BY KAREN BOSSICK

Author Craig Childs was driving through Arizona when he realized that a familiar Peabody Coal Mine structure that had crossed above the highway had been torn down.

Looking up, he saw what the sky looked like without the mine there.

“The sky is coming back!” he thought to himself. “What had been hidden is coming back.”

Craig Childs, talking here with Buck Drew, was greeted by a red aurora on his first night in Ketchum. PHOTO: Karen Bossick

The incident prompted Childs to begin thinking about the night sky. What if we couldn’t see it? How does that change us?

To find out the answer to his question, Childs enlisted his longtime friend Irvin—a Forest Service employee and outdoor guide—to join him on a nine-day bike trip from the Las Vegas Strip to the darkest spot in Nevada.

He wrote about the trip in “The Wild Dark: Finding the Night Sky in the Age of Light,” which was published this year by the Utah-based Torrey House Press. And this week he spoke to a packed audience in a darkened lecture hall at The Community Library in Ketchum.

Childs waxed poetically, sometimes with a spiritual fervor, as he described looking up in the night sky to see clouds that looked like ghosts and phantoms roaming around.

“Just to look up and see something going on up there….You know that there’s more than what’s down here on earth,” he said, noting that 80 percent of Earth’s people cannot see the Milky Way due to artificial light. “There’s this whole other world—the entire universe—happening above us.”

Childs’ trip began on the Las Vegas Strip where, he noted, the 300-foot projection screen on The Sphere resembles a revolving commercial.

“I’m drawn to the lights of Las Vegas,” he confessed. “And at night, when no one’s running ads on The Sphere at 3 in the morning, The Sphere is a perfect moon.”

The Las Vegas Strip is a nine on the Bortle scale, named after amateur astronomer John Bortle. The scale places the most lit-up places on Earth in zone nine and the darkest spots in zone one.

Dodging trucks on a busy day when Las Vegas was setting up for a Formula One event, Childs and Irvin headed straight north. They camped the first night on the outskirts of town amidst garbage and pieces of luggage that people had stolen and opened, spilling the contents of people’s belongings on the ground as they searched for things of value.

It was a freezing mid-November right with wind that howled all night. The men had agreed that they would not build fires, but it was too cold not to.

The lights of the city were very much in evidence.

“The city just ends, but the light doesn’t,” Childs said. “The light keeps flowing across the desert…into your eyeballs.”

The next morning, fortified by salmon skin-baked dog treats, they continued biking on dirt roads between massive mountain ranges and across basins. They encountered tarantulas and rattlesnakes and petroglyphs they figured were 2,000 years old.

They had cached water beforehand, marking the caches with GPS coordinates.

“Night three and Las Vega was still a major presence,” Childs said. “I want the stars to come and swallow us, but it’s taking time.”

Planet Earth has never seen so much light as it does today, Childs continued. Satellites detected a 40 percent average increase in light worldwide between 1992 and 2013; some places saw a 400 percent increase.

Citizen scientists who could see 200 stars in 2011 could see only a hundred by 2022. Fueling the increase were LED lights, which are so cheap that people use more and more.

“The East Coast is covered in light. We in the West say, ‘That’ll never reach us.’ But it will. The light is coming. That’s what we do with light. We make more and more of it,” Childs said.

On the fourth day, the men pedaled steadily uphill through fine flour-like sediment before popping out into a basin with an Ice Age shoreline that felt like a different planet.

Childs described an earlier backpack trip across sand dunes where he walked at night to beat the heat, navigating by stars.

“We’d say, ‘That’s a fixed point. Let’s walk in that direction,’ ” he said. “That’s how humans navigated in the beginning: By stars.”

Even dung beetles follow the stars, finding their way by lining up with the Milky Way, he said. And scientists have learned that birds navigate by the North Star.

Childs recounted seeing the columns of light at the World Trade Center memorial site filled with thousands of birds, including gulls, raptors and songbirds. When lights are on, sensors detect 16,500 birds; when off, just 500.

The lights draw them in, with New York City becoming their north star. And it kills them by changing their metabolism, he said.

“Light is a toxin—in excess, it kills. Not just birds, but people, too. The cancer rates among areas with excess lights are higher than in areas of darkness,” he said.

The lights of Las Vegas cast a shadow for 150 miles. There was still a shadow casting off Vegas on Night 7. But the stars were beginning to change color and shape.

Finally, 170 miles out, the men basked in the darkest night sky they’d ever seen as they reached Bortle One. Las Vegas was no longer casting a shadow. The light of trillions of stars seemed to land on their shoulders.

“I wrote this book to transport readers up,” he said. “All you need to do is walk out and look up. Look up and find a star. This darkness exists on this planet and it has since the beginning. Leave this planet for a moment and experience what beyond us.

Childs came to Ketchum as a writer-in-residence at the Ernest and Mary Hemingway House, which is administered by The Community Library. He is writing a book about cougars, and his wife is writing poetry.

“Maybe it’s Hemingway’s ghost that’s affecting my sleep, but I haven’t been sleeping,” he said. “I’ve been getting up in the middle of the night…and that’s because I’m writing about a nocturnal animal…who is moving around in the darkness.”

Childs recounted how he’s been leaving the house, which sits above the Big Wood River, at 2 and 3 in the morning. One morning he ran through town, shielding his eyes from light as he ran.

“You have to block lights because they affect your vision. In instances like that, you see how much one small light affects everything,” he said. “Maybe, thinking like a cougar looking for the darkness, the in between. Just one light changes everything, makes you aware of the value of darkness.”

Childs added that his father told him that he could hear sound in the stars. The Greeks called it a harmonic connection.

“He called it the Music of the Spheres,” Childs said. “He said: If you listen, you can hear a tone coming out of the stars.”

WHERE DOES KETCHUM STAND ON THE BORTLE SCALE?

Ketchum measured between Bortle One and Two depending on the location when the Central Idaho Dark Sky Reserve in which the town sits was designated in 2017, said Carol Cole, who heads up the nonprofit Idaho Dark Sky Alliance.

A MILESTONE FOR TORREY PRESS

Craig Childs’ “The Wild Dark” is the 100th book published by Torrey House Press, a non-profit environmental publishing company that publishes books focused on Western culture, nature and history. Torrey House has forged a partnership with The Community Library, bringing authors like Childs and Pam Houston to the Library. It plans to bring more in 2026.