Edge of the Cedars State Park Museum – Blanding, Utah

The History of Edge of the Cedars State Park Museum

Edge of the Cedars State Park Museum sits in a residential neighborhood in Blanding, in southeastern Utah. It is built next to an Ancestral Puebloan village, and the museum holds the largest collection of Ancestral Puebloan pottery and artifacts on display in the Four Corners region.

The Village

The village behind the museum was lived in from about AD 825 to 1125. It was a Chacoan era great house, with room blocks and a great kiva. Parts of it have been excavated and restored, and the kiva can be entered by ladder. Much of the rest is foundations, the outlines of rooms low in the ground.

The Name

Cowboys out of Bluff camped here in the late 1800s and called the spot Edge of the Cedars. The site sits on a natural line between forested country to the north and open treeless land to the south, and cedar is the local name for the Utah juniper.

The Museum and the Sun Marker

The museum opened in 1978 on 6.6 acres. It is a state park, a museum, and an archaeological repository, meaning artifacts from sites across the region are kept here. Inside are pottery, basketry, jewelry, tools, and rock art murals painted by Bluff artist Joe Pachak. Pachak also built the Sun Marker that stands on the grounds, a sculpture that tracks the movement of light at the solstices, the way Ancestral Puebloan calendars did.

Know Before You Go

• Region: Southwest United States
• Location: San Juan County, southeastern Utah, in the town of Blanding
• Address: 660 West 400 North, Blanding, UT 84511
• Coordinates: 37.6314, -109.4897
• Costs: Utah State Parks day-use fee; check the official site for current rates
• Schedule: Open year-round, Monday through Saturday, roughly 9 am to 5 pm, with reduced winter hours. Closed Sundays. Check the state park site before you go.
• Attraction Type: State Park Museum and Ancestral Puebloan site
• Activities: Museum exhibits, self-guided tour of the village ruins, the restored kiva, the Sun Marker, interpretive nature trail
• Notes:
  • The indoor museum and the outdoor ruins are two separate parts of the visit. Give yourself time for both.
  • The kiva can be entered by ladder. It is worth doing.
  • The outdoor site is compact and mostly self-guided. It does not take long to walk.
  • Closed Sundays, and it closes at 5 pm, so do not arrive too late in the day.
  • Blanding is a good base for the wider area, with Natural Bridges and Hovenweep both within reach.
• Additional Resources: Utah State Parks Official Site

My Visit

My brother and I stopped here in 2006, near the end of a long day of driving. We saw a sign for ruins and pulled in to stretch, not knowing much about the place. We got there close to closing.

Neither of us wanted to keep the staff late, so we went through the museum fast, read what we could, and kept moving. Then they told us we were welcome to walk the grounds outside as long as we wanted. So we did, and we had the place to ourselves.

The village out back is mostly low walls and foundations, with the kiva restored and open. It does not take long to see, but standing on it in the last of the light, with nobody else around and the staff letting us take our time, is the part I remember.