A Sky Within Reach
By Jim Colbert
When people of European descent first began traveling and settling in Iowa, they encountered a landscape no one alive today has ever seen. Nearly thirty million acres of tallgrass prairie blanketed the state—rich in plant diversity and home to large mammals such as bison, elk, mountain lions, and gray wolves. That Iowa is gone.
On clear nights, early settlers—and the Indigenous peoples who were here long before them—looked up at a sky crowded with stars, so bright it felt within reach. The Milky Way stretched overhead like a pale fog of light. In much of Iowa today, light pollution has taken that sky from us as well.
Even in towns and cities, some stars and planets remain visible on clear nights, but mostly those bright enough to outshine streetlights and commercial signage. The Milky Way is often invisible. To see the night sky as our ancestors knew it requires leaving town, and even then, points of human-made light intrude—headlights on a distant highway, a porch light across a lake. Still, there is a place within a day’s drive of Iowa where thousands of stars burn clearly and the Milky Way is unmistakable: the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA) of northern Minnesota.
Snowshoe tracks on a Boundary Waters lake (JT Colbert)
I’ve been fortunate to visit the BWCA many times, in every season, but the best stargazing comes in deep winter—when the sun sets by 4:30 p.m. One evening on a winter trip, the air was calm and the temperature hovered around twenty below. After dinner, my son and I snowshoed out onto the lake and looked up. Stunning. No moon. Stars blazing across a cloudless sky, the Milky Way splitting the darkness. The sight—and the cold—took our breath away. We soon retreated to camp, where firelight and warmth obscured most of those distant, nuclear fires.
Sadly, there are ongoing efforts to open a copper mine in the headwaters that flow into the BWCA. If developed, portions of the watershed could become polluted and acidified, with consequences for wildlife and for the people who come to experience this place. Fewer visitors would mean fewer witnesses to a night sky that, for now, can still be seen in its full clarity. You can support protection efforts through organizations like Friends of the Boundary Waters.
While a wilderness sky will always be exceptional, it would be good to reclaim more of that visibility at home. Reducing light pollution in Iowa could restore at least a measure of what we’ve lost, even if the vast prairie—and its unbroken night—are gone.
Jim Colbert grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where he spent much of his time in and along Prairie Creek and the Cedar River. He earned a degree in Biology from Iowa State University in 1978, followed by an M.S. and Ph.D. in Botany from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Jim started his faculty career in 1985 at Colorado State University and returned to Ames in 1988 to join the faculty at Iowa State University. Jim’s research focused on plant and fungal biology. For 15 of his 33 years at Iowa State, he served as the director of the Undergraduate Biology Program. During that time, Jim led the “Skunk River Navy,” an educational stream cleanup initiative that engaged students in hands-on conservation. Jim is an outdoors guy who, at various times, has enjoyed hiking, canoeing, wilderness camping, rock climbing (not anymore!), winter camping, bird watching, moss and lichen watching, fishing, and hunting. He occasionally shares his thoughts about the natural world on Substack (substack.com/@jimcolbert).