The Return Signal | Old La Sal Night Sky Echoes
Updated: Sep 4
Echoes of the Old La Sal Night Sky Back Home
He thought the Old La Sal night sky would remain where it belonged—over Deer Creek Retreat, pinned above the basin and ridges, far from the fluorescent corridors and busy streets of home. After all, stars don’t follow you the way a little lost dog might, he told himself. They stay where they are, fixed in the night sky, moving only with the curve and rotation of the earth.
He was wrong.
Old La Sal night sky echoes travel differently. The stars don’t reappear as light trails over your living room or above your own roof. They show up in quieter places: dreams, split‑second decisions, the way you pause before you speak—especially when you’ve spent nights under that sky in the La Sal Mountains.
The first weeks after he left Deer Creek and Old La Sal were busy.
He carried four encounters with him from those recent visits to Old La Sal—real or not, he remembered each one vividly: the midnight visitor at the tiny home, the intercepted radio frequency on the porch, the Gray alien on Suicide Hill, and the sovereign choreography of light in the sky on his final night. Even if no one around him knew those stories, they lived in him with sharp, unforgettable detail.
The drive back took him down through the basin, past Suicide Hill, past clustered fields, cows, the pairie dogs and scattered homes, then along the longer highway toward Moab and beyond. Gradually, the landscape shifted from high‑desert quiet to the layered noise of town life—traffic, signage, people moving in all directions at once.
He returned to his routines.
Hospital visits.
Counseling sessions.
Writing deadlines.
Family chaos and joy.
He caught up on emails, fielded phone calls, walked back into rooms where grief and fear hung thick in the air. His professional instincts came back online quickly, like muscles that remembered their work.
For a little while, it was easy enough to treat Old La Sal as a completed chapter.
A strange, beautiful week.
Stories for later.
Then the signal began to return.
Not on a radio.
In his sleep.
The first dream was simple.
He stood on the main cabin porch, the basin spread out in front of him, but the sky above was not dark. It was white—bright as noon, washed of stars. He felt a familiar sinking disappointment in his chest: I came all this way for the vast starry sky, and it’s gone.
Then, in the dream, he looked down.
The stars were under his feet.
Thousands of them, packed into the boards of the porch, glowing faintly through the wood grain like embers. Every step lit a pattern, pulsing in brief sequences as he moved.
He woke with his heart racing, the image burned into his mind.
He had no neat interpretation.
He didn’t rush to write it down.
But all day, as he walked hospital floors and sat by bedsides, the dream whispered:
You don’t lose the sky when you leave. You carry it in how you walk.
A week later, another dream came.
He was driving up Suicide Hill in the dark. No radio, no porch, no cabin behind him—just the familiar grade, the reputation, the sense that deer might appear at any moment. Except this time, when he reached the crest, there were no animals, no Gray aliens, no anomaly.
Just a fork.
Two roads that didn’t exist in waking life.
One to the left, lit faintly with warm, human light—houses, towns, people.
One to the right, unlit—stars overhead, land stretching away, no signs.
In the dream, he sat at the fork, hands on the wheel, unable to move. Unable to choose.
He woke before choosing.
He laughed at himself lying there in bed.
“Of course,” he murmured. “Of course the dream ends on a decision.”
He thought back to that dream at the fork—unable to move, unable to choose—and realized the Old La Sal night sky hadn’t solved his choices. It had only made him more honest about them.
All the time, under the humor was something else: the realization that the Old La Sal night sky had become a symbol of a different kind of life. Not escapism. Not running away. A life where mystery was allowed, the imagination runs, where silence wasn’t immediately filled, and where he paid attention before deciding.
The Old La Sal return signal was subtle.
But it was there.
It then surfaced elsewhere.
In the hospital, he sat with a patient who had just received a diagnosis that felt, to them, like the end of everything. They spoke in panicked bursts—words spilling out about unfairness, about fear, about unanswered prayer.
He listened.
He had done this hundreds of times.
But tonight, he found himself thinking about the Gray alien in the shadows on Suicide Hill—about standing in the dark, feeling watched not by a hostile presence from another world, but by something that seemed to hold up a mirror to his soul, forcing him to see parts of himself he usually ignored.
He realized that, in this moment, the patient needed something similar—not an explanation, not a promise that everything would make sense, but a presence that refused to look away.
He did not say anything about aliens or light trails.
He did not mention Old La Sal, the mountains, the Moab area, or even Utah.
But he let the memory of that steady gaze shape the way he stayed in the room.
He held silence longer than usual.
He asked fewer questions.
He let the person’s fear rise and fall without trying to fix it.
Afterward, as he walked back down the hallway, he thought:
The sky taught me how to stay with my own fear. Now it’s teaching me how to stay with theirs.
Another day, he sat with a family arguing quietly in a waiting room, voices sharp with stress. The patient's mom wanted to “know” exactly what would happen. His sister insisted that any unknown was a threat. And his little brother sat in the corner, eyes red, saying nothing.
As a professional, he heard himself say something he hadn’t planned:
“Sometimes, the unknown isn’t an enemy. It’s just… the part of the story God hasn’t written down in front of us yet.”
As he said it, the memory of his last night under the Old La Sal night sky flickered in his mind—the silent light trails that had paused above Deer Creek Retreat after his single radio pulse, then moved in deliberate patterns he could feel but not translate. They hadn’t given him sentences; they had answered with motion instead of explanation.
He realized the return signal wasn’t a set of answers.
It was a permission slip.
Permission to acknowledge mystery without pretending to solve it.
Permission to admit that some signals come as patterns we feel more than decode.
The signal also followed him into his writing.
Back at his desk, he opened a blank page to work on a piece about motivation, grit, and choice—his area of research. He meant to write about perseverance in the face of trauma, about the long work of identity formation, about how people can keep moving even when life doesn’t give them what they wanted.
It flowed for a while.
Then he stalled.
The usual language felt too flat.
Too linear.
It didn’t capture the way his week at Deer Creek had complicated his sense of struggle and meaning.
He found his fingers typing something different:
“Sometimes, grit is not about pushing through a storm. Sometimes, it’s about standing under a clear night and admitting that you are small—and choosing to keep loving, serving, and believing anyway.”
He paused.
He thought about the disk (shaped like an alien space craft) above the tiny home.
The radio pulses on the porch, eminating from his hand held.
The Gray alien in the shadows just off the highway on suicide hill.
The patterned light trails over the night basin sky.
None of those events had made his life easier.
They had made it wider.
Grit, he realized, wasn’t only about endurance, it was about passion.
It was about courage in the face of mystery, in the face of imagination.
He began to write from that angle.
Not as if his readers had seen what he’d seen, but as if they knew their own versions: diagnosis scans, unanswered prayers, losses that left signals of their own in dreams and decisions.
The Old La Sal night sky echoed between sentences.
He didn’t name it explicitly.
But it shaped the tone.
Less certainty.
More honesty.
Less “here’s how to fix it.”
More “here’s how to live faithfully when it doesn’t get fixed.”
One afternoon, months after the trip, he opened the short‑wave radio case again.
It had sat on a shelf since he left Deer Creek, quietly gathering dust.
He took it out, turned it on, and let the static fill the room.
He did not expect to hear the same other world radio pulses any more than he expected the Gray aliens to appear by his driveway.
This was a different dark night sky, a different place.
Streetlights bled into the horizon, envelopping the darkness.
Electrical noise saturated the air.
But as he tuned, he felt the same posture return.
Patience.
Curiosity.
Willingness to listen without promising himself that he would understand.
For a few minutes, he sat and simply let the noise wash over him.
Then he turned the hand held radio off.
He realized the act itself mattered more than the result.
A tangible reminder of what it had felt like to treat the night as a communicator instead of a decoration.
He wrote a single line in his notebook afterward:
“The greatest return signal from Old La Sal is not a message. It’s a change in how I pay attention, in how I watch and how I listen.”
There were days he doubted.
Days when he wondered if he had let the stories get too big in his mind.
He knew trauma could distort perception.
He knew isolation and darkness could stir old fears.
He’d counseled people whose experiences in the night were more about their own pain than any external presence.
He kept those cautions close.
He never built doctrine out of space craft like disks or triangles, Gray aliens, or light trails in the night sky.
He did not add “aliens” to his statement of faith.
But he refused to lie or even avoid the truth.
He had seen what he had seen.
He had felt what he had felt.
And he had been changed.
When he preached now, he found himself talking more often about wonder, about the beauty and terror of being small in a vast universe, about the fact that God’s creation was larger than their comfort zones.
He talked about stars, not spacecraft.
He talked about darkness, not specific hills.
But underneath those words, the Old La Sal night sky pulsed quietly.
A return signal, calling him back—not necessarily to the physical place (though he knew he would go again), but to the posture he had found there.
The posture of staring into the infinite without turning away.
One evening, after a long day of hospital rounds and a late meeting, he stepped outside after he got home, for a moment.
The sky overhead was dull compared to Old La Sal.
Few stars.
Light pollution.
Clouds drifting in.
He could have shrugged and gone back inside.
Instead, he did something small.
He turned off the porch light.
He stood still.
He breathed.
He whispered a simple line, more habit than experiment now.
“I’m listening.”
No UFO disk appeared.
No pulses rose in his ears.
No Gray alien watched from the fence.
But he felt the same quiet he had felt on the ridge in Old La Sal.
The same awareness that his life was tiny and precious.
The same sense that invisible layers of reality hummed around him, whether he understood them or not.
He smiled.
The return signal didn’t have to be dramatic to be real.
Sometimes, it was just this: choosing, again and again, to live as someone who knows the sky is deeper than it looks.
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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 the stories of Old La Sal night sky encounters have stirred something in you—curiosity, fear, wonder—consider how those feelings might echo in your own life long after a visit. Come to Deer Creek Retreat in Old La Sal. Stay in the tiny home or main cabin. Let the dark sky unsettle and comfort you. Then carry what you experience back home, not as proof, but as a new way of paying attention—to your decisions, your relationships, and the mystery that lives in your own story.
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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