Hello, hello, dear friends!

It’s been quite a while since we’ve sent you all a love letter. We want to say, first, how grateful we are that so many of you have visited us this season. We have been nourished deeply by every hug, tableside chat, and the friendships (old and new) that we’ve made with the many thousands of you who have come to dine and stay with us this year.

Having Grand Staircase back in the news (in a bad way) has been stressful–and it has brought many wonderful new people to our doorstep; from these travails, countless new alliances and friendships have emerged. We’re grateful beyond measure that while tourism, in general, is down about 45 percent in Utah, we are staying afloat because of all of you who are going (literally) out of your way to support our business.

And while we know not all of you made it to Boulder this season, we want to thank you for the love you sent in other ways: the cards and gifts that arrived by post, the thoughtful reviews you wrote, the wonderful people you sent our way, and the beautiful (and sometimes spicy) support you gave us on social media, too. These past months since the dismantling of the Grand Staircase have been heavy, and we are shouldering what we can. We feel buoyed by all of you. Thank you for reaching out with offers of help, queries about what to do, and heartfelt notes. You've shown up for us over the decades in myriad ways—including aiding us when our business was in crisis—and we’ll never, ever forget or know how to thank you properly. We feel you caring about us. The love is big, the love is real, and it is so very, very mutual.

We’ve Been Busy!

With the destruction of Grand Staircase and Bears Ears, Season 26 has been undeniably complicated-–and beautiful beyond measure.

As most of you know, after the monuments were restored in 2021, we recommitted to our project here by purchasing the sixteen-acre property of the Boulder Mountain Lodge, where we had rented our building for twenty-five years. Then we created Little Bone (our frisky baby sister breakfast and lunch restaurant), and expanded our farm team. We’ve since added additional employees, new roles, and way more amenities, infrastructure, and love.

If Season 27 reaffirmed anything, it’s that rooting deeper was the right decision. It’s hard to describe how much joy it’s brought us this year to welcome so many beautiful individuals, groups, and families for meals, weddings, anniversaries, birthdays, memorials, baby blessings, and reunions. We were honored to host the monks of Drepung Loseling twice this year, and we’ve assembled wonderful retreats and author events, and held a weekly local farmers market.

Meanwhile, we’ve made continual improvements to the restaurant, farm, Little Bone, and our retail line, with help from our talented Hellions. We’ve supported our wonderful head chef, Tyler Warren, in rolling out spectacular new dishes; we have a full-time sommelier, Sophia Dirado, on the floor every night; and our dining room manager, Jessie Keiner, has added mightily to our abundant hospitality program. And Birdie Ringquist has brought infinite care and regeneration in her role as our lead farmer.

Our farm store (retail line) continues to grow with us, too, and we’re in the process of getting our second cookbook, This Immeasurable Place: Food and Farming from the Edge of Wilderness, freshened up and reprinted in Canada. We hope to have it back in our online store in time for the holidays! We’ve simultaneously been working with a phenomenal brand designer to expand our website and launch a cohesive and inspiring look for our businesses.

And we continue integrating our values and vision into the Lodge: With the help of an herbalist, we’ve created our own line of natural bath and body products for our rooms, called Canyon Bloom, and we’ve even added a meditation garden under the willow tree by the bird sanctuary!

All of which is to say: Season 27 has been big. Helles is definitely a fully grown, dynamic adult, learning to navigate an uncertain world.

And Then, There's The Monument

There’s so much to say (so read on), but throwing ourselves into the effort to save Utah’s cherished national monuments, Grand Staircase and Bears Ears, has been pretty all-consuming.

Vote For Planet Earth

Writing this newsletter has felt really, truly daunting. But suddenly here we are, closing in on the final days of midterms and feeling a profound sense of urgency to communicate with all of you who care about wild and imperiled landscapes.

In this political climate, it can be risky to speak out, but the more we speak up, the safer we are, and politics has always been on the menu at Hell’s Backbone Grill. We’ve never shied away from using our voice and platform to fight for what we love—and our love for the land that surrounds us is as vast and wild as the lands themselves. So we’ve been pushing hard, both online and in the dining room, to galvanize all our intrepid Hell’s Angels (that’s you!) to get out the vote. Wherever you live, we implore you to vote strategically to support the restoration of protections and funding for Grand Staircase and Bears Ears National Monuments (and all other lands and ecosystems you care about) and to encourage everyone you know to do the same.

In the past eight years, more than six hundred elections in the US were decided—for better or worse—by fewer than ten votes. If our votes didn't matter, they wouldn’t be trying so hard to take them away.

The most straightforward path toward restoring the monuments’ protections is to have a president in two years who will protect them again by executive order. But until then, a blue Congress and Senate can certainly slow down the GOP’s nefarious plans for these places. This is our best collective hope. So we are pleading with you to literally “Vote Blue No Matter Who.”

To paraphrase our friend Rebecca Solnit, your vote is not a love letter; it’s a chess move. If we have any chance of saving the planet, it’s important to relate to voting in this way—as harm mitigation. If your menu of candidate options isn’t entirely appealing to you, please simply vote for the candidate who will best support the well-being of our planet earth. Climate catastrophe is affecting us all globally, and it must be addressed by excellent governance.

The Monumental Task

As most of you likely know, what was once Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears National Monuments now really exist only in our memories, hearts, and in the court. To bring you up to speed:

• Back in 2017, we were participants in a lawsuit against Trump after his executive order illegally reduced Grand Staircase by over 50 percent (you can read all about our part in it in The New Yorker). That lawsuit was brought by Conservation Lands Foundation, Grand Staircase-Escalante Partners, and the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (fun fact: four new species of dinosaurs were found  just last week in what was formerly GSENM). 

• After President Biden was elected, he reversed Trump’s executive orders and restored protections for both Grand Staircase and Bears Ears.

• On July 13, 2026, Trump signed an executive order eviscerating both Grand Staircase  and Bears Ears again—shrinking them by a combined 3 million acres or 90 percent. Utah Governor Spencer Cox and our entire federal delegation stood in the room clapping and cheering. We burned with a sacred, holy rage.

• The intention with the remaining 8.7 percent of Grand Staircase is to divide it into two units (Canyons of the Escalante and the Kaiparowits Horizon); some people are even discussing trying to eventually turn it into a gated national park. Let us be abundantly clear: we loathe this idea. 

• On September 11, the administration opened up the lands cut from the monuments to mining claims. So far, more than 110 claims have been filed: 41 in what was Grand Staircase, and 72 in what was Bears Ears. This is…bad.

   

• But a few weeks ago, a coalition of conservation groups (including Grand Staircase-Escalante Partners, SUWA, and Conservation Lands Foundation) formally requested to reopen our 2017 lawsuit (which was stayed after Biden’s restoration), and on October 15, Federal Judge Tanya Chutkin granted that request. She also put in place an order that says those working to defend the national monuments must be given 48 hours' notice before any destructive activities begin on the ground while the case is pending. The wheels of justice are turning, but slowly.

Reuniting with our attorney and D.C. law firm to update our statements from our 2017 lawsuit has been an intense and wild process, but we’re back at it! Here are some of the effective nonprofits we are partnered with on this effort: Grand Staircase-Escalante Partners, our old and trusted friends at SUWA, The Grand Canyon Trust, The Wilderness Society, The Center for Biological Diversity, Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, Utah Diné Bikéyah, and our beloved Conservation Lands Foundation.

“What I stand on is what I stand for.”

-Wendell Berry

Gathering Up: The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Are Longing For

Glimmering at us through all of the fog, one thing has become incredibly clear: We wish to be of benefit. And although we are so busy that it’s hard to even start a personal load of laundry, the time is now for us to begin our long-imagined nonprofit project, Gathering Up.

The purpose of Gathering Up is to nurture a secure sense of what it is to belong not only on, but to planet Earth. Holding love and reciprocity at the center, we are weaving relationships with wild places, specifically Grand Staircase and Bears Ears, and creating a new meaning-infused approach to bioregional belonging. Guided by the wisdom and traditional ecological knowledge of Indigenous people and matriarchs, we seek to reintegrate the majestic landscapes of the Grand Staircase and Bears Ears regions into the public consciousness by encouraging dedicated actions, cultivating trust-based coalitions, and fostering sustained stewardship of these fragile lands.

For years now, our guests, friends, and families have suggested we form a nonprofit branch, and it was never quite clear to us how to make something of genuine benefit, while keeping it distinct from the work of all the excellent nonprofits we continue to support. Born out of two trips to Washington DC with Dr. Angelo Baca and other Tribal coalition representatives in an effort to lobby Congress, the work ahead of us has become clear.

Blake and Angelo initially met in 2018 at the Telluride Mountain Film Festival, where he was showing his beautiful, award-winning film, Shash Jaa’, about his grandmother and her relationship to their homeplace in Bears Ears. Blake and Angelo’s friendship and long conversations led to a common vision. Angelo is partnering with us in the capacity of Tribal advisor and consultant for Gathering Up. We will be a meaning-making entity in support of all the other valuable work already occurring. Our intent is to complement, not duplicate.

We have been working with an extraordinary team of visionary change makers at the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center (OAEC) in California to help us by being our fiscal sponsor, and we’ve begun the process of defining what our new endeavor can really grow into. We are officially able to receive donations if you would like to help weave this basket of hope and connection, to help honor this place that has gathered us all up, and to support the beginnings of our nonprofit.

Angelo’s very apt advice to us during our visioning retreat was, “Go slow. Be patient. Be reliable. Muster your circle.” We are taking his words seriously. 

Our vision is centered around the symbol of a handmade basket—an integral tool at our farm, used for harvest, collecting seeds, and storing things of value throughout every culture in the world. Baskets are for winnowing, offering, and saving broken pieces of what needs repair. They hold things precious, or even what is mundane but useful.

Gathering Up is a metaphorical basket, where we can hold what’s important to us while adapting and responding to our external circumstances. Into this container we will place our accumulated twenty-seven seasons of inhabiting this landscape and community, our coalition-building work, and the deep relationships we have sustained with all of you. This basket will hold our aspirations to weave us into a future of kindness, reciprocity, goodness and mutual care—and evolve into a space that can nourish more of us, beyond that which a restaurant meal can provide.

“Honor the hands that feed you.”

Dolores Huerta

Rebecca Solnit has a recent book out called The Beginning Comes After the End. It is the corollary to our favorite book of hers, Hope in the Dark, where she shows that during some of the hardest times in human history, new paths forward emerged, often surprising all involved. On the other side of this excruciating moment in our country’s political trajectory, we are poised to meet new opportunities and use what we’ve created for an even greater good. As Rebecca once wrote to Blake before we purchased the lodge, “Having set down roots, perhaps it is now time to lift up wings.”

So, as much as we have our hands full with our many projects, we now hold a precious basket, too.

Gratitude And Grief

As we are sending this letter out on Dia de Los Muertos Day of the Dead, it feels important to us to acknowledge the recent passing of several of our most significant icons and inspirational figures, most notably the mighty Wendell Berry. Blake has spent a lifetime studying his writings about regenerative farming practices, and it has informed the relationship we’ve made to our land and all lands. We pledge to carry forward his values and intentions with care and integrity. Dolly Parton’s music has filled our dining room, she has been a lighthouse in countless ways. We will Always Love Her.

We are indebted to pioneering feminist Gloria Steinem—and the hell she raised in support of women, so being featured in an article in her magazine, Ms., was a life highlight. And just last week, Dolores Huerta also crossed over. We have much to thank her for, including the work she did in her final year to amplify the voices of survivors of sexual assault. Her famous words, “si se puede” or “yes we can,” are a guiding phrase for our own lives and work. And finally, Blake and Jen’s forever celebrity crush, Patrick Stewart.

 May their time among the stars be beautiful.

“The past is written, but the future is left to write.”

~ Sir Patrick Stewart

P.S. For our Utah specific voters, below is Helles’ Voting Guide!

We are advising to vote an emphatic NO on both Amendments. And we are endorsing and actively working to support many great candidates, including three who have impressed us with their commitment to the restoration of protections and funding for Grand Staircase and Bears Ears, should they be elected. We ask you to please vote for Ben McAdams for Utah’s First Congressional District.

We aren’t in his district, so we can’t personally vote for him, but we want everyone in Salt Lake City to know that he came all the way here (you know it’s a hella long drive) to witness Grand Staircase and Bears Ears—and met with us for nearly two hours to listen and converse about why this fragile landscape must be protected for future generations. It was great to hear how passionately he agrees with us, and it was a surprisingly enlivening conversation.

In Utah’s Third Congressional District, the most excellent and heartfelt engineer Kent Udell is running against our nemesis Celeste Maloy, who many people don’t know is an actual Bundy, her uncle is Cliven and her first cousin is Ammon. Words can’t begin to describe how grateful we are to him for running a great race against her. Unlike Celeste, who has received nearly $100,000 in AIPAC funding alone, Kent has refused all outside PAC money, and his campaign is entirely private donor-funded. 

We also love the excellent Diné candidate Tracie Yellowman Tso for HR 69 (a sprawling six-county rural district). Her primary focus these past two weeks has been delivering supplies to families and the elderly in her region of Utah, who are struggling to recover from floods caused by an extreme climate-crisis weather event. She is truly civically minded, and we hope she will win.

We are doing all we can to support these three candidates, and we hope that you will join us.