Guests sometimes assume “dark sky” is a marketing phrase. It isn’t, or at least it shouldn’t be — it’s a number, measured the same way every clear night with a handheld sky-quality meter, logged against the Bortle scale that astronomers use to rank sky darkness from 1 (best) to 9 (inner-city).
We sit consistently in Bortle class 2 territory, which in practice means the Milky Way casts a faint but real shadow on a clear moonless night, and the naked-eye limiting magnitude runs a full two to three magnitudes fainter than most suburban skies manage.
The number matters because it’s the whole reason the site exists in its current form — it’s also the number we’d lose first if the wrong kind of development showed up in the valley below, which is why we keep measuring and keep the readings public.