Idaho isn’t exactly a place on most people’s bucket lists. In fact, when we tell people we are in Idaho, some of the comments we get include jokes about potatoes. But Idaho is on the way east towards Yellowstone, Glacier National Park, and more. We knew we were going to drive through the state. So I looked up what was interesting in Idaho. And the thing that caught my eye was the Central Idaho Dark Sky Reserve. It was the first dark sky reserve designated in the U.S. by the International Dark Sky Association, designated back in 2017. And isn’t that the point of vanlife? Get out and see the mountains, the lakes, and the stars! I planned our trip around visiting the reserve.
Where is the Dark Sky Reserve?
The dark sky reserve takes up a large area and includes the care and cooperation of cities like Ketchum, Idaho to choose city lighting that is dark sky friendly. There are three main routes into the area, highways 75, 21, and 93. We planned to come through Stanely from the north. We stayed a night near Brundage Mountain reservoir in the Payette National forest on our way to Stanley. The reservoir is north of McCall, Idaho, a popular resort town and even though it was leading into a holiday weekend, we were almost completely alone.
Even in the location, the night sky was amazing. We camped near a boat ramp for fishing off of a gravel road. We decided even though we were outside of the reserve, to stay up and watch the stars come out. If you know us, this was a challenge because we are early to bed and early to rise people!
This was our first attempt at photographing the night sky with our phones. I know so many people take amazing pictures but we were newbies at it so the pictures don’t seem to do it justice. We could see so many stars and tried to recognize constellations. There was no cell signal here, so we couldn’t look them up.
The next day we walked around the reservoir before heading to Stanely. It was a cold 42 degrees when we woke up.
We were excited to move on to Stanley and see some more of the night sky before I had to work. But it turned out, that a fire near Stanely had grown to 12k acres and was threatening the town of Stanley. Midway, we switched our route to Boise to avoid the fire. But traveling east in Southern Idaho, we were met with heat and smoke from California fires. We both agreed that we were glad we stayed up to see the stars when we did. We are going to have to skip the dark sky reserve this time, but seeing the stars in Brundage without all of the light pollution from cities was beautiful.
You should check out SkyMaps! It’s an app we use to identify stars that uses GPS, so you don’t need a signal. It’s not perfect and can be off sometimes, so I always use the sun’s location to check the accuracy (it shows you what’s below the horizon as well!).
Great idea! We had heard people use some apps, but its good to have one that doesn’t need a signal for those kind of areas.