BLANDING — Edge of the Cedars State Park Museum is not the kind of Utah state park built around hiking, camping, boating or other outdoor recreation. Instead, this park is about education.

Located in Blanding, the state park focuses on the history of the Native American people in the Four Corners area and southeastern Utah.

About 11,800 people visited the park in the last year, according to Utah State Parks visitation numbers, making it the fourth least visited Utah State Park.

However, park and museum curator Jonathan Till feels if people give it a chance, it will become one of their favorite parks because they will learn something new.

“The history of Native American peoples here in the Four Corners area is just so beautiful, so amazing,” Till said.

Edge of the Cedars State Park Museum curator Jonathan Till talks about the museum. About 11,800 people visited the park in the last year. (Photo: John Wilson, KSL)

‘Native American people were here, and they were engaging that landscape’

That history is not just something visitors see inside the museum.

It is also outside, where the remains of an ancient Puebloan site sit just behind the building.

“What we have here is a community center from a thousand years ago,” Till said.

The site includes a Great House and a great kiva. You can also climb down a small ladder to go inside and get a sense of what they were like back then.

“These are places for people to gather to work out issues of God and politics,” Till said.

The site helps visitors understand how important the Four Corners region was to indigenous cultures.

“We are here in the middle of all that,” Till said. “A thousand years ago, this was the center place, and those far-flung places like Salt Lake, that’s the boonies. This was the center place a thousand years ago.”

Inside the museum, the story goes back even farther.

One of the artifacts Till pointed out is a Clovis point, a tool that dates back thousands of years.

“It’s a 13,000-year-old tool,” he said while pointing to it in a display case.

Till said the tool is evidence of how long people have been living in the region.

“Native American people were here, and they were engaging that landscape,” he said. “We have some good ideas that they were here even earlier. But it’s with Clovis that we can, kind of, hang our hat on that knob and go, ‘Oh, yeah, people are here.'”

The museum also includes sandals made of yucca that are about 1,500 years old.

“You’ll notice the tread side has an elaborate design woven into it,” Till said while looking at the sandals.

Another exhibit highlights the role dogs played in the lives of people who lived in the region.

Till said a rope in a display case shows that people not only had domesticated dogs, but also used their hair in textiles.

The museum also has a ladder found in a kiva on Cedar Mesa. Till said tree-ring dating helped researchers determine when it was made.

“We can get down to the year with tree-ring dating,” he said.

The importance of Edge of the Cedars State Park

For Till, archaeology is one reason the park continues to matter.

“We keep learning so much about the history through archaeology, archaeological research here,” he said. “But we’re also learning tons from descendant communities.”

Till said the area is connected to many Native American peoples, including the Paiute, Ute, Diné and Pueblo peoples.

“The landscape around here is known as being an ancestral homeland for many, or most, or maybe all of the Pueblo peoples,” he said.

That deeper connection is what Till hopes visitors understand when they stop at Edge of the Cedars.

Many visitors to the area are on their way to Moab, Monument Valley or Bears Ears.

Even though the state park isn’t one of Utah’s busiest, Till feels it offers something meaningful for those who take the time to visit.

“History is for all of us, and the history of Native American peoples here in the Four Corners area is just so beautiful, so amazing,” he said. “I encourage folks to come and visit.”

The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.