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| © DW Burnett The best way to make a massive truck feel small? Park it under the rest of everything. |
ON FEBRUARY 14th, 1990, on the fringe of our
solar system, Voyager 1 fixed its camera on Earth. The vessel was
roughly 4 billion miles from home, rocketing away from us at 38,000 mph.
The image it captured, known as Pale Blue Dot, was Voyager’s last. Our
planet is smaller than a quarter of a pixel in the photo, an
insignificant speck. More than 20 years ago, Jerry Seinfeld posted a
copy of the image above his desk, a reminder not to take this whole
disco too seriously (and that, in space, nobody can hear your jokes
bomb).
That humility can be elusive. Life is busy; times are trying. And
with our eyes perpetually locked on various screens, we rarely look up.
Even if we do, it’s hard to see the stars. Light pollution—the
cumulative unnatural glow of buildings, cars, and streetlights—washes
the night sky in a fluorescent din. That means millions of us will grow
old and never see the Milky Way. We should, if only to experience that
same feeling of smallness.
But how? Even rural Americans are
flanked by over-lit towns, and it’s rare to lie under a sky truly devoid
of artificial light. So the International Dark-Sky Association began
logging “dark sites”—places far enough from manufactured light that the
cosmos is as visible as it can be from the ground. A brief glance at the
association’s maps reveals several directives for finding dark sites:
head west, chase the voids between big cities, and bring the right
equipment, because the roads won’t be paved. Something like the 2020 Jeep Gladiator.
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| © DW Burnett Stargazing in America's Darkest Spot |
PHOTOGRAPHER DAVE BURNETT and I loaded up the cab of
our Gladiator just outside Phoenix. It was the first act in a five-hour
odyssey to New Mexico’s Cosmic Campground, one of the best dark sites
in America, deep in the rugged Gila National Forest, nearly 200 miles
southwest of Albuquerque.
The Gladiator is Jeep’s first pickup in
decades. The truck arrived like Beatlemania, to fanboy screams,
unironic joy, and slow-motion TV commercials. But for all the internet
enthusiasm, the Gladiator looks gawky. Jeep stretched the two-door
Wrangler’s wheelbase 21.6 inches to build the four-door Wrangler
Unlimited, then stretched that wheelbase nearly 19 inches to create the
Gladiator. Your brain grapples with the visual length of the thing, and
the Wrangler’s boxy, charming body doesn’t jibe with the changes.
Tacking on a pickup bed skews the look further. The Gladiator is
relatively narrow, too, so it lacks the hulking charm of long, large
four-door pickups like the Ram 1500 or Ford F-150.
Fortunately,
the Jeep’s length delivers civility. At 70 mph, wafting along Arizona’s
glass-flat asphalt, the Gladiator rides more like an S-class than a
Wrangler—in part because its wheelbase is longer than an S450’s. Our
tester arrived in Sport trim with a humming 3.6-liter V-6 engine,
17-inch wheels, and all-season tires. That combination of long legs,
commuter-friendly rubber, and suspension travel conspired to make this
Gladiator an excellent cruiser.
The wind picked up as we
approached the western edge of the Apache National Forest. Great heaves
and gales racked the Jeep as the White Mountains rose before us, their
peaks looming under the dark threat of rain. My mind flashed back to
cross-state drives through the grasslands of central Washington State
when I was a kid. I rode shotgun back then in my mom’s Jeep Cherokee
Sport. The winds whipped across those plains, each gust lurching the old
Jeep halfway across a two-lane road.
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| © DW Burnett Stargazing in America's Darkest Spot |
But there’s no tossing here, even under those heavy winds. The
slab-sided Gladiator may as well be a block of granite. The truck weighs
4651 pounds, and that heft makes it feel solid on the interstate. The
steering chips in, too. A huge dead spot rests at the center of the
wheel. On the arrow-straight highways of east Arizona, lazy steering
inputs kept the Gladiator true, whereas shorter Wranglers would have
required constant fettling. The drive east was effortless.
We
crossed into New Mexico three hours after setting out. As we probed
further, the state revealed a kaleidoscope of terrain: rolling plains
rose to become mountains. Jagged peaks fell into ridges where cacti
stood tall as telephone poles, and then the land gave way to grasslands
like oceans, flat and distant.
A couple of hours later, just
before sundown, we wheeled the Jeep into the parking lot of Los Olmos
Lodge. The hotel sits at the northern end of Glenwood, population 143,
the closest town to the Cosmic Campground and five hours from any major
city.
Kerry and his wife, Carla, run Los Olmos, but if they’re out
when you arrive, cross the road and check the gas station. They run
that, too.
“Don’t know why you came stargazing in monsoon season,”
Kerry chuckled as I signed the receipt for our stay. In America,
“monsoon season” is a seldom-heard phrase in the same vein as “grenade!”
They both spark recognition, followed by panic. Conditions are
unpredictable this time of year, Kerry explained. “If you don’t like the
weather, wait a half hour for it to clear,” he laughed. “Then wait
another half hour and you’ll hate it again.”
He pointed toward a
break in the treetops separating Los Olmos’s property from the mountains
beyond. The peaks were wreathed in soggy clouds. “If you see buzzards
flying in that clearing, it means there’s a thermal column that’ll shove
the clouds out from the area.” I watched for a second, hoping to
conjure a bird. No luck.
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| © DW Burnett Stargazing in America's Darkest Spot |
THE NEXT MORNING we awoke to clear skies. Dave and I
loaded bags and hard cases into the Jeep to scout photo locations. Dave
brought a heaping pile of equipment—a drone, cameras, lenses, lights,
and tripods. The lot wedged neatly in the Gladiator’s back seat, leaving
the truck bed conspicuously empty. I imagined strapping a couple of
mud-flecked dirt bikes back there, but we settled for the Jeep’s roof
instead.
Two T-top panels separate via hand-operated latches. A
tool kit in the center console will unfasten the rear hardtop and doors.
Those tools also unbolt the top of the windshield, allowing the glass
to fold forward on its hinges so driver and passenger can collect bug
splatters in their teeth. We’re chuffed that the Gladiator allows the
melanoma freedom essential to Wrangler identity, but bring a friend if
you want to strip this Jeep past its T-tops; the process is tedious.
We
pointed north, windshield firmly affixed, and left Glenwood in a cloud
of dust, aimed at an observatory 124 miles away in Socorro. The roads
narrowed in the first miles along Highway 180, then coiled. The asphalt
turned lumpy and cracked, and the dead spot in the middle of the
Gladiator’s steering wheel seemed to grow. While the Gladiator thrives
on the interstate, it postures like a lump of Jell-O on curvy back
roads.
It’s workable. You can generate a rhythm with the Jeep,
turning the wheel in a half second early, allowing the Gladiator’s body
to roll and set on the chassis, then throttling through the curve. That
rhythm is good fun, too, so long as the road is flat. But when there’s a
bump midcorner, it’s back to Jell-O mode. The body and chassis rarely
felt copacetic in these tight turns, and at an as-tested price of almost
$50,000, our Jeep was nipping at the heels of a pickup with bona fide
handling chops: the $52,800 Ford Raptor. Cruise control made the
disconnect worse, downshifting and hammering throttle at each incline.
There was a heaving, sinusoidal response for every midcorner
adjustment—a rolling wave that unsettled the truck.
I wrestled
the Jeep through the curves outside Glenwood, then leveled the truck out
on New Mexico’s Highway 60, due east. The Plains of San Agustin
stretched before us, 55 miles of grassland sprouting from an ancient,
dried-up lake bed. The antennas appeared like tiny white buttercups on
the horizon, small parabolas craned skyward on delicate stems. As we
drew closer, each antenna grew larger, then larger still, until the
buttercups had each become three-story giants.
The Very Large Array (VLA) is a collection of 27 antennas that form a
giant radio telescope. They’re spread across the vast plain, arranged
in a Y shape where each leg conga-lines to the horizon. Each dish weighs
230 tons and spans 82 feet—larger than any optical telescope on earth.
Every one of them looks like a huge white fruit bowl perched on a frail
stepladder—not elegant, but so massive and distinct against the barren
landscape that standing in the shadow of one inspires awe.
Each
antenna scoots along a length of railroad track, allowing researchers to
expand or contract the distance between the dishes. At full spread, the
VLA can create a radio telescope spanning 22 miles in diameter. Each
dish is aimed toward the same point of interest, deep in space. They
collect radio waves, data that’s stitched together into wondrous images
of distant curiosities. Black holes turning, galaxies forming, the birth
and death of suns, you name it. The story of our universe plays out
before the Very Large Array.
Construction on the VLA began in
1973, in the fresh afterglow of America’s space mania, at a cost of
$78.6 million to taxpayers. Next to the Apollo or Mercury programs—or
Voyager—the VLA was a drop in the bucket. But by the project’s 1980
completion, America’s lust for space discovery had waned.
Follow
that trend to today. In 1966, NASA’s funding was nearly 4.5 percent of
the federal budget. In 2017, it was less than 0.5 percent. The VLA was
built by the National Science Foundation, another organization hamstrung
by decades of budget cuts. It’s a reminder that science funding still
struggles in America. Under the shade of one of the array’s antennas,
that trend feels like great injustice.
There’s something essential
to humanity in these dishes. It feels like lust, our source code
grasping at things we’ll never hold. Conquering continents, crossing
oceans, probing space we’ve always looked for more. It’s important to
recognize that drive within us and to feed it as often as we can. Or at
least that’s what I was thinking when the first fist of lightning
cracked above us.
It was time to leave. Fast. Monsoon season had
arrived. Grumpy, mile-wide clouds were closing in, dumping rain like
upended hydrants. Dave snapped a few quick photos and we loaded up in a
hurry. Our last glimpses of the array were caught in the rear-view
mirror while I hammered away on the Jeep’s throttle. The downpour
tussled behind our backs, but there were clear skies ahead. We had a
sunset to catch.
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| © DW Burnett Stargazing in America's Darkest Spot |
THE ROAD to the Mogollon (locals pronounce it
moe-go-YONE) ghost town is narrow and curled. It doubles back a hundred
times as it rises, with sheer rock walls lining the inside of each bend
and vertical drop-offs opposite. The speed limit sign at the trailhead
reads “15 mph.” I’d recommend five.
I clawed the Jeep up to our
photo spot: a clearing among the cacti and aloe and brush. A scrape of
steep dirt led down to the pad of rocky, patchy grass. The Gladiator
clambered down to the clearing without trouble. Earlier in the day,
during photo scouting, I’d speared the Jeep off this same road onto a
rugged, unknown trail. The path was paved with shale, rutted and
scarred, and it ran along a ridge to an overlook miles away. Our Jeep
scrabbled upward, pirouetted at the overlook, then pointed back down. I
feathered the brakes the entire descent, palms damp, as the truck’s ABS
groaned. When we reached the bottom, Dave was asleep in the passenger
seat.
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| © DW Burnett Stargazing in America's Darkest Spot |
That moment sprang to mind as the sun set on the Gladiator, the
truck’s white paint softening in the glowing sky. I hadn’t scratched the
surface of the Jeep’s talent with dicey trail runs, even if I’d pushed
boundaries of my own. We love Wranglers because they allow us to reach
for the world’s frayed edges and pull them closer. If you embrace this
truck’s faults, and leverage its capabilities, the Gladiator will take
you almost anywhere you can put your eyes on. Same as any Wrangler.
Back
at the lodge, dinner was pulled-pork tamales from the gas station. If
you’re thirsty in Glenwood, you won’t find a six-pack in town, but rumor
has it that if you tip Los Olmos management well, a few cold Buds may
find their way to your doorstep. After sunset, I tucked into bed and set
my alarm for 1:45 a.m.—the opening of our window for clear, dark skies
at the Cosmic Campground.
We hit the road just after 2:00 a.m.
and aimed the Gladiator north along that nowfamiliar highway. The folks
who run the campground recommend approaching without lights, so we
dimmed ours and crept down the dirt path in silence. That seemed right.
“Make sure you close your eyes for at least three minutes before you
take in the stars,” I told Dave, echoing what Kerry had told me the day
before.
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| © DW Burnett Stargazing in America's Darkest Spot |
Those minutes were among the most peaceful of my life. I smelled sage
and dust. Coyotes yipped and whined in the distance. Cool air filled my
lungs. All in total darkness. My mind wandered to an unexpected place, a
grassy campsite in Montana where I’d first sat under life-affirming
starlight. That was more than 15 years ago, and one of the friends who
was there with me is now gone. Melodramatic, I know, but a reminder that
stillness and silence tend to go missing from our lives as much as
starlight.
Three minutes down. Eyes opened. Absolute wonder. The stars an
explosion above, seemingly infinite. The Milky Way arced from one end of
the horizon to the other in a great ribbon of celestial cotton candy.
Venus, Mercury, Mars, satellites, airplanes, shooting stars—brighter and
more glamorous than the Vegas strip.
In this rare darkness, I was
overcome with the sense that this place—our Earth—is precious. And
quite small. It’s the same feeling that Pale Blue Dot has
always stirred in me. We take this place and the people who share it
with us for granted. It’s out there, if you just go find it. If cosmic
revelation isn’t your jam, just go and find a dark site for the beauty
of it all. And if you’re chasing darkness from the cab of a Jeep with a
pickup bed, well, you could certainly do much worse.
