As the sun steadily sets below Black Mesa's towering rocky hills, Cassidy Harris stretches out on a park bench, looking up.
The sky is fading into dark blue as the first of many celestial objects appears into view. She and a friend drove six hours from Yukon, where it's harder to see the stars.
"Growing up, the most I could count in the sky was probably like 6 or 7," Harris said. "I just never seen the Milky Way or anything more than that. And I was just like, I think I'm going to be blown away."
She and dozens of other park goers visited Black Mesa earlier this month to celebrate the park's recent designation as an International Dark Sky Park — the first in Oklahoma. Since turning off the lights at night, the park has seen the benefits for wildlife and drawing more visitors eager to see its star-speckled sky.
The area's designation, Harris said, will let more people know what the park has to offer.
"It's really good that people get to see the stars like this in their full beauty," Harris said. "I think it's really important that at least once in a lifetime, you get to see it like that."
It's dark out there
Across rolling fields dappled with yucca plants and prickly pears, Black Mesa State Park and Nature Preserve sits in a hollow between red hills and rocks.
"It's dangling out on the end of the Panhandle," said Park Director Polly Kiker. "As far out as we are, you need something special to drive people here."
The park's isolation is also one of its biggest assets. With expanses of scrubby rangeland and very few people, No Man's Land is dark. But the park itself hasn't always been.
"When you drove in at night, it would be super dark, and you'd come over the hill, and there was an island of light at the park because of all the streetlights," Kiker said. "And so many guests would come out and ask us, 'Why do we have the street lights?'"
Kiker worked to get the streetlights turned off, and outdoor lighting at the park has been replaced with red bulbs jacketed so they only cast light downward. Red light does not travel as far or disrupt night vision in the same way as other colors.
Now it's super dark.
So much so, it received the International Dark Sky Park designation at the end of 2025.
"We actually were pretty much at the Dark Sky level for about five years before getting the designation," Kiker said. "But the important thing with the designation is that it means that when people look on their website, it certifies that we are, in fact, as dark as we say."
The designation comes from a non-profit organization called DarkSky International, which advocates for minimizing light pollution and preserving the world's remaining dark places.
The organization has recognized around 300 Dark Sky Places in 22 countries. Those include parks, reserves and even urban areas with good stargazing conditions.
Amber Harrison manages the International Dark Sky Places program. She said Kiker started working with DarkSky International on Black Mesa's certification back in 2022.
"They collaborated with some astronomy groups and some other local partners to bring more awareness and to develop programming," Harrison said. "They did quite a bit of infrastructure improvements on site so that they could offer visitors a nice place to stargaze and experience the night sky."
Since the recognition, the park's visitation has been increasing, with more people bearing telescopes. People have traveled from overseas or driven more than 1,000 miles to see Black Mesa's skyscape.
Harrison said DarkSky International requires its designated parks to have a plan in place so that an influx of visitors doesn't mean an influx of light.
"The idea is that those sort of regulations are built in now to the management of the site," Harrison said. "So there might be more draw for more visitors, but hopefully there are some mechanisms in place to help educate those visitors, give them the tools and the knowledge and education to understand how to behave in that situation."
Harrison said dark places are good for wildlife as well.
Kiker has seen that in action at Black Mesa. A group of wild turkeys has moved into a stand of trees near the park's darkened community center. As they settle into their roosts after a day spent strutting around campsites, their gobbles carry throughout the park.
And insects don't congregate around streetlights anymore. They used to attract hungry toads.
"The toads would be sitting in the roads, and we would find squished toads in the morning, which would make me terribly sad," Kiker said. "When we removed those lights, the toads didn't sit under the lights trying to catch the bugs anymore. And so it's reduced the number of toad kills on the road at night, which makes me extremely happy."
Although Black Mesa is the state's first site to earn a designation from DarkSky International, Harrison said it's paved the way for more in the future.
"The idea is that one site will get it and then others will also continue to do it," Harrison said. "What that does is it brings attention to Black Mesa and the people who are local and support that and will get excited by that."
No Man's Land's storied night sky
Black Mesa is where the Rocky Mountains reach the shortgrass prairie. It's a place known for wildlife, natural beauty and connection to the Wild West.
Black Mesa Park Ranger Leon Apple is a rancher whose family has been running cows in the Panhandle since 1886. On the final night of the parks' Dark Sky celebration this month, campers and astronomy enthusiasts gathered around a campfire to hear Apple's cowboy tales.
"I'm the Lone Ranger of No Man's Land. That's what they call me out here," Apple said. "Because in the panhandle of Oklahoma, I am the only park ranger. This story goes back to the 1800s."
Although bands of Comanche people lived in the area, it was not part of any state or territory for much of the nineteenth century, earning it the name No Man's Land.
For wagon trains traveling the Santa Fe Trail, Black Mesa's stars offered more than something dazzling for weekend warriors to gaze at.
"At night, they would circle their wagons, and the front wagon — the lead wagon would always find the North Star and point the wagon tongue towards the North Star," Apple said. "So in the morning when they got up and started out, they knew which way was north, and which way was west and east."
This same star-blanketed sky is the same one parkgoers roll out of sleeping bags to admire today.
The park isn't ever fully asleep. In the dark early morning hours, campers may encounter determined astrophotographers and astronomers along the trails.
One of them is Elieen Grzybowski, who was pointing a green laser up at the night sky.
"I look like Luke Skywalker," she said.
In mid-April, the Milky Way wasn't visible overhead until 3 a.m. So that's when Grzybowski was up, circling constellations with her laser pointer and telling their stories.
"This is Queen Cassiopeia, and Cassiopeia is very special," she said, circling the constellation with a laser. "She was the queen of Ethiopia. She was considered the most beautiful woman in the world."
Grzybowski has been interested in astronomy since her childhood, and that interest has brought her to Black Mesa for more than five decades. As a public school teacher, she hauled students to the area for the annual Okie-Tex Star Party.
"One night they were looking, they said, 'Mrs. G, you said it was going to be dark here. Where's all this light coming from?'" she said. "And I pointed up to the Milky Way and said, 'Welcome to starlight. You're being bathed in starlight.' And they couldn't believe it."
Grzybowski has since retired and is now program director at the OKC Astronomy Club. She helped get the area its International Dark Sky Park designation, which was one of her post-retirement goals.
"I want to see this area protected, and this is one way to do it," she said.
Abigail Siatkowski contributed to this report.
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