Tuesday night, if the clouds stay under 30 percent, Top of the Pines will fill with people looking up. The Perseid watch starts at 9 p.m., with a laser pointed at constellations and telescopes set up on the meadow at Top of the Pines. It is the kind of event that sounds like it exists for visitors. It does not. Ridgway spent years making sure a night like this could happen from more places than just a recreation area up County Road 5, and the town got there before the park did.
That order matters more than it sounds like it should.
The Ordinance Came Before the Badge
In February 2020, a local volunteer group called the Ridgway Ouray Community Council submitted an application to the International Dark-Sky Association asking the town itself, not a park or a preserve, to be certified as a Dark Sky Community. The application came together under the leadership of resident Val Szwarc after roughly two years of groundwork. Ridgway got its answer in July 2020: the third town in Colorado to receive the designation, after Norwood and the joint Westcliffe/Silver Cliff application, and one of only 21 U.S. communities holding the honor at the time.
The paperwork followed the practice, not the other way around. Ridgway had already passed an outdoor lighting ordinance and had already run education campaigns encouraging shielded fixtures before it ever filed for recognition. The DarkSky International announcement noted that the town, at an elevation of 6,985 feet along the Uncompahgre River, had spent years protecting its surroundings before the certification made it official. That sequence is the opposite of how a lot of tourism branding works, where a designation shows up first and behavior is supposed to follow.
Not Everyone Signed On Right Away
The town-wide push wasn't universally popular. According to reporting from the Colorado Sun, the Ridgway Area Chamber of Commerce chose to stay neutral on the application, weighing the cost of compliance against how dimmer, shielded lighting might affect the visibility of local storefronts and signage. That is a real tradeoff, not a footnote. A business that depends on a lit sign to catch a driver's eye on Highway 550 has a different stake in an outdoor lighting ordinance than a homeowner who just wants to see the Milky Way from the back step.
Ridgway went ahead anyway. Mayor John Clark called the designation an incredible accomplishment when it came through, and the town's outdoor lighting rules stayed in place. The friction did not disappear so much as get absorbed into how the town looks after dark now, which is dimmer than the highway approach might suggest and brighter in stars than most people expect from a town with a grocery store and a hardware store on Main.
Two Certifications, Two Timelines
The recreation area most visitors assume is the reason for Ridgway's reputation, Top of the Pines, actually came later and through a separate process.
| Town of Ridgway | Top of the Pines | |
|---|---|---|
| Designation type | Dark Sky Community | Dark Sky Park |
| Awarded | July 2020 | November 2021 |
| Led by | Val Szwarc, Ridgway Ouray Community Council | Board president Brad Wallis, with Szwarc's continued involvement |
| Scope | Whole-town lighting ordinance, public and private fixtures | 175-acre recreation area, 8,650 feet elevation, up County Road 5 |
| Backstory | Application filed Feb. 2020 after roughly two years of ordinance and outreach work | Land donated to Ouray County by the Girl Scouts as a former camp; application submitted August 2021 |
Top of the Pines is now documented among the darkest measured skies in Colorado, a claim backed by its own sky brightness monitoring program. But the town's certification predates the park's by over a year, and it was driven by the same small volunteer network doing the unglamorous work twice: writing lighting standards, walking businesses through compliance, then turning around and helping the recreation area's board do the same thing for a completely different kind of property.
Ridgway Ouray Community Council volunteers still show up for the follow-through. They have helped adjust or replace fixtures at the public library and the local secondary school to keep the town in compliance with its own rules, work that gets no ribbon-cutting and mostly happens because someone on a volunteer board decided it should.
Where Locals Actually Look Up
Because the ordinance covers the town and not just a park boundary, the best stargazing spot in Ridgway isn't necessarily the one with a name and a website. Longtime residents point to Ridgway Athletic Park's open fields as a starting point, and Frontier Park along County Road 23 as another wide-open option south of Chipeta Drive. Neither requires the fifteen-minute drive up to Top of the Pines. Neither charges anything or needs a reservation.
That's the part a visitor's guide tends to gloss over. The town-wide designation means a Milky Way view is available from a yard on Cora Street or a bench in Hartwell Park on a clear, moonless night, not just from a recreation area with a gate. The infrastructure for that, dimmer streetlights, fewer unshielded floodlights on Main, was built to work at the neighborhood scale from the start.
The Week This Is Happening In
This particular Tuesday sits inside a busy stretch of the town calendar, which is worth knowing if you're deciding when to actually go stand in a field. The Ridgway Farmers Market, which typically runs Fridays from May 22 through October 30 this year, shifted to Thursday, August 6, because the Ridgway Rendezvous Arts and Crafts Festival took over Hartwell Park for the following weekend. The Rendezvous, now in its 42nd year and hosted by Weehawken Creative Arts, ran Saturday and Sunday, August 8 and 9, with more than 100 juried vendor booths and free train rides at the adjacent Ridgway Railroad Museum. The market returns to its normal Friday slot the following week.
None of that overlaps with the meteor watch itself, but it explains why the back half of this particular week in Ridgway feels fuller than most. A festival weekend, a rescheduled market, and a dark sky event within five days of each other is a fairly normal August here, and it says something about a town of just over a thousand people that it can host all three without any of them feeling like an afterthought.
Why the Porch Still Wins
The instinct is to assume the destination event, the one with a name, a start time, and telescopes, is the point. But the reason Top of the Pines' Perseid watch matters isn't that it's the only place in Ridgway worth looking up from. It's that the town spent two years before its own certification making sure it wouldn't be. The ordinance was written for streets and yards, not just for a 175-acre preserve up a county road. Standing on a porch on Cora Street on a clear night is functionally the same experience the park was built to protect, minus the drive.
That's the thing worth knowing if you already live here and were planning to just glance out the window Tuesday night instead of loading up the car. You don't need Top of the Pines to see what the fuss is about. You need a clear sky, a light you're willing to turn off, and about twenty minutes for your eyes to adjust.
If you're weighing a move to Ridgway or Ouray County and want a broker who actually knows which nights are worth staying outside for, Ouray Real Estate Corporation has been working this stretch of the San Juans long enough to know the difference between a marketing badge and a town that means it. Let us guide you to your home in Colorado.
