Camp where the sky is still dark.
Every located campground in this atlas carries a night-sky rating: the 2024 VIIRS night-lights composite, read through the National Park Service’s own sky-glow model. 3,194 of the 7,456 rated campgrounds sit under a Bortle 1 or 2 sky, the two darkest classes on the scale, and 58 sit under a Bortle 6 or worse. Here’s the whole ladder, what the number is, and what it isn’t.
Why the dark is on public land
measured Oct 12, 20263,194 of 7,456 rated campgrounds, and 5,106 are Bortle 3 or darker. The reason isn’t policy, it’s geography the agencies inherited: the federal estate is concentrated where almost nobody lives, and the light-pollution model can only see what’s lit.
4 reach Bortle 8, all of them inside a city, and not one campground in this inventory is Bortle 9. The bright end of a federal campground map is a short list, and it’s worth knowing which end of it you’re booking.
The darkest is South Steens Campground in Steens Mountain Cooperative Management And Protection Area, Oregon. BLM ground, wildlife refuges and river campgrounds hold most of the top of this list. The famous parks are on it, further down, with a lodge and a parking lot lit beside them.
The Bortle scale, end to end
and what this atlas holds in each classA class isn’t a forecast. It’s the modelled artificial glow over that coordinate in 2024, on a 500 m grid, and on any given night the moon, the cloud and the season will each move what you can see more than the difference between two classes. It also knows nothing about the ridge west of camp. What it’s good for is choosing between places before you go.
The darkest in Iowa
0 of 32 under a Bortle 1-2 skyIowa has 32 rated federal campgrounds. 0 of them (0%) are Bortle 1 or 2 and 0 are Bortle 3 or darker. The darkest is Bridgeview (Rathbun Lake), at 0.28 mcd/m².
The ten darkest you can drive to
the lower 48Alaska holds the ten darkest campgrounds in the country and most of them are cabins reached by float plane, so this list is cut to the lower 48. It’s the one a reader in Denver or Dallas can use.
And the ten darkest anywhere
Every one of them is in Alaska, and that’s not a quirk of the model: it’s what a map of American electric light looks like. They’re kept here rather than in the ranking above so that nothing is hidden by the cut.
Where the dark is
0 Bortle 1-2 campgrounds in IowaOnly campgrounds rated Bortle 1 or 2 are drawn. Pin colour is the site’s own: campfire for first-come, pine for reservable, lake blue for mixed. Hover a pin for the record, click it for the page.
Pick a state
darker where more campgrounds are Bortle 1 or 2Every state with a rated campground
51 of 51The figure is the number of that state’s rated federal campgrounds under a Bortle 1 or 2 sky. Oregon leads on count with 490 of 770. A state missing from this list holds no rated federal campground at all.