Cherry Springs

This is the field the whole note is about — a small clearing of mowed grass and open sky, high on the plateau, with the state forest closing in dark on every side. By day it is unremarkable: a parking area, a few signs, black cherry woods at the edges. Its value arrives after sunset, when the last headlights leave and the sky above the opening turns as deep as it gets on this side of the country. Give your eyes a full half-hour in the dark to open up, and keep any light dim and red — a single white phone screen resets everyone’s night vision, including your own. Then simply look up. Stars you never see from a town appear in the gaps between the bright ones, until the sky feels crowded. There is nothing to buy and nothing to climb here. The whole experience is standing still in the open and letting the dark do its slow work on your eyes.

Stand in the same clearing and you are standing on old airfield ground. From 1935 to 2007 this spot was Cherry Springs Airport, a Depression-era emergency landing field for small planes, carved from the surrounding Susquehannock State Forest. It saw light traffic for decades. In 2006 the land passed from aviation to astronomy: the state park absorbed the old airfield to give stargazers the flat, open, light-free ground they needed, and the runway closed for good the year after. Nothing marks the change today but the openness itself — the same flatness that once let small planes land now lets the whole sky in.

The park is a small opening; the forest around it is the real expanse, and the park was carved out of it. Unbroken woods run for miles in every direction, with few roads and fewer towns, and that emptiness is exactly what keeps the sky overhead dark — darkness above needs darkness on the ground for a long way out. By day the forest is worth entering on its own terms. It has a northern feel: a floor of clubmoss and, in season, the nodding white of painted trillium, and birdsong from a cooler kind of woods than you find down in the valleys. Walk a short way in from a pull-off and the trees close over the road behind you. The same quiet that lets this forest grow unbroken is what leaves the field at its center one of the darkest places to stand after nightfall on this side of the country.

A long backpacking loop threads the country around the park — the oldest such trail in the state, running some eighty miles through the surrounding forest and passing near several parks along the way. You need not walk the whole thing; a stretch near Cherry Springs makes an easy day sample. What the trail lets you feel on foot is the one quality that makes the night sky here what it is: roadlessness. The loop crosses some of the least-broken country in the state, including a large wild area with no roads at all, and it is known for its solitude and its long stretches with no sign of people. By day that means quiet walking; by night, back at the field, that same absence of roads and towns is why no glow rises anywhere on the horizon. The full loop is a multi-day trip with shelters along the way, but a short out-and-back is plenty to take the point.

For a change of element, drop off the plateau to running water. The creek here is a small one, gathering in the valleys below the high flat ground where the dark-sky field sits. That height is quietly part of the story overhead. On still nights, haze and the glow of distant towns tend to pool in low valleys like this one, while the plateau rides clear above them; up top you are looking at the sky from above the murk, not through it. By day the creek is simply a pleasant place along the road — moving water, streamside woods, a lower and gentler world than the exposed plateau. It makes a good midday counterpart to a night spent up top, and standing beside it you can look up at the wooded rim and see, in daylight, the high ground you will return to after dark.