Aurora season opens, and the county's dark-sky pullouts draw their first full night
A coronal mass ejection pushed the borealis far enough south to watch from a downtown parking lot. The county built four places to see it properly.
The first serious geomagnetic storm of the season arrived Monday night, and by 11 p.m. the county's four dark-sky pullouts — gravelled, signed, and until this week mostly theoretical — held more vehicles than the arena on a Friday.
The pullouts were a line item almost nobody argued about two budgets ago: a few loads of gravel, a fence, and signage on roads the county already maintained, at spots far enough from town that the sky goes properly black. The bet was that people who already park on approaches to watch the lights might as well do it somewhere with sightlines and no traffic.
Monday suggested the bet lands. The northern curtain was visible from town — parking-lot visible, phone-camera visible — but the crowd drove out anyway, because ten minutes of highway is the difference between seeing the aurora and standing inside it. "In town you watch it," said one photographer set up along the fence line, who has chased the lights across three winters. "Out here it comes down around you."
The forecast gives the storm two more nights, strongest between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. The county asks watchers to park inside the fence, keep headlights down on arrival, and pack out what they bring — the pullouts have no bins, on purpose, and so far, no litter either.
