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The sun comes out the next day, making me sweat on the Angels Landing trail in Zion as I scramble up 1,488 feet along a sandstone ridge. The lofty outcrop got its name from a Methodist minister who exclaimed that only angels could land there, and this high above Zion Canyon, I feel closer to celestial bodies than I did the night before. I sense the stars and ��ó����ó, the Diné (Navajo) philosophy of harmony, a profound interconnectedness between human life and everything in the natural world and universe.

Utah is the sacred and ancestral home of the Diné, as well as the Shoshone, Goshute and Paiute peoples. The Kaibab Paiute Reservation is the world’s first “Dark Sky Nation”: . “The designation helped revitalize the teachings of Southern Paiute astronomy,” as anthropologist and astronomer Autumn Gillard explains in the short film “Western Skies: Toohoom-pai-ahv (The Southern Paiute Sky),” which I watch later in this trip.

Gillard, who is part Southern Paiute, shares how stars have long guided her people, both literally and figuratively. The Milky Way, for example, is their path to the spirit world.

The brightest stars along the Milky Way are, as Gillard was told by her grandmother, “the campfires of our friends and families that have passed on. The creator allows them to come and set along the Milky Way to watch us in our waking life.”

After descending from Angels Landing, I look for stars again at nightfall but am only teased with brief glimpses — I see Sirius and the moon and Venus — before clouds drift in. But then, as I walk the gravel road back to my plush safari-style tent at the glamping resort , the curtain is raised, and the Paiute’s spirit path makes an appearance.

I stare at the Milky Way’s gossamer band of billions of stars and imagine the proverbial fires lit along it. The Big Dipper also dangles high above, brighter and somehow different or askew, and I later learn the Paiute see it as a giant rabbit net — apt imagery for a smattering of seven stars that also lures me with its familiar yet fantastical form.

Much like those hunters pursuing rabbits into starry netting, I continue chasing stars and their asterisms and constellations. The skies stay dark and the stars bright as I explore the buttes and slot canyons of the .

Here, hoodoos, fallen arches, chimney- and mushroom-shaped rocks, and lunar-like formations are as layered as the thousands of stars — out of the more than 100 billion in our galaxy alone — visible to the naked eye at night. Even far below Angels Landing, these so-called heavenly objects seem within easy grasp. I spot the North Star above a silhouetted mesa but now see it the way that Gillard describes: as the big horn sheep who climbed too high and got stuck in the sky.

Near Bryce Canyon National Park at , a camp-like retreat with vintage Airstreams and hip cabins, more revelations come to me after dark. Its old-school open-air movie theatre is where I watch the film featuring astronomer Gillard and other local Paiute, a project sponsored by the resort. I learn about Coyote’s family in the Pleiades, and how “ancient wisdom dances with modern science.”

The dance is happening across Utah, with all of the state’s “” national parks receiving dark-sky certification from the non-profit organization DarkSky International (formerly the International Dark-Sky Association). The state also has — where public policy and initiatives protect against light pollution and educate people — than anywhere else on Earth. I’m awestruck in these wide-open, star-filled spaces and find a kind of levity in spirit. ��ó����ó.

While Indigenous Peoples like the Diné and Southern Paiute in Utah have long revered the innate beauty and balance of the natural world, recent scientific studies also suggest that observing dark skies and their stars may help decrease stress and increase well-being.

What we get from the stars is a — a “feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world,” as psychologist Dacher Keltner defines in his book, “Awe”— which is also a form of wellness.

My lesson in scotobiology, or the science of how darkness is essential to life (“skotos” is Greek for darkness), continues at my next glamping site, . Another sleek, safari-inspired sanctuary, it is the world’s first DarkSky-certified resort.

I immerse myself in the property’s nocturnal-themed offerings, from night-sky trivia and yogastrology (outdoor yoga guided by zodiac signs and “cosmic nudges”) to a Meteor Mimosa and campfire s’mores. But the main attraction is still the vast darkness — and brightness — above.

Here, more of Utah’s gargantuan geological features — the stark shapes of Lone Rock and Navajo Mountain — become dark latticework for gleaming stars, asterisms, constellations, clusters, moons, planets, nebulae and galaxies. The campfires where other guests are roasting marshmallows are mirrored in the sky above, alongside the perpetually suspended big horn sheep and glittering rabbit net.

I stand on the periphery in the dark where everything is illuminated in a synchronicity for which I now have a word: ��ó����ó.

Barb Sligl travelled as a guest of the Utah Office of Tourism, which did not review or approve this article.