Every Certified Dark Sky Place In Utah: The Complete List
All 28 of Utah's certified International Dark Sky Places, by type and designation year, plus the two errors in the official state lists, and what Gold-tier means.
Morgan Kotter · August 6, 2026 · 13 min read
Utah has 28 certified International Dark Sky Places, 22 parks, monuments and protected areas plus 6 certified communities, the highest concentration of any place in the world. All five of its national parks are certified. The single most under-reported fact in that list: when Torrey was certified in January 2018, it became not just Utah's first Dark Sky Community but the first national park gateway community in the United States to earn the designation, sitting directly alongside Capitol Reef National Park's Gold-tier certification from 2015.
We compiled this list in August 2026 because no single accurate version of it exists. The state's own sources disagree with each other, and both carry errors: one lists a park that was decertified three years ago, and the other reports a lesser designation category as though it were a full park. Details and corrections below.
The Full List
Certified places in Utah: 28
National parks certified: 5 of 5
Certified communities: 6
Concentration, worldwide: #1
Utah's certified places by designation type
Dark Sky Park: 19 places
Dark Sky Community: 6 places ← incl. Torrey
Urban Night Sky Place: 2 places
Dark Sky Sanctuary: 1 place
28 total, compiled August 2026. The Park count includes national parks, national monuments, state parks and one county park. Urban Night Sky Place is a distinct and lesser category; Snow Canyon and Timpanogos Cave hold it, and both are routinely miscounted as full Dark Sky Parks.
National Parks And Monuments
Capitol Reef National Park
Designation: Dark Sky Park (Gold tier)
Year: 2015
Arches National Park
Designation: Dark Sky Park
Year: -
Bryce Canyon National Park
Designation: Dark Sky Park
Year: -
Canyonlands National Park
Designation: Dark Sky Park
Year: -
Zion National Park
Designation: Dark Sky Park
Year: -
Cedar Breaks National Monument
Designation: Dark Sky Park
Year: -
Dinosaur National Monument
Designation: Dark Sky Park
Year: -
Hovenweep National Monument
Designation: Dark Sky Park
Year: -
Natural Bridges National Monument
Designation: Dark Sky Park
Year: -
Rainbow Bridge National Monument
Designation: Dark Sky Sanctuary
Year: -
Timpanogos Cave National Monument
Designation: Urban Night Sky Place
Year: -
State And County Parks
Dead Horse Point State Park
Designation: Dark Sky Park
Year: 2016
Goblin Valley State Park
Designation: Dark Sky Park (Gold tier)
Year: 2016
Antelope Island State Park
Designation: Dark Sky Park
Year: 2017
Steinaker State Park
Designation: Dark Sky Park
Year: 2018
East Canyon State Park
Designation: Dark Sky Park
Year: 2020
Fremont Indian State Park
Designation: Dark Sky Park
Year: 2021
Goosenecks State Park
Designation: Dark Sky Park
Year: 2021
Jordanelle State Park
Designation: Dark Sky Park
Year: 2021
Rockport State Park
Designation: Dark Sky Park
Year: 2021
Snow Canyon State Park
Designation: Urban Night Sky Place
Year: 2025
North Fork Park (Weber County)
Designation: Dark Sky Park
Year: -
Certified Communities
Torrey
Designation: Dark Sky Community, Utah's first
Year: 2018
Helper
Designation: Dark Sky Community
Year: -
Springdale
Designation: Dark Sky Community
Year: -
Castle Valley
Designation: Dark Sky Community
Year: 2024
Moab
Designation: Dark Sky Community
Year: 2024
Bluff
Designation: Dark Sky Community
Year: 2025
Years are shown where a primary source confirmed them. A dash means the place is certified but we could not verify the year to the standard of the rest of this table, not that the year is unknown to anyone, only that we did not confirm it.
The Gateway Community Finding
This is the part that gets lost in every roundup.
In January 2018 Torrey became Utah's first International Dark Sky Community, and the eighteenth in the world. More significantly, it was the first national park gateway community in the United States to earn the designation.
“A certified Gold-tier Dark Sky Park, and the first certified gateway community in the country, sharing a boundary. The protection does not stop where the park does.”
That matters practically rather than ceremonially. A dark sky park surrounded by an uncontrolled town gives you a protected sky you have to drive into and a degraded sky where you sleep. Capitol Reef was certified Gold tier in 2015; Torrey adopted and enforced the lighting ordinance that certified it three years later. The result is continuous protection across the boundary, which is the condition that actually determines what you can see from a bed rather than from a trailhead at 2am.
Of Utah's six certified communities, Springdale (Zion) and Moab (Arches and Canyonlands) are also gateway towns. Torrey was first.
Where The Official Lists Are Wrong
Compiling this surfaced two errors in sources people reasonably treat as authoritative.
1. Kodachrome Basin State Park is still listed, and it should not be. It was certified in January 2021 and decertified in August 2023 at the request of park staff. The Utah State Parks dark sky page still lists it among its certified parks. Visit Utah's list correctly omits it, which is precisely why the two sources produce different totals.
2. Snow Canyon State Park is an Urban Night Sky Place, not a Dark Sky Park. It was designated in December 2025, and the category is a distinct and lesser one; it recognises a site near significant light pollution that still offers an exceptional nighttime experience. Coverage widely reported it as a new dark sky park. The same distinction applies to Timpanogos Cave National Monument.
The count reconciles cleanly once you account for the first error: 22 parks and protected areas plus 6 communities is 28, and that figure already excludes Kodachrome Basin. Including it, as the state parks page implies, would give 29.
What The Four Designations Mean
The categories are not interchangeable, and the difference is routinely flattened in travel writing.
Dark Sky Park
Protected public land certified for the quality of its night sky and for how it manages its own lighting. The most common designation in Utah.
Dark Sky Community
An incorporated town or city that has adopted and enforces a lighting ordinance. This is the one that requires ongoing political will, not just land management.
Dark Sky Sanctuary
A remote site with exceptionally dark skies and a fragile protection status. Rainbow Bridge National Monument is Utah's.
Urban Night Sky Place
A site near significant light pollution that still maintains an exceptional nighttime experience. Snow Canyon and Timpanogos Cave hold this designation, not full park status.
What Gold-Tier Meant
Some Utah parks carry a Gold tier distinction. Tier ratings described the measured quality of the night sky at the park at the time of certification, with Gold the darkest category.
Two Utah places are documented at Gold tier in the sources we checked: Capitol Reef National Park (2015) and Goblin Valley State Park (2016).
Tier language appears less in recent designations than it did a decade ago, so treat it as a historical marker of how dark a place measured when it was certified rather than a current, continuously verified rating.
How This Was Compiled
Assembled in August 2026 by cross-checking three sources against each other:
Visit Utah's dark sky places listing, the state tourism office
Utah State Parks' Dark Sky Initiative page, for state park designations and years
DarkSky International designation announcements, for individual certifications, tiers and decertifications
Where sources conflicted, we went to the announcement for the individual place. Where we could not confirm a designation year to that standard, the table shows a dash rather than a guess.
DarkSky International's own place directory blocks automated access, so this compilation is drawn from published announcements and the two state-level lists rather than scraped from the registry. Anyone needing a certified-as-of-today answer should go to DarkSky International directly.
What Has Actually Been Measured At Capitol Reef
Certification is a record. Measurement is a different thing, and for Capitol Reef some of it exists.
The NPS Natural Sounds and Night Skies Division, working with Capitol Reef National Park staff, collected night sky data at 14 locations throughout the park for a Natural Resource Condition Assessment published in 2022. The assessment used four night sky indicators across seven measures, including luminance, a measure of anthropogenic light pollution, and sky quality assessed by both the Bortle Dark-Sky Scale and limiting magnitude, the faintest star visible to the naked eye.
NPS Night Sky Condition Ratings, Capitol Reef (2022 Assessment)
Luminance Good
Anthropogenic light pollution Good
Sky quality Good
Illuminance Good / Fair
Monitoring locations 14 across the park
Three of the four night sky indicators were rated good; the fourth, illuminance, was rated good/fair. The Park Service's summary is that "the indicators of night sky condition are good."
⚠️ That assessment publishes condition ratings, not raw numbers. It does not release the underlying magnitudes per square arcsecond, the Bortle class values, or the limiting magnitudes measured at each of the 14 sites. So this is measured data reported as categories, better than a certification date, short of a dataset.
Broader measured sources do exist and are worth knowing about: the NPS Night Skies Program has collected thousands of night sky image datasets nationally since the early 2000s; Globe at Night's monitoring network publishes sky quality meter readings as downloadable data; and the World Atlas of Artificial Night Sky Brightness (Falchi et al., Science Advances, 2016) models zenith brightness worldwide, calibrated against more than 35,000 SQM observations.
What This List Still Lacks
What none of those sources give you is a reading from where you will actually sleep.
Park-wide ratings describe a 243,921-acre park. Satellite-derived models describe a grid square. Neither tells you how dark it is at a specific lodging site, how that shifts between a new moon in December and a full moon in June, or how one property compares with another a few miles down the road.
We intend to publish that. The plan is measured readings from our own site near Torrey in magnitudes per square arcsecond, taken across seasons and moon phases with the method stated plainly enough that anyone can check the numbers or repeat them. When that data exists it will appear here, alongside this list rather than replacing it.
Until then, treat this page as what it is: the most accurate certification list we could assemble, with its errors corrected, its gaps marked, and the measured park-level data that does exist reported honestly as ratings rather than dressed up as precision.
Reuse This Table
This list is published as an open dataset under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. You may republish it, in whole or in part, including commercially, provided you credit the source and link back.
Suggested credit:
Certified dark sky places in Utah, compiled August 2026, Capitol Reef Country, Torrey, Utah. Utah Dark Sky Parks Guide
If you find an error or a designation we have missed, tell us and we will correct it and note the correction. A list that gets fixed in public is worth more than one that is quietly right.
Compiled August 2026 from Visit Utah, Utah State Parks and DarkSky International designation announcements. Certifications change: new places are designated and, as Kodachrome Basin shows, existing ones can be withdrawn. Verify current status with DarkSky International.
Staying Out Here?
We are on open land outside Torrey, a few miles from the park boundary. Two ways to stay.
Quick Answers