In Spring’s Full Swing

A Love Letter from Helles

Little Bone Food Truck

Have you heard about Little Bone? Our new food truck is the cutest and sweetest addition to our family, and we’re officially in love with her! She’s thriving and growing and shining bright with lots of original Hell’s Backbone Grill breakfast delights (including Blue Corn Pancakes, Breakfast Jenchilada, and our biscuits and local pork gravy, aka the Hungry Haymaker) alongside some new menu items created by Jen, Blake, and Lacy. And Little Bone also features – ta-da! – a high-functioning espresso machine that’s making many morning folks Hella happy. Including us!

We’re also thrilled to announce that we’re offering Tuesday and Wednesday dinners at Little Bone when her big sister (the main restaurant) is closed. We’re serving up a beautiful blend of HBG quality and ethos with Little Bone’s energetic spin. Some popular dishes are the Four Corners Smashburger using elk & grass-fed beef, a Spicy Cowgirl Meatloaf Sandwich, the vegan Farmer’s Bowl with roasted veggies and garlic tahini dressing, and a gluten-free Baby’s Got the Blues brownie sundae with a salted butterscotch sauce. We can’t wait for you to meet our newest Hell’s Backbone baby!

The Fight For the Monument Continues

Though it comes as no surprise, we’re devastated by what's being proposed for all public lands and national forests in the US. The distressing news for the Grand Staircase and Bears Ears Monuments is that the new Secretary of the Interior, in cahoots with the Utah governor, senators, and representatives, have shortlisted these beloved wild places for extractive industry of all types. We’re hearing that this time they intend to open up as much as 85 percent of both monuments for destructive commercial purposes.

That said, glimmers of light and hope are always present. To see them, we need only keep our eyes and hearts open. And we really must, lest we all descend into a pit of despair. Hope is a practice, as is activism. As our dear friend Rebecca Solnit said,

“They want you to feel powerless and to surrender and to let them trample everything and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving.  You may need to grieve or scream or take time off, but you have a role no matter what, and right now good friends and good principles are worth gathering in. Remember what you love. Remember what loves you. Remember in this tide of hate what love is. The pain you feel is because of what you love.”

On that note, some very recent and deeply gratifying news is that a coalition of six different tribes have formed an alliance to protect and preserve these Aboriginal lands (similar to what The Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition did in 2015). The new Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument Inter-Tribal Coalition, which includes the Hopi Tribe, the Navajo Nation, the Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians, the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, and the Zuni Tribe, is committed to defending the monument from any attempts to modify its boundaries or reduce protections. We are looking toward their efforts with profound respect while drawing courage and resilience from their actions. We’re committed to standing with them in every way possible, to preserve and save these monuments for generations to come. You can read the full press release from the six tribes here.

We know you love your public lands, and they are very much under direct attack. We encourage you to support the many nonprofits filing lawsuits and using the full force of their abilities to fight for these extraordinary landscapes. You can follow recent developments related to the Grand Staircase and Bears Ears Monuments by becoming a member of Grand Staircase Partners and the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition. We hope you’ll get involved and donate to them, as well as to the Grand Canyon Trust and SUWA. Please call your representatives and governors and let them know this all-out assault on Utah’s beloved monuments is wholly unacceptable. We stand together with the tribes to save Grand Staircase and Bear’s Ears from being sold off to developers and extractive industry.

Springing into Summer

Look up “bustling” in the dictionary this spring and you’ll see some pretty funny pictures of your favorite Hellions. Hey, look, there’s Jen cooking four dishes simultaneously while training new dishwashers while also on the phone with our Bison supplier! Here’s Blake running to the post office to fetch a surprise engagement ring for a customer before racing laps around the dining room with plates of hot food, signing cookbooks, and giving hugs! On the next page (it’s a two-page spread), Morgan is lighting heaters, painting gorgeous signs, adjusting reservations, offering wine recommendations, and formatting this newsletter! And there’s Nina at Guest Reception welcoming overnight visitors, tending the flower beds, and downloading an update from Cloudbeds (all hail our new state-of-the-art reservation system)! And that blurry shot at the bottom of the page is Nick flipping eggs at Little Bone while fixing the leaky sink and overseeing the building of our new spacious parking lot! Together, we’re a highly caffeinated, strength-based, next-level juggling, multitasking montage.

All of which is to say we are beyond grateful for the support we’ve received this spring. We had our busiest-ever April, and May is looking to be a similar situation. This is tremendously helpful as we embark on this exciting new chapter of lodge ownership.

It also means our remaining availability at the lodge is somewhat limited over the next month and a half. But a silver lining for those who haven’t reserved rooms yet: While we welcome a gazillion travelers in the spring, many people don’t realize how dreamy Boulder is in the summertime. Our little town sits at 6,700 feet, so it’s an ideal time to explore the Escalante River and Boulder Mountain. The wildflowers on the mountain are often at their peak in June, and there’s no better time than July and August to enjoy the mountain trails or meander up the Escalante River.

And from a sustainability point of view, it’s a better time to travel, too. In sleepier seasons, your environmental impact is reduced, and you’re supporting small businesses (like ours) that need tourists.

Summer is truly the sweetest time of year to be here, so please consider booking with us during this sublime season! We definitely don’t see the same punishing temperatures of Moab and Zion (and in fact, it’s almost always cooler here than in Salt Lake City), especially under the shade trees at the lodge. And because many national parks travelers steer clear of Southern Utah in the summer months, it’s much less busy here!

To sweeten the pot, from July 1 to August 27, we are offering a 25 percent discount on rooms when you book for a minimum of two nights. Just enter the code CoolNightsDarkSkies in the booking engine to claim this special offer.

As we said in our second cookbook (waxing poetic here, too),

“Think mid-eighties, gentle breezes, smell of wildflowers, birds singing. Think trails that are relatively unoccupied, vistas free of selfie-snapping couples, and our normally jam-packed dining room a much more civilized kind of busy.”

Speaking of our cookbooks, we are no longer making them available through Amazon because along with canceling our prime memberships, we decided to stop being sellers there. We hope you will order them (and other books we carry, along with pantry goods, signature mugs, goat soap, jewelry, prayer flags, and extremely stylish HBG apparel) directly from us, in person or via our website shop or from your local independent bookshops (many of which will let you request and order books online). Join us in boycotting Amazon and prioritizing shopping as small and local as possible!

Mission Possibile!

We’re so grateful to Salt Lake Magazine for giving Hell’s Backbone Grill a “Walking the Talk” award in February! We’ve always tried hard to walk our admittedly ambitious talk, and it’s super gratifying that our efforts continue to be valued. We’re also totally delighted that Outside Magazine named HBG “One of the 50 Best Adventures in U.S., Mexico, and Canada.” As chefs who began our careers very, very much outside (as river chefs on the Grand Canyon and extreme caterers to the first reality television crews in deeply wild places like the Amazon Rainforest of Suriname and the high-altitude zones of the Cascade Mountain Range), we think this is a pretty fun bit of recognition. Especially because while some listings give a passing mention to restaurants, ours is the only one with its very own entry! So please come celebrate with us, and if you have never dined at HBG (which Outside calls “a mecca for recreationists”), check us off this adventure bucket list – while finding even more adventures in the extraordinary wilderness that is our backyard.

Call of the Wild

Since we opened our doors way back in 2000, we have always intended for our business to be a gateway to the vast wilderness surrounding us – a warm hearth for our guests to embark from and return to after exploring. And when we were in the throes of envisioning our new restaurant and lodge model, one of the team’s big goals was to deepen that existing commitment. We’re excited that soon we’ll be sharing an updated collection of resources to help you enjoy some of the lesser-known parts of this spectacular region. Our mission is to facilitate a more intimate and comprehensive experience of the land through experiences such as guided hiking, horseback riding, fishing, and more, while supporting the amazingly knowledgeable and hardworking folks in our community. We’re talking with the many talented massage therapists and wellness practitioners in the area to see how we can bring more of these services to our guests.

We’re also gearing up for a big year at Blaker’s Acres! Our capable team of farmers is in the midst of planning and planting a bounty of produce (corn, beans, tomatoes, peppers, carrots, ten kinds of squash, cucumbers, radishes, greens, and countless truckloads more!), and we’re setting our sights on highlighting all of this beauty through curated farm dinners on the beautiful lodge grounds. We’ve always dreamed of serving extraordinary dinners from our six-acre farm on the lodge grounds, and we’re excited to start dreaming into them this year.

In addition, we’re working with many of the brilliant writers, artists, and thinkers in our network to plan book talks, workshops, and retreats. Ultimately, what drives us – and what we believe we all need most in these troubling times – is connection. We are eager (we might even say Hell-bent) on creating spaces and opportunities to gather and learn and ground ourselves, to create meaning and beauty with which to nourish and nurture one another. It’s with all of this in mind that we’re looking toward the coming months and imagining what we can bring to our community, to the land, and to the future.

We’ll keep in touch as our various plans and dreams firm up, and in the meantime, please know how much we appreciate and care for you all. You continue to make all this possible, and it’s our greatest joy to build relationships with you while chatting over a basket of warm biscuits or during a moment of reverence overlooking the bird sanctuary. You, our team, the broader Boulder community, and this immeasurable place we're fortunate to call home continue to give us hope.

Thank you for being with us for a quarter of a century. We look forward to seeing you and celebrating with you soon!

With endless gratitude,
Blake & Jen (& Morgan, Nick, Nina & all the Hellions)

Morning After

Again the chance to praise
the same room, the same floor,
the same view, the same tea,

the same image in the same mirror,
which today is startlingly not the same.
Again the chance to find the miracle

in the leaves that fall, the miracle
in the morning sun, the miracle
in the willows beside the pond.

Again, the chance to fall in love
with the same sky, the same field,
the same dirt, the same broken world.

Again, the chance to show up
with these same tired arms
and put them to work,

the same work as yesterday,
which is to learn to lift up,
to heal, to carry, to build,

to be in the world, to praise
the same room, the same floor,
the same view, the same tea.

— Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
from All the Honey (Samara Press, 2023)