During a normal summer, Mesa Verde National Park park rangers and staff are busy leading daily guided tours of the signature cliff dwellings and archeological sites built by Ancestral Puebloans. But in 2020, visitation to the national park in southwest Colorado decreased by 50 percent due to the COVID-19 pandemic. With fewer visitors and tours, staff had some time on their hands.
“A silver lining of the pandemic was having time to dedicate to projects on the back burner,” says Spencer Burke, a park ranger at Mesa Verde. “One of those projects was getting certified as an International Dark Sky Park.”