Plenty of people questioned my decision last year to fly from New York City to Salt Lake City, then to Boise, and then drive nearly three hours to Sun Valley, Idaho, all for “some stars.” But at 2 a.m., sitting on the hood of my rental car a few miles into Sawtooth National Forest, I felt like I could see the entire breadth and depth of the Milky Way. My contacts were drying out, as I couldn’t bear to close my eye for risk of missing one of the scores of meteors crossing the sky during August’s annual Perseid meteor shower. These weren’t just “some stars,” these were all of the stars (at least in the northern hemisphere).

I hadn’t picked rural Idaho out of a hat: In late 2017, the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) named a 1,416-square-mile area in Central Idaho an official dark sky reserve. Founded in 1988, the IDA protects nighttime by fighting to keep the dark sky, well, dark. It created a sliding scale of awards, which acknowledge swaths of private and public land based on their level of legal protection and size. Now, 22 dark sky communities and more than 70 dark sky parks exist around the world—along with 10 dark sky sanctuaries, places so remote that they’re dark by proxy (like the Pitcairn Islands). The toughest designation of all is the dark sky reserve, which is reserved only for places that offer “exceptional or distinguished quality of starry nights and nocturnal environment that is specifically protected” because of its stars, the IDA reports.

Why does something like the IDA even need to exist? Nearly 99 percent of United States residents can no longer see the Milky Way because of light pollution, according to a 2016 study.

In part, the creation of the U.S. only dark sky reserve in Idaho is thanks to Dr. Stephen Pauley, an astronomy evangelist and retired ENT doctor who moved to Idaho from Southern California in the early 1990s. He learned to love the stars when he, his wife, and two kids used celestial navigation to sail from California to Hawaii—and Pauley knew when he saw Idaho’s equally stunning sky that he had to protect it.

“We got here and I noticed that light pollution was creeping in,” he says over breakfast at Sun Valley Resort. “Having sailed the Pacific and seen that beautiful night sky, I realized we really need to protect what we had here. With this many stars, even finding constellations is hard. They just melt into the Milky Way. And that’s a good problem to have.”

And so, Pauley worked as a volunteer for decades to convince local government and landowners to not only protect the sky they had, but to improve it. Ordinances across the Sawtooth National Forest and Recreation Area now limit new light sources and development, and towns in surrounding areas now have limits on types of lights and when certain areas should be lit.