Megan Finnerty

The Republic | azcentral.com

"It's more than just a bunch of pretty stars; it's where we live," photographer Jim Richardson.

Laura Williams' job is funded through the end of the year.

"And what is coming of age but realizing that you're not the center of the universe?" Grand Canyon National Park ranger Laura Williams.

It didn't look like she was saving the universe.

It was a Friday afternoon in June, and Laura Williams was at work. She withdrew a Panasonic Toughpad, a clipboard and a blue plastic spectrometer from her backpack and walked up to a light pole on the South Rim of Grand Canyon National Park.

She jotted notes about a fixture so bright it was annoying campers at Indian Gardens, nearly 5 miles away down the Canyon. The reflector-filled light glared atop a 20-foot pole in front of the historic Buckey O'Neill cabin.

"It's a pathway light," Williams said. "But it's overlighting the space if we can see it all the way down into a wilderness area."

Laura Williams, 45, is the park's night-skies inventory coordinator. She is creating a system for cataloging and assessing lighting. Williams does this to protect views of the galaxy from the kind of light pollution that keeps more than 80 percent of Americans from being able to see the Milky Way.

Because few of us will travel in space, protecting our view is tantamount to protecting the stars themselves.

"Our focus is ever more inward and on our phones and our Facebook," said Nathan Ament, the National Park Service's Colorado Plateau Dark Sky Cooperative coordinator. "And having access to dark skies gives us a greater connecting to something larger than ourselves."

Williams has created a 30-page system that details the best practices for recording 17 key pieces of information — a light's bulb type, purpose and glare potential — so that unnecessary fixtures are taken down and too-bright bulbs are replaced with dimmer ones.

She has cataloged 700 lights on the North Rim and is working with volunteers to take notes on the thousands on the South Rim.

When she is done, Williams' model will roll out across the national park system, affecting how Americans experience their parks for decades.

The increased darkness will mean visitors can better see the celestial bodies that make up our universe and have an easier time considering their places in it.

The problem is, she is funded only through January.

Though vital to what the national park system calls "astrotourism," or nighttime tourism, the work was funded for only one year, with money from the Grand Canyon Association.

For Williams' work to continue, the national park would have to allocate funding. The Grand Canyon Association has not raised additional funds for the project. E-mails and calls to the superintendent's office were not returned.

Williams grew up in Rochester, N.Y., and remembers the first time she saw the Milky Way. She was in the third grade, on a family camping trip.

"Most of us don't have jobs where we can see the Milky Way," said Williams, who used to be a photographer in New York City. "People are always talking about how cosmopolitan cities are, but only in the ways of society. I mean, how limiting is it intellectually if you're cut off from the galaxy?

"And what is coming of age but realizing that you're not the center of the universe?"

Williams has a humanities degree and thinks about these things as she walks the park. But it was her experience as a photographer that made her ideal for a job where it's important to know how to measure and use lighting as a tool.

"I was just ready for a change and was looking for a place with a totally different energy," Williams said. "There were 10 stars in New York City, and I knew their names. I felt that thing that is missing when you can't see the universe."

Her work is repetitive, logging the same types of data, fixture after fixture. But Williams, whose desk is decorated with an Arizona license plate reading STRCH1D, sees herself not only as a star child, but as a fighter against light pollution.

For 15 years, the National Park Service has been educating visitors about the perils of light pollution. Today, they advertise the idea that they are 24-hour destinations with gift-shop posters depicting a moonlit nightscape: "Half the park is after dark."

At dark Western parks such as Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah, evening programs have double the attendance of daytime ones.

"We studied after-dark visitors, and they had a substantial economic impact on that (adjacent) community," Ament said. "They're typically people who are going to eat dinner in a local restaurant and use lodging because they're nearby."

At the Grand Canyon, Williams has already had a small victory. At the Desert View Watchtower on the park's eastern edge, first-floor gift-shop lights glared out of picture windows so brightly that river runners on the Colorado River could see them, even late at night. They resented the intrusion of man-made light on their rafting trips. So, Williams talked to the manager, who agreed to put the lights on a timer.

And with that, a little wildness was restored to the wilderness.

By the end of December, Williams will have completed the park's lighting inventory and will have drafted new guidelines. If she has time, she plans to roll out a pilot program testing new fixtures and bulbs throughout the park.

But if it isn't funded, the project will be put on hold indefinitely. Williams jokes that she has a Plan B, C, D, E and F.

"There's a lot of things I can do, but I'd rather do this," she said. "It's a project that I'd like to see through to it's completion."

If the park can find the funding to keep Williams working, she will prepare and submit an application to have the Canyon named a Dark Sky Park, use her lighting inventory to prepare light-retrofit costs and savings estimates and eventually change the lighting at the park. She expects the project would wrap in 2016 or so.

When photographer Jim Richardson was trying to show the problem of light pollution for the 2008 National Geographic story "Vanishing Night," he visited several national and state parks to find dark spaces.

"We live in the middle of this galaxy, and we've known that. But until you see it, you don't really think about it," Richardson said. "Cameras really reveal that, and that's changed our perception not just of photography but of our world.

"It's more than just a bunch of pretty stars; it's where we live."

Coming Sunday

In 10 years, America may have only three dark places left where astronomers can probe the edges of the universe and scientists can conduct nocturnal wildlife research.

ON THE BEAT

Megan Finnerty is a reporter on the Page One team. She is the founder and host of the Arizona Storytellers Project. She loves the Grand Canyon. She has been with The Republic since 2002.

How to reach her

megan.finnerty@arizonarepublic.com

Phone:602-444-8770

Twitter:@MeganMFinnerty