LAS VEGAS, Nev. (FOX5) – Las Vegas may be known as one of the brightest cities on earth, but some motivated locals have taken it upon themselves to rid the city of rogue lights popping up on the mountains.
And those lights don’t have an off switch. FOX5 heard from a neighbor near Frenchman Mountain in the east valley about the many steps his group takes to deal with the light pollution, thanks to solar lights popping up hundreds of feet up the ridge.
Members of the Light Hunter League have had enough.
“For me, I just look at it every night from my backyard and it just got more and more annoying.”
Take it from one of the members of the makeshift group who wants to stay anonymous and avoid any potential retaliation for taking down the markers. “We do have some haters that say, hey the valley has tons of lights, what does one make a difference? but, you’d be surprised even just a small light on the mountain can look super bright when it’s that dark around it.”
He says he’s gotten his steps in hiking up these mountains time and time again.
“That shouldn’t be up there, it doesn’t make sense. And then another popped up, and then another, then it turned into three. And I had to do something about it.”
Even though the solar lights are most visible at night, it’s too dangerous to walk the trails after sundown because it’s hard to see anything.
That’s why one member on his team of about eight with the Light Hunter League helps look for the lights from above.
“We have a drone operator now who helps with the reconnaissance, so we have a better idea of where to hike to.”
But that’s after he does extensive mapping on the ground. The light hunter says he noticed the lights popping up about a year and a half ago.
The most recent takedown happened in early February of this year. But it’s not just people he’s worried about being bothered by the lights.
“There’s critters all over the place. it doesn’t seem like a big thing, but when a lot of people start doing it and a lot of lights start popping up, who knows what kind of disturbance it could have on wildlife.”
A Nevada Department of Wildlife official tells FOX5, “It is difficult to say whether a scattering of solar lights would add an additional impact on the amount of light pollution already established in the Las Vegas area.”
Still, the light hunter wishes the perpetrators would remember one important variable. “This is public land, there’s laws against dumping objects on public land.”
Speaking of laws, he explains he hasn’t contacted police about it since he doesn’t have any leads to give them.
He just hopes the Bureau of Land Management will install a trail cam to catch who’s doing this.
The FAA tells us it’s looking into whether any pilots have complained about the stray lights on the mountains.
The protocol is for the FAA to the contact the landowner to address it, in this case, the Bureau of Land Management.
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