Sure, this article from the NY Times goes into some details about light pollution as well.
OK. I laughed. 
It’s now a rare night that I can see the Milky Way at my home. It used to be a regular sight. The DarkSiteFinder map locates me in a brown zone (between yellow and light green). I suspect if I got myself to a dark green zone on their map, I’d have a good chance of seeing it again.
If you have a large body of water near you (a lake without developed shores for instance) you can boat out into the middle and see it. I grew up on a farm but there were enough lights near us to block out most of the Milky Way. I didn’t get to see it until sailing at midnight on a nearby lake. It is surrounded by rural development so it was a pretty good spot. It looked like a cloudy patch in the sky and I didn’t realize for a few minutes that it was actually the Milky Way I was seeing. Depending on your circumstances it might be easier to take a boat out to the middle of no where than drive somewhere public.
If you are anywhere near Cloudcroft NM, I’d recommend driving out to the towards the solar observatory on a moonless night. Stop at one of the scenic overlooks. Get out and look up. You might want to be holding onto something to keep from falling over backwards. I wish I had been holding onto something.
The Marfa Lights viewing area in west Texas will produce a similar result.
Many areas of the country now sport perpetual high level cirrus and dust clouds from drought out west. Under those conditions you can travel as far from a city as you like, and still see very little.
Mountaintops are generally a good choice. You’ll beat the dust there, but not the cirrus.
I live near Seattle. So even when it’s not cloudy it’s still not really clear, and the city lights are nearby. And there are lots of trees near my house. So it’s hard to see the Milky Way. You can see it, but it’s not very clear, just a faint cloudiness.
On a visit to some friends who live way up in the hills near Albuquerque NM, the Milky Way is completely different. Incredibly distinct.
On the other hand, you wouldn’t have to go far to get a very good view from Mt. Rainier.
I’m confused both by the question and by many of the answers… maybe it’s because I grew up in a town of 30K people where the cloudless sky is clear enough to be able to see that wide belt of tiny lights at any time in the year (ok, yeah, it will be prettier if you go higher than that town’s bare 200m above sea level; in fact, we had the advantage of living in a high floor which put us way above street lights), but basically any time I’ve been in a place where there weren’t clouds or so many lights they blind you to what’s behind them, I’ve been able to look up and point to it.
“How to locate the North Star”, I get. “How to see the Milky Way” is… pretty easy, isn’t it?
Mono lake is pretty good. Probably anything east of the main valley at Yosemite, but west of death valley is good. Generally by the time you get to the midwest, skies are not so clear anymore. The Arrowhead district of Minnesota being a glaring exception.
That sounds like the beginning of a horror movie!
I live in Si Valley, but spend a lot of weekends on the Monterey Peninsula (in and around Carmel). Carmel has no street lights and no stop lights, so you can often see the MW. But… all it takes is the neighbors to have some safety lights on the their house, and poof, it’s gone. So it’s not just city lights, but even a little local light can ruin the view.
LOL, I’d have to go 20 miles out on Lake Michigan to reach a truly dark zone, per the DarkSiteFinger. NOT gonna do that at night, in the dark, on that body of water! Not unless I’m sailing the ferry across to the other side anyway.
I live within 10 miles of downtown Chicago. I’m lucky if I can see the Big Dipper, never mind something like the Pleiades. The Milky Way is right out. My sister lives another 30 miles west, but the urban sprawl is so bad that even out there, light pollution is pretty annoying.
Useful map, worldwide: Light Pollution Map - DarkSiteFinder.com
See post #13
And then your seeing will be ruined by the above-deck lighting. :mad:
In fact, the vast majority of light pollution could be abated by relatively simple measures that are minimal cost (e.g. shrouding streetlights) and ordnances limiting nuisance lighting from advertising and commercial applications. Of course, Flagstaff has a pressing reason (Lowell Observatory) to do this. Tyler Nordgren (professor of astronomy at University of Redlands and the artist responsible for the “Half thr Park is After Dark” National Parks poster series) addresses this in Stars Above, Earth Below: A Guide to Astronomy in the National Parks, which is a very accessible and reasonably comprehensive introduction (or at least a survey) to astronomy and planetology.
I don’t know where you grew up, but in much of Western and Central Europe, and a good portion of the eastern half of the United States, nighttime ambient
illumination is such that the Milky Way is all but invisible. Even well away from local sources of light, the combination of persistant aerosols and over the horizon light sources can still create enough ambient radience (often termed “sky glow”) to wash out the relatively faint light from the galactic disk. And this has gotten dramatically worse over the past half century, in large measure due to outdoor nighttime advertising and ambient illumination such as the persistant light along highways in urban areas, the majority of which is reflected directly into thr sky. I’ve had friends and associates who grew up on the Eastern Seaboard of the US come to California and be amazed at the night sky that can be seen from Big Sur or Joshua Tree, even though these areas are far from the best viewing as they’re affected by ambient light from nearby San Jose and Palm Springs respectively.
Stranger
I first saw it as a kid on the farm in North Dakota that my mother grew up on. I’ve also seen it sailing overnight across the Chesapeake Bay down in VA where it’s pretty wide.
It can be sometimes surprising when/where you can see it.
E.g., several years ago I was on a beach in Santa Barbara CA and noticed this long faint cloud overhead that seemed oddly static.
Oh. It was the Milky Way.
Despite being late summer and right on the edge of a city, it was a quite nice view.
For a really great nighttime view, though, my best experience is in the intermountain West out in the tullies. Egad, the impression that the sky is an actual dome of lights is unshakable.
I looked.
I didn’t see it.
Still, you won’t catch me twenty miles out on a moonless night on lake Michigan.
From the map, it looks like the sky over much of the lower half of the lake is degraded anyway.
If it weren’t suicidal, 20 miles off Copper Harbor in lake Superior on a moonless night might supply some fine views.