The beams from our headlamps cast a soft red light as our footsteps crunch through the scrubby desert soil. Our eyes have been adjusting to the darkness for the past half hour, and any bright light would send us straight back to square one. Above our heads, the universe.

More stars than I’ve ever seen before sprawl across the indigo darkness. Constellations cluster in the clouds of the Milky Way, which arcs shimmering through the sky like a river. Cygnus the Swan dives headfirst into this cosmological skyway. For the Shoshone, who are native to this land, these stars tell the story of the great grey grizzly Wakinu, who left a glittering trail of snow on his journey to the eternal hunting grounds. Whatever one sees sparkling in this cosmic picture, it’s spellbinding.

Below our feet, the Great Basin Desert, the largest cold desert in North America and home to some of the darkest night skies in the contiguous United States. My partner (and photographer) Ben Nguyen and I are in Great Basin National Park, Nevada, a few days into a celestial road trip in search of stars and spectres. We’re a few kilometres outside Baker, Nev., at the Baker Archeological Site, which several locals have told us is the best place for astrophotography due to its remoteness, flatness and lack of light pollution.

Ben fires off exposures, his eyes full of stars, while I turn my gaze to the realm at my feet. The moon, tonight a bright waxing crescent, casts our shadows on the ground, so I switch off my headlamp. In the moonlight, I find a path leading into the site. If the moon and stars remember this place’s original name, they’re keeping quiet; it was in a language that’s been silenced. The so-called Baker Archaeological Site was once a village, home to a people that archeologists call the Fremont, named for the Fremont River in Utah, where similar sites share the same styles of pottery, basketry, figurines and moccasins. The Fremont people lived in this particular village from about 1220 to 1295, building a complex arrangement of adobe structures and pit houses. The only visible signs are short walls, built in 2002 to protect the original foundations.

In the centre, a structure dubbed the Big House was built in alignment with the rising sun on the summer solstice, which, as I stand here today, is just days away. To the east are the remnants of three smaller adobe structures. As the sun rose over the village on the summer solstice, its rays would have hit the left-most structure, casting a shadow on the corner of the Big House. During the winter solstice, the rising sun would have hit the corner of the structure on the right, casting a shadow straight through the Big House.

Did the Fremont construct these buildings as a horizon calendar to track the seasons, when to plant and when to harvest? “We may never be sure,” demurs a pamphlet at the site. We shared the same stars, though, watched the same sun rise and set, as day transitioned into night. I pour some water on the dry soil as a quiet thank you for being present in the Fremont’s ancient home. The rustle of a pocket mouse startles me from my reverie, and we head back to the aptly named Stargazer Inn to get a couple hours’ sleep while the moon sets, leaving the stars to shine even brighter.

In the morning, we sip cold brews and chat with inn co-owners Liz (chief enthusiasm officer) and James (chief fun officer) Woolsey, who also operate the Bristlecone general store next door. James worked in the National Park Service for 32 years and, “I just followed him from park to park,” Liz tells us. “In the dark?” I ask. “Sometimes in the dark!” James says cheekily, making Liz laugh.

As it turns out, Liz is the person who spearheaded the “Park to Park in the Dark” astronomy route we’ve driven to get here, which winds its way from Death Valley National Park, Calif., through five “stellar” Nevada towns (Beatty, Goldfield, Tonopah, Ely and Baker) to Great Basin. Both parks are international dark sky parks. The route highlights that about 85 per cent of Nevada is public lands, some of the least developed areas in the United States, “which means dark skies,” says Liz.

“But the only way dark skies stay dark is if we preserve them and not light up.”

It’s not just the “starry-est route in America” that draws people here. As well as clear skies, the desert is notorious for out-of-this-world phenomena, from ghost towns to aliens to other unexplained occurrences. Perhaps that’s not so surprising in a place where the margin between life and death is so thin.

In Death Valley (called Tupippuh Nummu, “Our Homeland,” by the Timbisha Shoshone), we see mirages on the roads in the baking 46 C heat. We start to question what looks like a salt flat down in the valley before us.

“Is it real?” I ask Ben. His response: “Is anything real out here?!”

We stop for gas at the Area 51 Alien Center in Amargosa Valley, Nev., painted an appropriate bright green and covered in extraterrestrial art. Memories of the hilarious 2019 shitpost “Storm Area 51, they can’t stop all of us” start to surface. The viral Facebook event asked would-be attendees to infiltrate Area 51, a highly classified U.S. air force base, where conspiracy theorists claim extraterrestrial life is concealed. “If we naruto run, we can move faster than their bullets. Lets see them aliens [sic],” read the event description. Two million people clicked “going.”

We grab breakfast in the diner at the back of the centre, Mr. Alien Sandwiches and Frozen Yogurt, striking up a chat with our server. “That was so funny,” she laughs, recalling the events of 2019, telling us how the sheriffs and police departments from all the nearby towns came to stop the millions storming Area 51.

In the end, a meagre handful of people showed up at 3 a.m. “Everyone was so mad!” she laughs. OK, but actually though, I ask, what’s the vibe on aliens here? She shrugs big, then answers: “All I know is I’ve seen some stuff.” Lights darting around in peculiar shapes in the darkness, glowing orbs, bigger than stars in the night sky. Everyone here seems to have their own unexplainable story.

We head to Beatty, Nev., to explore the eerie art of Goldwell Open Air Museum next to the ghost town of Rhyolite. Cloaked phantoms, created by “sculptor of ghosts” Albert Szukalski, stand starkly against the sky. There’s something here that unsettles me. Heat ripples around the surrounding hills, faint glimmers on the edge of sight.

“Love Like Ghosts” by Lord Huron plays as we drive the short distance to Rhyolite, a mining town, once served by three railroads, that boomed and busted in the space of a decade. All that remains are crumbling buildings and a few signs explaining what they used to be. As we walk along the cracked, dusty road of one of the most photographed ghost towns in the West, I wonder to myself, why are we drawn to these abandoned places? Is it because they remind us of the legacy of humanity’s own actions, our traces on the landscape? A glimpse not just of our past, but of our future?

There’s still life here, though. Creosote bushes pull water from unseen places to nourish fluffy cotton wool fruits. They smell like rain. They are medicine. Fourwing saltbush, often found in disturbed sites, flickers drily in the breeze. Lizards scurry hastily in the heat. Maybe we’re the ghosts in the landscape. As we leave, another car arrives. Ghosts replaced by more ghosts.

As a steady stream of souls comes and goes in the lobby of the Mizpah Hotel in Tonopah, some spirits supposedly remain. We’re at the Mizpah, touted as the most haunted hotel in Nevada, for the night to lay our heads to rest — or not, as the case may be. This place, built as a five-storey luxury hotel in 1907 and restored in 2011, has a troubled history: murders by jealous lovers, children taken too soon, bank robbers killed mid-heist by their co-conspirator.

We find ourselves walking the red-carpeted hallways on the hotel’s ghost tour, holding electromagnetic field readers and copper dowsing rods. The readers are scientific instruments used to measure ambient electromagnetic fields — Wi-Fi sources, phones, power lines, etc. — but have been co-opted by paranormal investigators as a way to detect ghostly activity. L-shaped dowsing rods, one held in each hand, are used in the attempt to communicate with phantoms. It feels like something out of Ghostbusters.

The spectres that haunt these halls are pretty chill, ghost guide Daley assures us, as she takes us down to the hotel’s creepy basement. Especially the Lady in Red, Evelyn May Johnston, who went by Rose as her call name, a sex worker who kept a suite of rooms on the fifth floor of the hotel before she was stabbed and strangled by a jealous former client. It’s said she whispers sweet nothings to male guests — pretty forgiving of her, I think to myself. Apparently Rose likes to hang out here in the basement, and our electromagnetic field readers go off right on time, flashing in the gloom. One lady in our tour group seems to be having a full-on conversation with Rose using her dowsing rods.

The entities here aren’t only the spirits of the departed, Daley tells us. There’s a “non-human entity” in the conference room, which honestly feels off, even to us cynics. Daley doesn’t go in there. There’s another alleged non-human entity in the old speakeasy across the street. (I kid you not, dear reader, I felt a deeply eerie sensation on the back of my leg.)

When we leave the room, everyone is slightly on edge. Daley tells us it’s important to set our boundaries with the spirit realm, and we all say aloud, “I don’t give you permission to follow me.”

But a few days later, as we cross the border into Utah, something follows. After exploring the ghost town of Frisco, Utah, we see a plume of smoke rising from the Tushar Mountains, close to Beaver, where we’re slated to camp. Our car climbs the winding gravel road, out of cell service and into the forest. Our camp hosts are unruffled when we ask about the smoke. A fire dubbed “Little Twist,” still burning as I write this, started as a prescribed burn but turned into a wildfire. Don’t worry though, they assure us; it’s a couple hills over — they even took their grandkid to see it that morning.

I’m feeling nauseous and need to lie down, so Ben pitches our tent. As night falls, I start chundering into a garbage bag. Ben is coughing from the smoke. Some teens camped nearby are screaming the lyrics to “Party in the U.S.A.” by Miley Cyrus. The wildfire burns two hills over. It is a truly unhinged experience. Have we been haunted?

We survive the night, the stars hidden in smoke.

After a day’s rest, we leave the ghost towns, and my unexplained sickness, behind us. Now we’re in awe of the landscape itself, which is almost frightening in its otherworldliness — from the rich red hoodoos of Bryce Canyon to the vast mountain sentinels of Zion. At night, looking at the stars in such a dark and isolated place makes you feel both as if you’re the loneliest person in the world and that you’re connected to everything in the universe.

Constellations fight their own battles as we fight ours down on Earth. Hercules seems to lob a ball (the Corona Borealis) at the herdsman Boötes. But it’s the moon, now a waxing gibbous, that’s astronomy guide Corinne Komlodi’s nemesis tonight. “The moon is NOT SETTING and it WILL be my worst enemy!” she declares at the start of our Stargazing Zion tour, just outside the national park, near Lambs Knoll. A brighter moon means dimmer stars.

We begin by hiking a scale model of our own galaxy, starting with a red light representing non-planet Pluto, down a track through a field. We stop at each model planet for fun facts (and Uranus jokes), working our way in to the “sun,” which is the observation site, where telescopes are stationed for us to take a closer look at spiral galaxies, nebulas and the bright moon.

“I wholeheartedly believe that the sky is your connect-the-dots picture book and not the ancient Greeks’,” says Komlodi as she takes us on a tour of the skies. Virgo does kind of make more sense if you look at her like a robot, and Hercules still is “just a square!” cries one child. Under Komlodi’s guidance, though, the constellations begin to shift into the shapes for which they’re named. The dots start to connect, start to tell stories.

We end by putting our thumbs up to the sky. “The average human thumb covers about 10 million galaxies,” says Komlodi. “Every galaxy has hundreds of millions, if not billions of stars. … So, whether or not you believe in aliens, you can do the statistical math with those numbers.” We are literally the tiniest specks of stardust in the vastness of the universe.

Back at Great Basin, somewhere between the desert and the rest of the universe, is an ancient grove of bristlecone pines, their twisted branches reaching for the stars above them. Bristlecones are the longest-lived non-clonal beings on Earth. Some of the trees in this grove have lived as long as 5,000 years. These groves have weathered ice ages, photosynthesized through cataclysmic volcanic eruptions, seen empires rise and fall. They’ve grown, slowly, spiralling up from the harsh conditions of their mountain halls, recording history in growth rings.

“The great reluctance to die is common among bristlecone pines,” reads an interpretative sign. These trees are already on a glacial uphill journey as the climate changes, a veritable March of the Ents. The bristlecones, these most resilient of spirits, are making their slow migration upwards toward the stars.

We all come from the stars, from bristlecones to humans. And to the stars, one day, we shall return.