikes are world-famous for their awe-inspiring views, and with good reason. Even a short drive through the park will have you feeling like most of your problems have flown out the sunroof. And if you want to zoom out even further, all you have to do is look up. Zion is a certified Dark Sky Park and one of the best places in the world to stargaze.

And when it comes to dark skies, Zion has some good company in the Beehive State. Utah is home to the highest concentration of internationally-certified Dark Sky Places. In fact, all five of Utah’s national parks are certified.

Dark Sky Places, a designation assigned by DarkSky International, offer a compelling way to think about conservation. We tend to think that parks, reserves and monuments are only about protecting natural spaces and species, but they also work to preserve their own untouched corners of the night sky. A place needs to meet a rigorous set of guidelines to be certified as a Dark Sky Place. One such qualification is that the Milky Way is readily visible to the unaided eye on a typical night.

The recent evening I spent in Zion National Park may have been typical by those standards. But for the 30 or so folks joining the Stargazing Zion-led tour beneath the park’s stars and spires, it was anything but. As we walked from the parking lot to the viewing area in the waning dusk, the sun was sinking slowly below the horizon and silhouetting the surrounding cliffs against the gathering twilight. It was clear we were in for quite a show.

Seasons of the Sky

Some astronomers favor winter stargazing for its longer nights, clearer skies and minimal atmospheric disturbance. Others enjoy warmer summer nights and views that reveal a greater expanse of the Milky Way. But with stargazing, you generally can't go wrong, particularly because its nighttime schedule helps you avoid much of a busy park's daytime traffic.

Our stargazing guide for the evening, Matt Taber, told me he prefers winter stargazing, and not just because of what’s happening in the sky. He thinks there’s something about the experience of bundling up and getting warm that helps people focus on the stars above them.

“All they have to focus on is getting warm, looking at the sky, and wondering,” he said. Stargazing Zion typically operates from mid-March through mid-November, and by request only in the winter. With chilly temps, clear skies and cozy blankets, our group’s tour definitely got to see what Matt was talking about.

Some of the winter constellations also hold more astronomical diversity. Orion, for example, is a constellation that almost everyone can recognize. But most of us don’t know that it’s home to two stellar nurseries, six total nebulae, a blue supergiant and a red supergiant.

“It’s a visually complete constellation that gives us a timeline of the life cycle of a star,” Matt shared. And it can only be seen in the cold months.

As is often the case, the stars have a lesson for us here. Off-peak travel always holds pleasant surprises for the flexible traveler, and nowhere is that more true than Zion. The park is quieter. There are traces of snow nestled in amongst the vibrant red rock. And the nearby accommodations offer surprisingly affordable rates. Visiting at the tail end of March, my partner and I were able to enjoy a luxury glamping stay at Zion Wildflower Resort, only 20 minutes from the stargazing site, for far less than luxury prices. After watching the desert sunset begin from our front window, we bundled up and headed out.

My Very Educated Tour Guide

Stargazing Zion’s “tour” isn’t your typical tour. The night’s program consisted more of “follow the laser pointer” than “follow the leader,” so the half-mile walk to the viewing area was our only movement of the night. But it ended up being one of the highlights of the evening.

As our walk began, we neared a soft LED glow in the desert sand. It was a scale model of Pluto, the forgotten P in “My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas,” the mnemonic device you might remember from grade school. A short walk away was Neptune (the “Nachos” of the new version) and so on. This delightful scaled solar system was a great way to start the tour — it was hard not to get a healthy appreciation of the scale of space as we saw Mars just a foot away from Earth, then turned to see Pluto’s faint glow a few football fields away.

With our sense of awe now activated, the tour got to the gazing. Each guest was given a blanket, a pair of binoculars, a red-light flashlight, a warm drink (hot chocolate, coffee, or tea), a blanket, and a Yogibo bean bag to lie out on (which may have been worth the price of admission alone).

Written in the Stars

Each guide at Stargazing Zion has their own unique spin on the tour, so depending on the night, you might have different objects highlighted in the night sky. Matt told me that for him, the most fascinating part of astronomy is the historical and mythological element of the stars and the division of the sky. For the first part of our tour, Matt took us through the zodiac constellations, tracing them with a powerful green laser pointer that seemed to cut through the sky like a knife. (Or, more appropriately, like a lightsaber.)

The zodiac soon had company, some that was expected and some that wasn’t. With impeccable timing, Matt and our other guides, Matthias and Spencer, helped us spot the International Space Station as it raced from one corner of the sky to the other. The ISS is easy to predict, but meteors are a little more sporadic. When our group caught a brief glimpse of a bolide, an exceptionally bright meteor that’s colloquially known as a fireball, the excitement in Matt’s voice told us that it wasn’t a normal occurrence.

Later, he told me that events like the bolide are what he loves most about stargazing.

“I think seeing that fireball gives that sense of gravitas. It represents something of a chance encounter.” Talking about the bolide, Matt certainly spoke like someone drawn to the mythos of the stars. “We have a tendency as people to tie the stars to fate because of their cycles,” he said, “But the bolide represents that quick, small thing that changes the tides of fate. Something different that changes the cycle.”

Zooming In to Zoom Out

It would be hard to get much closer to the stars than we did with the Enhanced Vision telescopes at Stargazing Zion’s disposal. These electric telescopes take long exposure images of stellar objects and layer them on top of each other to give you a color-accurate image of nebulas, galaxies and star clusters.

The results were incredible. Gazing at nebulae light-years away, from the soft red stardust of the Horsehead Nebula to the vibrant blue of the Running Man, I found that perfect moment of smallness that you search for when looking at the stars. The spectacular improbability of everything came into focus as though I’d just spun the dial on my binoculars. How amazing it was to be alive at a time when we could look at the stars this way, to be in Zion at a time when it was a mecca of towering rock and not some boring basin; to live in a time where people from all over the world could travel so easily to incredible places.

As the rest of the tour continued, with Matt highlighting other well-known solar objects, I was torn between the desire to ask about everything or to simply take it in. Ultimately, I decided to treat Zion the same way at night as I do during the day. I was content to look up in wonder, unable to believe what I was seeing, but feeling grateful to be alive to see it.