It did not occur to me until I had lived here a while that darkness is a resource. You do not think of it that way. Nobody grows up thinking of the dark as something a place can have more or less of, or something you could run out of, or something worth protecting. But there is a scale for it — the Bortle scale — and it runs from 1 to 9, where 9 is downtown and 1 is as dark as the sky gets anywhere on earth.
We are a 1.
That is not a local exaggeration and it is not the Chamber talking. It is a measurement, and it is the reason there is now an International Dark Sky Park up the road at the Slumgullion Center, and it is the reason a bunch of people who care a great deal about the night sky come here every June for Star Fest.
Star Fest is free. All of it, every event, which I want to say early because I think people assume a festival means a wristband and a ticket price. It does not. It is a weekend in the back half of June, and the dates move around from year to year — 2025 was late June, 2026 was the middle of it — so check the calendar rather than taking my word for when.
There are three pieces of it that I would tell anybody to do.
The first is the big telescopes up on Slumgullion Pass. This is the main event and it happens after dark on Saturday, when everybody drives south out of town on 149 and up to the observatory site at the top of the pass, which sits around eleven thousand feet with nothing around it making light in any direction. There are serious telescopes set up and people who know how to point them. You can bring your own if you have one. Two things about the drive: it is genuinely cold up there at night in June, colder than you will believe standing in town at seven in the evening, so bring more layers than you think and something to sit on and something hot to drink. And dim your headlights as you come up on the site. Everybody there has spent thirty minutes getting their eyes adjusted and one set of brights undoes all of it.
The second is the planetarium, which is a mobile one that lives at the Lake City Community School — it was donated to the school by the University of Colorado — and gets set up during the festival. They run solar viewing outside it during the day, where you look at the actual sun through a telescope built for that, and then you go inside the planetarium for the night sky. My honest opinion is that this is the single best part of the weekend if you have kids along, because it happens in the afternoon and it is indoors and it does not require anybody to stay up until eleven at eleven thousand feet.
The third is the movie. The Mountaineer Theatre on Gunnison Avenue puts on a space movie during Star Fest and lets everybody in free. The year they showed Forbidden Planet — a 1956 science fiction picture, robots and ray guns and a very serious narrator — in a one-screen theater that has been running since 1975, on the original kind of equipment, in a town with the darkest sky in the state, was about as close to a perfect evening as I can describe to you.
And here is the part I did not know until somebody told me, which reframed the whole thing.
The man who runs the astronomy programs is the man who owns the movie theater.
His name is Phillip Virden. He grew up in Garland, Texas, and when he was four years old his two older brothers showed him Mars through the family telescope. In sixth grade his teacher showed the class the Mercury launches and took them on a field trip to a planetarium at a school in Dallas. Then in 1973 he moved to Lake City, and the first time he saw the Milky Way from up here he said it was like being back in that planetarium, only a hundred times better. Two years later he opened the Mountaineer. He has been running free public stargazing for this town for something like forty years, most of it at the Windy Point overlook, and he was a National Weather Service observer for thirty-five of those years, and he writes the sky column in the paper.
So a kid gets taken to a planetarium on a school field trip. Sixty-some years later he is standing in a school gym in the San Juan Mountains running a planetarium for somebody else’s kids. I do not think you can plan a life to come out that neatly. But it is a good thing to think about while you are standing in the cold on top of a pass looking at Saturn.
If you cannot make Star Fest, you have not missed your chance at the sky. Virden runs free stargazing sessions at Windy Point through the summer, usually starting around 8:30 in the evening and going a couple of hours. Windy Point is off 149 south of town on County Road 5A. Same advice applies — layers, a chair, a blanket, a thermos, headlights down. The sessions are free and donations go to the Lake Fork Valley Conservancy. The night of the week has moved around over the years so look it up before you drive out there.
There is also Astro-art over at Lake City Arts during the festival, and talks, and workshops, and enough going on that you can fill a whole weekend without trying.
One last thing worth knowing. Slumgullion Pass is named for the earthflow that came down off it, and that same landslide is what dammed the river and made Lake San Cristobal about seven hundred years ago. So the ground you are standing on to look at the stars is the same event that made the lake you swam in that afternoon. I find that satisfying in a way I cannot fully justify.
Also… clouds happen. This is the mountains in June. If the sky closes up, go to the movie.
