You might just forget how dark the night can really be until you’re standing in the middle of it. Most of us live in cities steeped in artificial glow: headlights, buildings, streetlights that never sleep. But if you drive out far enough, step into the silence and look up, the sky reminds you just how vast and beautiful the universe truly is. That’s the feeling I chased this summer when I headed north to Jasper National Park, home to Canada’s second-largest Dark Sky Preserve.

Jasper was designated a Dark Sky Preserve by the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada in 2011. At over 11,000 square kilometres, it’s one of the largest in the world. Jasper’s designation isn’t just symbolic. That status comes with strict lighting policies and active efforts to educate the public about the impact of light pollution. The preserve exists not just for the view, but to protect natural darkness as a part of the ecosystem itself. Here, the night sky is protected, allowing the stars to shine the way they were meant to.

Driving into Jasper, still feeling the aftershock of the 2024 wildfires, I saw majestic mountains cloaked in charred trees, silent sentinels marking both devastation and resilience. The scars were fresh, but Jasper’s spirit remained unbroken. After settling in, I had dinner – Alberta elk, appropriately – and waited for the light to fade. As twilight set in, the jagged peaks softened into shadow. The last orange streaks disappeared, and one by one, stars began to puncture the darkening sky. I drove about fifteen minutes out of town, parked and waited.

True darkness arrives gradually. Your eyes adjust, the sky deepens. Starry pinpricks multiply until the heavens feel less like a ceiling and more like an infinite ocean. On a truly cloudless and pitch black night, the Milky Way stretches across the heavens in full clarity and it’s possible to spot deep-sky objects like the Andromeda Galaxy or the Hercules Cluster with the naked eye. But I didn’t want to drive out even farther away from the town in the pitch dark of the night.

Even my iPhone, eager as I was to capture the moment, couldn’t do it justice. Some stars burned cold and sharp, others soft and fuzzy. Depth made visible in a way no camera sensor could replicate. Long exposures flattened the sky, exaggerated some lights, erased others. The constellations lost their context, the vastness collapsed into a screen-sized box. Eventually, after taking some pictures, I put it away. Its glow was robbing the moment of its silence, pulling me out of the stillness I had driven all this way to find.

Without the screen, I could hear everything: the hush of trees, the distant rush of water, the cold nudging me awake rather than pushing me away. At night, Jasper doesn’t go quiet, it just shifts. Elk and deer move more freely without human interruption. Owls take over the treetops and you might hear the eerie yip of a coyote in the distance. Even black bears have been known to forage under cover of darkness. In true dark sky areas, animals behave more naturally, without the stress of artificial light throwing off their internal clocks or patterns. But I stayed mostly in my car, lest a bear or coyote surprise me in the middle of my stargazing.

By the time I packed up, the eastern sky was starting to pale. Driving back into town in that liminal glow, I felt both spent and recharged. It was about showing up, for the stars and for the reminder that above all the noise of modern life, a universe still waits, still shines. That’s the magic of a clear unpolluted dark night in Jasper.