International Dark Sky Week is observed each year in April. As a professor of park and conservation policy at Texas A&M University, I gave presentations on “natural lightscapes” in my undergraduate course. The National Park Service defines a natural lightscape as the resources and values that exist in the absence of human-caused light at night, such as starlight and moonlight, lunar eclipses, meteor showers, displays of the northern and southern lights, and bioluminescence. But night skies are not the only harbors of darkness. Caves also provide natural lightscapes. Countless visitors have experienced total darkness during cave tours when a guide switches off the artificial lighting.

Led by the International Dark Sky Association, actions to protect natural lightscapes are expanding worldwide. A growing number of parks and communities stage night-sky events to promote public awareness and protection of natural lightscapes, and astronomy programs are among the most popular interpretive offerings at many national parks. As harbors of darkness, those parks offer superlative views of pristine lightscapes that possess both scientific and cultural value. But perhaps their greatest impact comes from revealing what we have lost when light pollution turns the urban night sky into a featureless yellow. This brief excerpt from my draft book describes my personal encounter with a harbor of darkness. It comes from the chapter titled, “Keeping the Gates.”

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In the summer of 1972, I was a twenty-two year old seasonal concession employee at the Old Faithful Campers Cabins in Yellowstone National Park. It was my turn to “open up,” which meant leaving my cabin well before dawn to prepare the dining room for the frantic breakfast rush. Yellowstone had little night lighting, even in developed areas, so I carefully made my way through the predawn darkness toward the dim shape of the lodge.

I worried about grizzly bears.

One night a few weeks earlier, a young man camping illegally had been killed and another seriously mauled by a grizzly just across the Firehole River, not a mile from where I walked. In the immediate aftermath, trails in the Old Faithful area were closed, rangers armed with rifles hunted the bear, helicopters hovered overhead.

But on this night, as I glanced up at the dark sky, my concern about earth-bound grizzlies vanished. Just above the horizon, otherworldly in its brilliance and pinned at a weirdly skewed angle, blazed the constellation Ursa Major—the Big Dipper, the Great Bear. I was transfixed. Having grown up in the incandescent glow of a Seattle suburb, I recognized a few familiar constellations; but the night sky a few miles north of a city is a pale shade of the darkness that cloaks Yellowstone.

The brilliance of that constellation and its unfamiliar position in the predawn hours disoriented me. I felt out of balance and, at the risk of seeming melodramatic, uncertain of my place in the firmament.

On returning home that fall, I tried to compose a short story about my experience but gave up. My immature skills as a writer were no match for the power of that encounter with the Great Bear in Yellowstone’s starry night sky.