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Doug McFadden came to southwestern Utah in 1976, when he was hired as the first archaeologist for the Kanab Field Office, Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Doug soon joined forces with Gardiner Dalley, the Cedar City and St. George Districts BLM archaeologist, and together they made a formidable fieldwork team, surveying thousands of acres in both districts, and recording hundreds of archaeological sites. During his tenure at the Kanab District BLM, and later as the archaeologist for the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (1996-2006), Doug, excavated, and helped to excavate, numerous Virgin Anasazi sites in both the Kanab and St. George districts and produced reports on these endeavors (see below). Doug also presented papers at UPAC, the Society for American Archeology, and the Pecos Conference, and he wrote articles for Utah Archaeology and other publications. In the early 2000s he was a driving force in the development of the Kanab BLM Visitor Center which focused on the excavation of the Arroyo Site, a late Pueblo II/III Ancestral Puebloan site, located east of Kanab.
Doug retired from the BLM in 2006. He spent his retirement years conducting contract work in southwestern Utah and northern Arizona concentrating on the issues and areas that he was particularly interested in, primarily local Ancestral Puebloan, Virgin Anasazi, settlement patterns and cultural chronology. He also made time for sailing in the Sea of Cortez with his wife Jo during the winter months, another one of his favorite activities. Doug continued his scholarship after he retired and was in the process of producing a report on the Road Kill Site and early Puebloan occupation of the region. Doug served as a mentor to a numerous professional and avocational archaeologists who worked in the southwestern Utah and the Arizona Strip and he will be remembered as a supportive and collaborative colleague, as well as a great field archaeologist. Sadly, Doug passed away from the effects of pancreatic cancer on August 3, 2022.