National Geographic Magazine named Natural Bridges National Monument in southeastern Utah among the best places in the world to view the night sky. There are only Sixty four miles of good road between Natural Bridges and Bluff, Utah.
Its website notes Bluff was founded in AD 650, settled in 1880 and incorporated in 2018. Locals say their town was founded in 650 AD, the year the Ancestral Puebloans first built cliff dwellings in these sandstone walled canyons casting their eyes to the mirific night skies.
Settled in 1880, when Mormon Pioneers of the “Hole in the Rock Expedition” scrambled up San Juan Hill overlooking this bend in the San Juan River and decided this was the place Brigham Young had sent them. Thereafter, the towering night skies looked down on them as they gathered for evening Church services or dances; prayed and slept.
Prior to incorporation, Bluff’s government was at the County-level whose offices are in Monticello, UT with day-to-day affairs handled through Bluff Services Administration. After incorporation in 2018, local government is Bluff residents and made up of mostly new settlers, not related to the relatives of the original pioneers. New settlers are drawn to the rural life, quiet evenings and the nights lit only by the majesty of the Milky Way.
In the Bluff town council meeting we attended via Google Meet the issues were universal: local versus remote governance. In Bluff’s case, the remote government is located in SLC where the Utah legislature convenes and among the bills causing heartburn to the residents of Bluff is SB0061 which takes decisions on billboards from local communities allowing billboard companies and advertisers to decorate the viewscape with lighted messages from the highest bidder and the local residents have no say over where billboards can be placed, and even if not wanted.
The locals, living and those who have gone before, who value the awe of their dark night skies are not enthusiastic over billboards in Bluff.
