On the night of October 17, 2026, Goblin Valley State Park will hold a star party called Spooky Mythology in the Sky, running from 7:30 to 8:30 p.m. The park's own event listing is spare -- "Star Party! Contact park for more details" -- but the setting does most of the talking. Goblin Valley is a designated International Dark Sky Park, and its remote corner of the Colorado Plateau delivers night skies that DarkSky International has compared in quality to Gold-tier parks like Natural Bridges National Monument, Capitol Reef, and Canyonlands. The difference is the crowd: Goblin Valley draws far fewer visitors than its higher-profile neighbors, so the same spectacular sky comes with far fewer people standing in front of it.
The name of the event is a nod to the landscape itself. Goblin Valley's signature feature is its thousands of hoodoos -- freestanding sandstone pinnacles capped by a harder rock layer that protects the softer stone beneath, leaving mushroom-shaped figures standing as tall as several meters. Locals call them goblins, and the resemblance to the mythical creatures of folklore is what gave the park its name. Along with Bryce Canyon National Park, roughly 185 miles to the southwest, Goblin Valley holds one of the highest densities of hoodoos anywhere in the world. Standing among them after dark, with a mythology-themed program overhead, is a different experience from seeing them in daylight.
The park's origin story is nearly as strange as its rocks. In the 1920s, a miner named Arthur Chaffin was searching for an alternate route between Green River and Caineville when he and two companions reached a vantage point about a mile away and looked down on a lowland full of bizarre rock formations ringed by eroded cliffs. He called it Mushroom Valley. Records indicate cowboys had stumbled onto the area earlier while searching for lost cattle, but Chaffin's discovery is the one credited with eventually leading to the land's protection. He never forgot the view. In 1949 he returned and spent several days photographing the hoodoos he had first seen some twenty years earlier. As those photographs circulated, word spread about the valley of mushroom rocks, and sightseers began making the trip.
To protect the formations from vandalism, the State of Utah established Goblin Valley State Preserve, which became Goblin Valley State Park in 1964. The geology behind the goblins was set in motion roughly 170 million years ago, when the area lay beneath a shallow sea. As higher ground eroded away, sand and silt washed down and settled across a wide tidal flat, building layers of sandstone separated by weaker shale and siltstone. The softer layers broke down first, leaving the harder sandstone to be carved by water, wind, and ice into the shapes visitors now wander among. Erosion is still at work, which means the goblins are not a fixed exhibit; they are a process, slowly changing.
Hollywood has borrowed the landscape more than once. Portions of the 1999 film Galaxy Quest were shot here to stand in for an alien planet, and in 2010 an area not far from the park served as the Martian surface in John Carter. The park's own materials lean into the comparison, describing a valley "often compared to Mars" and inviting visitors to camp "among the nooks and gnomes." It is the kind of place that reads as otherworldly in daylight and genuinely eerie after sundown -- which is precisely the mood a spooky-mythology star party is built around.
The park's dark-sky work is not incidental. Goblin Valley received its International Dark Sky Park designation in 2016, and park leadership and staff have committed to protecting local night skies while running an outreach program built around the idea that "half the park is after dark." That framing shows up in the park's programming throughout the year, from astronomy courses run with the Utah Master Naturalist program -- covering planets, stars, constellations, nebulae, and black holes -- to seasonal ranger-led events. The October calendar at Goblin Valley leans into the holiday: a Sunset Hike themed around spooky animals of the desert follows on October 24, and a Full Moon Hike on October 25.
The practical appeal of the October 17 star party is that it is a state park event, not a ticketed production. It is open to anyone who shows up, at low cost, with no reservation system standing between a visitor and the sky. The park sits at the edge of the San Rafael Swell in Emery County, in southeastern Utah, on 9,915 acres of land. Its official address is 18630 Goblin Valley Road, Green River, Utah -- though the state park system's own event listing for this star party gives a Helper, Utah address, so anyone planning to attend should confirm the meeting location with the park directly. The park's phone numbers are 435-259-3710 and 435-275-4584, and its visitor center is open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily.
Visitors should also plan around the park's rhythms. Goblin Valley's own guidance warns that it can be exceptionally busy on weekends and during spring break periods, and recommends arriving in the morning or later afternoon to avoid crowds. Park hours run 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. every day. For a night event, that means arriving with time to settle in before the 7:30 p.m. start, and dressing for a desert evening at roughly 5,000 feet of elevation, where temperatures drop quickly once the sun is gone.
What the park has not published is the content of the program itself -- which myths, which constellations, which stories the ranger plans to pair with the sky. The event listing points anyone wanting specifics to contact the park. That leaves the shape of the evening open, but the ingredients are already in place: a valley full of stone figures that folklore named after goblins, a sky dark enough to be internationally certified, and an October night to stand under it.