A blackout, dark skies, and stargazing in The Methow

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At 12:36 AM last night, the area where we are staying--Wolf Ridge, a few miles from Winthrop in The Methow Valley--experienced a three hour blackout. It didn't affect anyone much except me. I appeared to be the only person awake. In total darkness, I found the headlamp and went outside to read. Oddly and incongruously in this blackout, my BlackBerry worked fine--both for connecting to the internet and as an auxiliary flashlight. It's weird being in an information vacuum. No local news covered a blackout. Nothing anywhere else. For all I knew it was a ten state blackout.

I spent an hour picking out constellations in the dark skies of the Methow Valley. As it turns out, I can only remember five. The stars were fabulous...bright under a low-moon night. I saw shooting stars and a couple of satellites. And way out here in the serious boondocks, you see the stars, but you also see those fantastic clouds of stars--just the way we see the Milky Way in photographs. [typed in the parking lot of a Kampgrounds of Amerika in Winthrop, where I am hijacking their WiFi.]
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