Blanding, Utah

Blanding sits on White Mesa at about six thousand one hundred feet, the largest town in San Juan County and a gateway to some of the most concentrated archaeology in North America. The land here was hunted and traversed by Ute people for centuries before Mormon pioneer Walter Lyman scouted the mesa in eighteen ninety-seven and determined that a canal from Johnson Creek could irrigate crops. Digging began and the first families arrived in nineteen oh five.

The community was renamed Blanding in nineteen fourteen, using the maiden name of the wife of Thomas Bicknell, an eastern benefactor who offered books to towns that took his name. Natural Bridges National Monument and the Four Corners region lie within an hour in every direction, and Ancestral Puebloan ruins run through the canyon walls just below the mesa edge. The White Mesa Ute community, whose reservation lies immediately south of town, is one of the last communities in Utah where the Ute language is still actively spoken.