This year at Mountainfilm, the town of Telluride will be the first in the world to try a crazy little experiment. It’s a small idea, but on the scale of a municipality it becomes kind of a big idea. During the late night hours of the festival weekend, we’re going to turn off as many lights as we can — street lights, porch lights, business lights — all so we can simply look up and enjoy the stars. 

What will it mean for a city to go dark intentionally? What will people feel stepping out on Colorado Avenue to see the Milky Way over houses with no porch lights? What will the valley look like with no lights on? We don’t know, but we’re curious as hell to find out.

Once it’s said aloud, the idea really doesn’t seem like such a big deal. “Yeah, let’s just… turn off the lights!” But, turns out, it’s tricky in our modern world to find all the switches and permissions. Centuries of effort have designed brilliant and entrenched systems to carry the light of day into the hours of night. Our streets are wonderfully lit; our porches have no shadows; and we drive with vehicles equipped to literally let us see in the dark at 70 mph. We have conquered the night.

In that zeal, however, we’ve lost sight of a precious light that’s inspired us since the first human lifted his or her head skyward in the dark — the stars. This infinite field of twinkling lights — representing planets, suns, galaxies, nebula, endless potential and possibility — has guided us on journeys of the internal and external since our first stories and recordings of time. So what have we lost if we’ve unintentionally blocked that view during the last 50 years, over merely two generations?

In the 1990s, a power outage in L.A. dropped the city into darkness. The police received numerous calls from worried people talking about a strange cloud hanging overhead. It was the Milky Way. Rather than inspiration, this glowing cloud was a sudden, foreign invasion in the sky. People were actually afraid.

This small experiment at Mountainfilm becomes a big deal because it stands for much more than only turning off a few light switches. This simple action says we are no longer afraid of the dark. We control our technology; it does not control us. We excitedly pause time and rather than step into the past, we test steps into a future where the stars can be seen once again.

Consider joining us late Saturday night when Telluride becomes the first city in the world to intentionally turn the lights off to enjoy a view of the stars. Between 3 and 4 a.m. that night (officially Sunday morning), I’ll be on Colorado Avenue in front of San Miguel County Courthouse, and I invite all fellow photographers (and others) to join me for this one-of-a-kind opportunity to shoot Telluride during this rare moment of darkness.

Until then, find out more information about efforts to control light pollution through the International Dark Sky Association, or for some pretty pictures of the stars please check out my night photography online.

—Ben Canales