Blanding • Rising between Montezuma and Recapture canyons east of the southern Utah town of Blanding, Alkali Ridge once teemed with Native Americans who thrived for centuries. They cultivated squash and maize, hunted wild game and decorated rock faces with prehistoric versions of social media posts that resonate across the ages.
Before their mysterious decline, they erected large settlements housing hundreds of people in stone along the long mesa top where one can look across the canyon country to Bears Ears Buttes and Cedar Mesa to the west and Sleeping Ute Mountain to the east.
Vestiges of the Ancestral Puebloan civilization remain embedded in a network of canyons and mesas around Alkali Ridge, offering thousand-year old clues to how the Anasazi and their predecessors survived on agriculture in the arid, rugged landscape, then vanished in the 13th century.