The Sovereign Call | Old La Sal Night Sky Patterns
Updated: Sep 4
A Final Encounter of Patterns Under the Old La Sal Night Sky
The Old La Sal night sky had become an animated character in his week—an actual presence, not a backdrop. By the final evening at Deer Creek Retreat, he no longer felt he was simply visiting a mountain cabin. He felt like he was living inside a long, slow conversation with the dark.
It had started at the tiny home.
A hovering UAP, a disk shaped air craft that he could see over Haystack Rock, a peak of the La Sal mountains.
It shown an emerald beam pausing at the cabin door.
Then on another night at the main cabin porch. A short‑wave radio picking up rhythmic pulses while a massive triangular craft glided silently across the stars.
Then the adventure up Suicide Hill.
The late‑night walk across the driveway under the Old La Sal night sky, down the road where a slender Gray figure watched from a fence line and slipped out of phase with the world.
Any one of those would have been enough to shrug off as imagination or misinterpretation. However, here at Deer Creek, in the field, amongst the brush and trees, the occassional mule deer anything seems possible.
Together, these events of the week felt like a sequence building to something more.
Not a horror sequence.
Not a neat plot.
More like a series of nudges. Pay attention, the week seemed to say. You are not as alone as you think under this vast starfilled sky.
This was his last night staying in Old La Sal, for this trip.
Tomorrow, he would drive back down the mountain, through the basin, past neighbor fields and ridges, toward civilization, toward Moab and the rest of his life—hospitals, classrooms, work, family, the hum of ordinary days. Tonight was the one remaining chance to sit under the Old La Sal night sky and answer, in some small way, the attention he felt it had been giving him.
If the sky had been speaking all week, what would happen if he spoke back?
He moved slowly through the late afternoon.
He walked the edge of the fenced five acres of the retreat property, running his hand along weathered posts, watching the way the land rolled gently toward other properties. The basin was not empty; it was stitched with human lives—neighbors, scattered homes, the occassional car on the road, small lights that would turn on later.
He checked the tiny home, then the main cabin.
He tidied dishes.
Folded blankets.
Performed small, grounding tasks that reminded him this was still a real place with real responsibilities, not just a dream set.
By dusk, he carried the short‑wave radio and headphones out onto the main cabin porch.
No railing. The porch was sturdy, made with cement, a table and chairs and an open view of the landscape and the sky.
He set the radio on the porch table, extended its antenna, and laid the headphones within reach.
The sun sank behind the La Sal Mountains, leaving a soft band of fading light that thinned and finally dissolved. As darkness deepened, the stars started their familiar work.
One appeared.
Then another.
Then dozens.
Then hundreds.
The Old La Sal night sky opened fully, thick with stars, the Milky Way stretching across the basin in a pale, textured band. The five acres around the cabin felt small beneath it. The neighboring fields and homes looked like minor punctuation marks in a much larger sentence.
He thought of all the guests who came to Deer Creek Retreat for this view alone—with a dark Utah sky the experience of stars felt close enough to touch. They didn’t ask for space crafts or alien figures or signals out of this world. They were searching for and wanted quiet.
He wanted that, too.
But he had been given something more.
He turned on the radio.
Static greeted him.
Soft hiss.
Tiny pops.
The sound of distance made audible.
He slipped on the headphones and tuned carefully, moving the dial through bands he’d already explored earlier in the week. Some of these bands were empty. Some carried hints of voices from far‑off places, time signals ticking seconds into the night, the familiar clutter of radio traffic.
He wasn’t chasing a specific frequency.
He was watching for the same thing he’d watched for in regular life, at home or at work, in the corridors of the hospital at 3:00 AM: a change in the pattern. Something that didn’t fit the usual noise.
Minutes passed.
The porch cooled under his feet.
The cabin behind him glowed gently through windows, a reminder of warmth and shelter.
Then, on the edge of his perception, something shifted.
Not in the radio first.
In the sky.
A single line of light streaked silently across the stars overhead.
It was thin, clean, and oddly controlled—too deliberate for a satellite, which usually glided steadily, and too sustained for a meteor, which flared brightly and then vanished almost at once.
He lifted the headphones off one ear and looked up.
Another streak.
Then another.
They weren’t random. Each traced a clear arc, intersecting others like carefully drawn curves on a graph.
He took the headphones off completely.
The Old La Sal night sky had begun a new sentence.
At first, only a handful of light trails moved.
Three.
Five.
Seven.
They crossed near the zenith, weaving through the densest band of the Milky Way.
Then their number grew.
Dozens of silent light trails carved through the star field, each holding a steady glow—not flaring, not fading. They moved as if choreographed, forming loops, lines, and patterns that hovered in place before shifting again.
He stood and stepped to the porch’s edge, one hand resting lightly against a post.
The basin below remained unchanged.
Fences and fields lay quiet.
Neighbor houses shone with a few dim porch lights, respectful and small.
No sound rose from the land.
No engines.
No planes.
No towns.
All the movement belonged to the sky.
The trails of light slowed, wrapped, intersected, and curved along invisible paths. At times they seemed to spiral around a point somewhere above the cabin. At others, they stretched out toward the ridges as if mapping the edges of the basin from above.
He whispered without looking away.
“Who is this for?”
The question was honest.
Was this display indifferent, happening whether he watched or not?
Or was he, somehow, part of the reason it was unfolding here?
The lights did not answer with words.
They answered with form.
The sky trails of light tightened.
Instead of spreading across the entire dome, they began to concentrate in a region roughly the sky above Deer Creek Retreat. Lines of light bent inward, weaving closer, building a dense lattice of motion that seemed to hover over the five acres and surrounding fields.
He felt something change in his chest, working down to his soul.
This no longer looked like distant cosmic geometry, or merely lines in the sky.
It looked like attention centered on a specific place.
A week’s events echoed through his mind.
The beam at the tiny home door.
The triangular craft over the porch.
The Gray observer on the road.
Now this: a sky full of coordinated light trails gathering above the same small human outpost in a wide basin at the foot of the La Sal moutains.
This is not random, he thought. Something keeps looking back.
He moved back to the table and sat down, fingers resting gently on the radio.
“Okay,” he said softly. “If I’m part of this… then I should at least answer.”
He had spent his life listening—to patients, soldiers, families, students, to God, to his own inner life. Tonight felt like the first time the Old La Sal night sky had listened to him in return.
He put the headphones on again.
Static.
Hiss.
The ordinary fabric of noise.
He did not wait for the radio to change.
He decided to change it himself.
He closed his eyes for a moment, steadying his breathing.
“God… if responding like this is foolish, stop me. If it’s arrogant, humble me. If it’s simply human to knock when I feel something knocking at me, then let this be honest.”
He opened his eyes.
He reached for the transmit button.
This was not a sophisticated instrument capable of broadcasting complex messages. It was a simple short‑wave unit—practical, limited.
He chose to match its simplicity.
One brief signal.
Just one.
He pressed the button.
The radio emitted a clean, sharp burst—a single, focused pulse of energy pushed out into the night.
No words.
No coordinates.
Just a knock.
He released the button and froze.
Up above, the light trails reacted.
Every moving line seemed to hold in place.
Not slow down.
Stop.
For one suspended heartbeat, the entire choreographed display paused over Old La Sal.
The rest of the sky remained unchanged.
Stars still shone.
The Milky Way still glowed.
But these trails of light waited, as if listening.
He felt his own heartbeat matching that pause.
He whispered the word that surfaced.
“Acknowledged.”
Then, one of the light trails changed its path.
It brightened slightly, drawing the eye, while the others dimmed just enough to make space for it.
The brightened line broke into pieces.
Segments of light separated along its length—short, long, short, short—forming a dotted curve rather than a continuous streak. Those segments began to move in a sequence, pulsing in an order that looked too patterned to be an accident.
His mind jumped to code.
Morse.
Time signals.
Beginning student exercises in radio astronomy plotting pulses.
But he was not a physicist, and this was not a lab.
He was a chaplain sitting on a porch.
He watched the sequence:
Long pulse of light.
Short.
Short.
Long.
Short.
Short.
The fragments repeated in a rhythm, sliding slightly along their curve, holding their coordinated dance above the basin.
He did not know what the pattern meant.
He had no chart to consult, no computer to decode it.
But he understood enough to know that pattern itself was the message.
He had knocked.
Something had knocked back.
The segmented trail of light continued for several cycles.
Then, as gradually as it had separated, it fused again.
The pieces merged into a single line.
The line dimmed.
The other light trails regained their original brightness briefly, sweeping once more across the sky in wide arcs—one last flourish.
Then the motion began to thin out.
Then the light of each of these streams faded, one by one.
The sky’s choreography loosened and dissolved until only the familiar constellations and Milky Way remained, quiet, vast, and ancient. It left the kind of darkness that can be felt.
Static filled his headphones again, unchanged.
He took them off.
He didn’t press the transmit button a second time.
He knew enough from grief and prayer to recognize that one answer can matter more than a hundred repetitions.
He sat in the porch chair, hands resting on his thighs, staring up at the Old La Sal night sky that now looked deceptively ordinary.
“God,” he said quietly, “if this was just Your natural sky doing what it always does, then forgive me for treating it as menial or ordinary. If this was someone using Your sky to speak, thank You for letting it be gentle.”
He thought of all the times he’d told other people that God was near—that they were seen, heard, held, even when nothing dramatic happened. Tonight, something dramatic had happened, but the feeling underneath it was strangely familiar:
He was not alone.
That was enough.
He went inside, turned off the radio, and placed it on the desk by the big bay window. He poured water, sat down, and opened his notebook.
He wrote what had happened.
Not with theory.
With description.
The trails of light across the sky.
The pause.
The segmented line.
The pattern he’d seen.
The way his chest had felt.
He wrote the phrase that had haunted him all week: Staring into the infinite.
It had started as an experience waiting to happen, but now...
Now, it felt like a real posture.
Staring into the infinite sky.
Staring into the infinite unknown.
Staring into the infinite layers of his own soul that only surfaced when he left noise behind.
He closed the notebook and looked out across the driveway and into the portrait of the landscape one last time for this stay.
Neighbors’ lights flickered softly.
The ancient ridges stood, silent and patient.
The night above them all stretched, unbothered by human questions.
He whispered one final prayer before bed.
“Thank You for letting me see more than I can explain. Help me live faithfully with mystery instead of trying to crush it into certainty.”
He turned off the lamp.
Outside, the Old La Sal night sky continued its quiet work—patterns, motions, signals and silence—whether anyone watched or not.
🌌 Staring Into the Infinite? Get the Official Field Guides Before hitting the trail or sitting under the dark sky of Old La Sal, equip your journey with our printable and mobile 12-page companions:
High-Desert Survival Field Guide: Real-world wilderness prep, our 1-gallon hydration formula, 12:00 PM alpine lightning rules, slot canyon flood protocols, and the 10-essential trailhead checklist.
Staring Into the Infinite Field Companion: The 20-minute rhodopsin night vision protocol, short-wave radio porch vigilance, anomaly identification matrix, and dawn/dusk reflection journals.
Download these essential Moab & La Sal field guides instantly for your phone or daypack.
A Challenge to You
If part of you is tired of treating the night sky as a backdrop and ready to see what happens when you treat it as a conversation, consider spending a few nights at Deer Creek Retreat. Stay at the tiny home or main cabin. Turn down the lights. Step outside, or sit by the window, and let the Old La Sal night sky have time with you. You don’t have to send radio signals; you only have to be willing to stare into the infinite and see what stares back.
Cheers,
Justin
🌌 The Staring Into the Infinite Series
Epilogue (Series Finale): Staring Into the Infinite | Night at Deer Creek Retreat
About the Author
Justin holds a Ph.D. in Education and is an ordained professional chaplain, specializing in the integration of motivation and choice theory, psychological resilience, and pastoral soul care. He transitioned from a ten‑year active duty career as a Chaplain in the U.S. Army, serving in the high‑intensity environment of a critical care hospital, where he learned to sit with people in their deepest valleys and darkest nights. His work now bridges empirical behavioral science with practical strategies for long‑term identity formation and spiritual growth.
Justin serves as the primary researcher and writer for grittygritgrit.com, a digital platform dedicated to helping individuals cultivate authentic perseverance through profound transitions, traumas, and seasons of suffering. You can explore more of his high‑mountain‑desert reflections, stories, and resources at deercreeklasal.com.
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