Exploring Eastern Utah: USU Eastern Speaker Series, ‘From the Book Cliffs to Blanding’

USU Eastern is presenting speakers to discuss the unique history and environment of Eastern Utah. “From the Book Cliffs to Blanding: A Panoramic View of Eastern Utah” is a series of six faculty speakers found and introduced by the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, USU Eastern Learning and Library Commons and the Merrill-Cazier Library.  

The program began on Sept. 11 with Evey Gannaway Dalton, assistant professor of geology at USU Eastern. The speakers span from professors of geology, paleontology, history and wildland resources to the director of the USU Eastern Prehistoric Museum.  

The final speaker will be Terry Tempest Williams, a well-renowned author and a writer-in-residence at the Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass. Williams used to be a member of faculty at the University of Utah.  

Michael Harris, head of Eastern and statewide library services,  is in charge of the program. He recruits professors and faculty to speak within their specialized fields.  

Harris reached out to Williams to be the last speaker of the series, as she intends to look more toward the future of Eastern Utah as it coincides with climate change and other factors. 

“Since this is a USU publication, even though she will be doing this talk at Price, she and her agents have agreed to allow us to do a closed Zoom webinar and broadcast that Q&A to anyone in the USU community,” Harris said. “They can log into a Zoom webinar and attend that session virtually.”  

Harris was inspired by his goal to increase the library’s outreach and the unique environment at USU Eastern. He said he learned about the rich geologic and paleontological history of the area from the first two speakers of the series.  

“I started talking to some faculty members about research talks at the library,” Harris said. “I feel like these are a great way to connect our students and potentially off-campus community members with the intellectual life of our faculty. So people know what faculty are working on outside of just their regular teaching assignments.” 

The last three speakers will present in 2025 on Feb. 12, March 18 and April 7. Recordings of previous speakers will be available on the USU Eastern website.  

The most recent speaker was Sunshine Brosi, an associate professor of wildland resources at USU Eastern. She spoke on Nov. 12, and her talk was titled “Unique Plants and Animals: The Flora and Fauna of Eastern Utah.”  

“She is very approachable, very knowledgeable,” Harris said. “She’s someone who just — she laughs. So she’s a very engaging speaker.”  

Harris predicted Brosi would give an in-depth overview of the plants and animals of Eastern Utah and inevitably talk about one of her favorite species — kit foxes.  

The kit fox is listed as a vulnerable species in Utah. They dig burrows other species use and are an important part of the ecosystem they inhabit. Brosi brought up kit foxes several times throughout the presentation, professing her love for the species and emphasizing their endangerment.  

“It’s like a small fox that lives in the desert, and it’s uniquely desert adapted,” Brosi said in an interview to the Utah Statesman. “It has great big ears, and it has hair on the bottom of its feet so it can walk in the hot desert.” 

Brosi brought attention to other vulnerable and rare species in Utah, such as the endangered little brown myotis, one out of the 16 species of bat found in Utah.  

According to Brosi, there is a high number of threatened plants in Utah, including the endangered Ute lady’s tresses, an herb found in low mountain areas.   

Brosi also talked about the San Rafael Swell, a semi-desert environment that houses up to 120 rare species of plants, including the San Rafael cactus. The cactus can only be found in the swell and is endangered due to being collected or trampled on.  

The presentation’s structure was described as a “virtual road-trip” through Eastern Utah, starting at high elevations with higher levels of precipitation, going down the mountains, through semi-desert and ending in the desert. Brosi talked about soil qualities and different species that could be found in these environments and how elevation plays a role.  

Brosi brought up how to assist endangered species and prevent more from being threatened. She emphasized the importance of being educated and understanding where food and water comes from and the impacts of individual actions. 

“One of the best things that we can do is to recreate responsibly,” Brosi said. “Wherever people go, if they go to Moab or Price or anywhere between, understand the impacts of whatever they’re creating, mountain biking or hiking or a TV or anything, understanding the psychological impacts of that.”  

Josh Lively is the curator of paleontology at USU Eastern’s Prehistoric Museum. On Oct. 23, Lively spoke about the variety of turtle fauna that once called Utah home, living among the dinosaurs over 75 million years ago. 

“Turtles were actually very, very abundant and diverse in the ecosystem here in Utah,” Lively said. “75 million years ago, we had at least 17 species of turtles living in Utah at the time.”  

One such species is the Arvinachelys goldeni, dating back to the late Cretaceous period. Arvinachelys are classified as baenidae, an extinct family of freshwater turtles.  

“There’s a critter I named back in 2015 called the Arvinachelys,” Lively said. “This turtle is really neat because unlike most turtles which have a flat snout, this thing has a really expanded snout.”  

Arvinachelys goldeni translates to “bacon turtle” in latin, named for its distinctive pig-like snout. This pig-snouted turtle went extinct over 40 million years ago when Utah’s climate went from swampy lowlands to dry desert. 

Today, only one species of native turtle inhabits the red rocks of Washington County: The Mojave Desert Tortoise. This sandy-colored reptile spans from the lower tip of California through Southern Nevada up to Southwestern Utah.  

“The big reason why we have so few turtles in Utah today compared to the age of the dinosaurs is because the climate has dramatically changed,” Lively said. “Back then, we were right on the edge of a shallow interior seaway.”  

Over 60 million years ago a large, inland sea known as the Cretaceous Seaway split North America into two landmasses, with Utah located right on its edge. As a result, Utah’s climate was much warmer with many coastal swamps and lakes creating the perfect environment for aquatic turtles.  

“Only having one species of native turtle in Utah is really an artifact of the Ice Age and moving all of those more favorable habitats much further south of Utah,” Lively said.  

According to Lively, development in Washington County is the biggest threat to eastern Utah’s native tortoise.  

“There’s only a very small area in lower Washington County where the desert has favorable habitat,” Lively said. “There are roads and housing that people want which cuts right across this habitat.”  

Furthering protections for places such as Red Cliffs Desert Reserve could safeguard Mojave Desert Tortoise populations. However, this reserve is up for nearby potential development plans as part of the Northern Corridor Highway project. 

“A lot of people here in the states are all about this kind of runaway development,” Lively said. “This is a decision for our populace here, whether or not we care enough about things like the Desert Mojave Tortoise.”  

The series will move into the indigenous and material records of Eastern Utah with museum director Tim Riley’s lecture, painting a complete picture of Eastern Utah’s rich history, from fossils to culture.   

“I’m going to talk a little about how we can tell the stories of people from the stuff they left behind — their cooking pots and tools, their remnants of their house and from broken debris from their daily lives,” Riley said.  

Small hunter-gatherer bands, called Paleo-Indians by archeologists, were the first inhabitants of the Americas, utilizing stone tools to hunt megafauna. Around 8,500 B.C., humans entered the archaic period. People learned to harvest the desert, and inventions such as earth ovens and grinding stone tools arose in this era.  

Corn was first introduced to Utah from Mexico 2,000 years ago and spread across North America. This era saw people living in pit houses, using greyware pottery and working primarily as corn farmers.  

The direct descendants of these groups are the Ute, Paiute and Shoshone tribes in Eastern Utah. 

“Most of what we see on the landscape around here is from those farming groups,” Riley said. “They’re staying in places longer and investing in spaces longer.”  

Rock art throughout Nine Mile Canyon, tools and ceramics preserved at the Prehistoric Museum provide a glimpse into this time frame. Similar to protecting Eastern Utah’s local fauna, questions have been raised about preserving this cultural history.  

“Some say the best way to preserve history is to leave it all in place — don’t disturb it,” Riley said. “But then there are other things we see that naturally decay or fall apart.”  

Tools or other objects made from perishable materials often disappear from the record due to the natural decay process, dubbed the “missing majority” in archeology. Human intervention is often required to preserve these objects in museums and archives.  

However, human presence also impacts spaces which aren’t perishable, such as ancient homes or rock art sites, leaving indelible traces. 

“If something is in a rock shelter or an overhang, it will probably continue to preserve there,” Riley said. “The problem is that people come and visit those spaces. When I was excavating a rock shelter in the buck horn wash area, you could see bullet casings and fire rings, and even when I dug down into the sediment, I found things like rubber balls and receipts from the 1960s.”  

Riley’s lecture aims to share the material history of Eastern Utah while urging the importance of protecting it by being aware of the impact visitors leave and remaining sensitive to the different voices of this story.  

“My specialty is the material culture — the stuff that’s left behind,” Riley said. “My talk is going to be about rock art, how we can visit these sites with respect and how we can best respect those cultures as well as their descendent cultures today.”  

Starting from the beginning, USU Eastern’s lecture series shared the geologic history of dinosaurs and native fauna.  

“Utah has a phenomenal paleontological record of the evolution of life on our planet,” Lively said. “Very few places can you see fossils from every geological time period — you can do that in Utah.”  

The lecture series will wrap up with Eastern Utah’s people-centric history, from the indigenous to the immigrant. By telling these stories, the lecture series hopes to keep Eastern Utah’s past alive for decades to come.  

“It’s up to the present to preserve the past for the future,” Riley said.