My love for the natural world and the night sky comes from having a science teacher for a dad.  My dad was an Earth Science, Geology and Astronomy teacher and an amateur photographer so of course he took pictures of night sky objects as well as geological subjects and the natural world.  Not to mention us family members!

I joined DSI in 1993 as my dad had also joined after he retired in 1991.  He felt it was a non-profit that covered all the environmental bases.  As we now know, artificial light at night (ALAN) affects all living things by throwing circadian rhythms out of balance.  ALAN is contaminating our nighttime ecosystems and the starry night sky with the Milky Way is disappearing at alarming rates. This is extremely concerning and harmful to our well-being.  Pollinators have diminished!  Linked to ALAN are circadian rhythm disruptions, gestation problems, cancer, obesity, vision problems and sleep difficulties.  

I realized that by using LED lighting correctly the problem of light contamination could be corrected and reversed!  It is easy to do and cost effective. It is safe and saves energy. 

I knew I had to do my part to preserve the rare and precious resource and heritage of night skies in the West End towns of Nucla and Naturita.  I got my chance in 2020 when both Naturita and Nucla decided to up-grade their town ordinances. By then I had inquired about how to become a certified DSI community.  That's when I met Dr. Robert Grossman.  He and Creighton Wood had just completed the process for Norwood and helped guide and encourage me through the rigorous DSI application process for Nucla and Naturita.  The towns both adopted almost identical versions of DSI's Model Lighting Ordinance which is a key element necessary to becoming a certified community.  The other key is Sky Quality Meter Reading measurements which measure star brightness.  

 Bob Grossman and I created the Western Slope Dark Sky Coalition out of a need for a support network to help maintain certifications for DSI places in our region. The number is growing.  We also had a desire to expand the area of preserved dark sky and create a certified DSI Dark Sky Reserve that could grow and expand county by county.

Today I see potential for reducing the light domes of Grand Junction, Delta and Montrose. Perhaps Colorado will become a dark sky state!

Western Slope Skies Coordinator

Kate is a University of Colorado alumna in both Medicine and Nursing, with a career spanning anesthesiology, remote medicine, and flight medicine; a life lived at the edges of the world where the sky is never taken for granted.

Her relationship with the night sky began early. Growing up in a rural community, the Milky Way stretched like a river of stars to the horizon, interrupted only by the silent flicker of distant lightning. That childhood sense of awe never left her.

It followed her to the South Pacific, where she sailed the Fijian islands and crossed open ocean to New Caledonia, identifying Southern Hemisphere constellations while crewing  a 40-foot sailboat.

It found her again on Wake Island, a narrow coral atoll in the vast middle of the Pacific, where she served as the island's physician. On quiet nights, she would drive to the airfield after the aerodrome closed, climb into the bed of a pickup truck, and lie beneath a sky brilliant with both the Southern Cross and the North Star, a rare celestial gift available only at that precise latitude. Around her, deep ocean swells thundered against the reef on one side while the lagoon lapped softly on the other, the whole world reduced to stars, water, and nature’s embrace.

Now rooted in Telluride, Kate draws from her ancestral ties to the first miners in the San Juan Mountains and channels that deep belonging into her work with the Western Slope Dark Sky Coalition.  For Kate, dark sky preservation isn't merely academic. It's personal. The night sky, she believes, evokes something primal and restorative: a reminder, deep within our genetic code, that we are connected to something far greater than ourselves — and that beauty, in a chaotic world, can still heal.