Dear wonderful friends of Helles,

We began writing this love letter to you on the autumnal equinox, the official first day of fall and one of two days of the year when daylight and darkness are equal. Now, a few weeks later, fall has fully arrived in Boulder, and it’s nothing short of magical, with the light shifting, the air turning slightly crisp, and fruit ripening all around us.

We’ve received so many sweet messages (as in five to ten a day!) inquiring about when we will be closing this year, so we are hereby announcing that we are planning to stay open through Thanksgiving weekend. We love your enthusiasm, and we’ve appreciated your patience. It’s taken time to sort out how we might put on such a big event, considering all the changes in the last four years. But finally…we’re thrilled to say that the answer is YES! We are hosting Thanksgiving at HBG for the first time since 2019! We’re overjoyed to celebrate with you again. We aren’t taking reservations quite yet, but you’ll find more details about Thanksgiving toward the end of this letter.

Currently, reservations are built through November 20th. We be serving dinner as usual the weekend after Thanksgiving with the final evening of our 24th season being Sunday, November 26th. These weekend reservations will go live on Tock at the same time as the three Thanksgiving feast events.

You, our cherished newsletter subscribers, will be the first to know when the events become available on Tock, so please, there’s no need to email or call us, since all booking will be done through Tock. We will send a short & sweet follow-up newsletter with links to reserve in the coming week.

The Practice of Noticing

A word we’ve been living with lately is phenology. It’s the study of nature’s calendar, or the life-cycle events in plants and animals (such as flowering, leafing, hibernation, reproduction, and migration). It’s also a practice of noticing. We’ve been thinking a lot about phenology, and about how, by inhabiting a place for all four seasons (as we have done for nearly a quarter of a century now), we’re able to fully notice how the place is changed, season to season, year to year. Living here in tiny, remote Boulder, on the edge of the spectacular wilderness that is the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, we’re devoted to noticing.

This season, we noticed more Monarch butterflies than we’ve seen in years—and we notice that they’ve now left on their migration. We notice the hummingbirds at our feeders dwindling in number as they fly away this month, heading south to their wintering grounds. And we are watching the turkey vultures “kettling,” gathering in thermals as they prepare to migrate to a lower elevation, where they’ll hatch their eggs and raise their young before returning to Boulder on the vernal equinox. (Side note: Blake leads the charge in noticing and admiring turkey vultures, since a big group or  “committee” of them—seventy or more—sleeps each night in a huge tree adjacent to her yard. If you ever have questions about turkey vultures, ask Blake; she’s full of fun facts!)

 It is a sacred and powerful act to witness these migrations—to observe so many creatures leaving and returning, leaving and returning. It’s a gift that comes from staying put, holding ground. And it is, in some ways, a lot like running a restaurant—being present with who comes and goes and comes back again. We are always marking with tenderness the goodbyes and happily awaiting the returns.

More than anything this year, we have noticed the effects of a wet winter and an abundance of rain—and, along with the sense of relief of being (if only temporarily) out of the drought, we have noticed what, as a result of the rain, comes alive in the desert. We had a “super bloom” this year and saw flowers we’d never encountered before. We’re also noticing at this time of year that all the weeds on the farm are frantically putting on seeds, which means we are frantically pulling them! Another thing we’re observing is early color on the leaves of the trees. In years with generous rain, the colors tend to be much more vibrant, and this year is no exception! So, for any leaf peepers in the crowd, we’re already experiencing glorious foliage. It is peaking on the mountain but over the course of the next month, it will spread down to the canyons, giving everyone ample time to enjoy the autumnal finery of every tree dressed in yellows and golds.

“The eyes of the future are looking back at us and they are praying for us to see beyond our own time. They are kneeling with hands clasped that we might act with restraint, that we might leave room for the life that is destined to come. To protect what is wild is to protect what is gentle. Perhaps the wilderness we fear is the pause between our own heartbeats, the silent space that says we live only by grace. Wilderness lives by this same grace. Wild mercy is in our hands.”
- Terry Tempest Williams

Just Peachy

All of that rain delivered an unexpected bounty to us. It turns out it was fortuitous that we fallowed the farm from our annual crops this year, as we’ve experienced a volume of fruit we could never have dreamt of! For the first time in our restaurant’s history, every single one of our fruit trees fruited, and they fruited big! Our walk-in fridges are currently full of peaches, and the trees are packed with peaches, and we are still harvesting peaches! Meanwhile, the season of pears and plums and apples is upon us as well. We have boards propping up the laden branches so they don’t break, and we’re culling the smaller fruits as fast as we can and feeding those to the goats and our chicken flock. We’ve even brought in former employees just to help us process fruit at night. The dehydrators are running, the pots are bubbling with jam, and we are cutting and IQF-ing and bagging for the freezer. (We  purchased a massive new freezer just to store all of the fruit!) Suffice it to say fruit has been an epic project this year. So: If we also had to deal with pickling hundreds of pounds of cucumbers and zucchinis? Forget about it! We’d be entirely over our heads. Jen is busy enough being a many-armed kitchen goddess, filling her hours jamming and putting up the harvest, while also working with her small-but-mighty prep team (herself, Tony, and Anna) to produce the lion’s share of the food that arrives on the menu.

Still: too much gorgeous fruit is a great problem to have, especially for our new executive chef, Tamara Stanger, who is, as the saying goes, making pie while the sun shines! (That’s the saying, right?) Tam is famous for her meat pies and sweet pies (check out her Instagram account, @pieruleseverythingaroundme), and she’s been baking exquisite creations daily from our prodigious yield. We’re also up to our chins in beautiful jams and jellies and preserves. Think crabapple, pear, peach, apricot, and apple, as well as Glenora grape from Blake’s heirloom vines. They’re dazzling on a slice of warm toast, stirred into our dreamy creamy oatmeal, spread on our blue corn pancakes, spooned on top of ice cream, and of course, sandwiched with peanut butter. They’re also shelf stable for a few years, and available in our farmstand and online shop. What a steal it is to get gold in a jar, from blossom to ball jar! These preserves make popular gifts, too, especially when paired with a set of our cookbooks!

Greener Pastures

We mentioned in our last newsletter that we had hired our rancher friend Andy Rice to bring 200 goats to the farm for three days to help us regenerate our pasture. We planted hundreds of pounds of seeds: a veritable smorgasbord, including radishes, oats, field peas, clovers, sunflowers, and beans. After a whole summer of preparing for them, they arrived this week: mama goats, daddy goats, baby goats, old goats, tween goats, angora goats, friendly goats, goats with horns, frisky goats, plump goats, svelte goats, goats of all shapes and sizes and ages and breeds, bleating and eating and feeding our soil. Goats are a class of animals called ruminants, which means they chew their cud; they have four-compartment stomachs specially designed to digest roughage. Their survival strategy is to eat many different foods, and they’re selective about what they ingest—and they process their food really well—so after eating, they poop on our pasture and give it the perfect probiotic the soil needs! (Another side note: we’re pretty confident that’s the first usage of the word poop in our newsletter, in case you wondered.)

We also hosted our annual garlic party in July, a symbolic (if not quite chronological) marker of the halfway point of the season. Our entire crew came out to harvest, separate, and braid garlic (not to mention swim in the pond, share a great lunch Jen whipped up, and tell tales of garlic harvests of yore). With some 18 years of seed garlic under our belts, our garlic is a true Boulder local at this point. People always ask what variety it is. The answer is it’s really our own by now! Back in 2006 when we started the farm with Blake’s brother, Nathanael, we purchased three or four kinds of seed and were given some by a friend, and every year since, we’ve selected the nicest heads for replanting. Those varieties crossed up, and we haven’t added any outside seed, so now what we have is our own special garlic, developed on our farm. We call it Helles’s Pride. It’s sweet, tasty, and oh-so-garlicky, and it stores well over winter. We save all the extra heads and use them in our spring dishes. And—perhaps because of all that rain—we noticed this season’s garlic broke all of our previous records in terms of size and yield. We harvested some of the largest heads we’ve ever seen anywhere—some were the size of baseballs! We saved those for the seed, which we’ll plant later on this month.

We Give Thanks For So Much This Year

And… back to Thanksgiving! This has always been an incredibly special gathering, and we’ve missed hosting it these past four years. We’re working diligently now to create a new formula for this year’s Thanksgiving—one  that will be appropriate and celebratory and also take into account our guests’ varying comfort levels with Covid, etc. We’re presently building the event on Tock, and we think we’ve arrived at an achievable plan.

As a reminder, you, our cherished newsletter subscribers, will be the first to know when the events go live on Tock, so please channel your enthusiasm into securing lodging while we finish building out the events. There’s no need to email or call us. All booking will be done through Tock. We will send a short & sweet follow-up newsletter with links to book in the coming week.

Here’s what we know so far…

We know we’ll offer three seatings, and that we’ll serve locally raised heritage breed Five Forks Farm turkey and Jen’s trio of gravies, along with copious other delights—some traditional favorites and some new dishes we’re dreaming up with Chef Tamara. We will be making our cranberry-cherry sauce, various kinds of pickles, and Blake’s fabulous bread braids with whipped sage butter. There will absolutely be piñon butter mints and chocolate-chile bourbon pecan pie and luscious mashed potatoes and creamed spinach and moky mac. We know we’ll offer an additional wine-pairing option. And we know the price will be $185 per person, not including tax or gratuity (children 4-12 will be $85, free for 3 and under). We are happy to offer a vegetarian menu, but we can’t provide a vegan version, because butter is a critical component of our holiday dishes, desserts, and candies.

We also know we’ll be offering both indoor and heated patio seating this year, which means more reservations will be available than ever before. In happy, related news, we now have high-powered, ceiling mounted electric heaters and have added a porch enclosure system to our lovely outdoor dining space. Because of the additional seating, securing a reservation will be the easy part this year. The more challenging part will be finding a place to stay, since lodging options are limited that time of year.

Therefore, if you’re planning to come for Thanksgiving, the first step is to secure your accommodations as you probably know, we are on the grounds of the beautiful Boulder Mountain Lodge.

It’s an honor to host this celebration and share the harvest with you—and this year, considering the astonishing love and support we’ve received from you all, it feels even more significant to mark the occasion with some of you. We are thankful we’re in a position to do so again.

Ring of Fire

We don’t quite know what to think about it, but apparently the tourism board is predicting that 25,000 people will be coming to the region for the Ring of Fire eclipse on Saturday, October 14th! Our area has been named one of the most scenic places to witness the solar eclipse. We’re already fully booked for dinner (and we have a lengthy waitlist going) but we will be offering a special take-out menu. So, depending on your level of commitment to seeing the eclipse from Boulder, it might be a good weekend to visit—or a good weekend to avoid!

Progress Report

It is incredibly kind and humbling, how so many of you still regularly check in to ask how we’re faring, to see if we’re going to be ok. The update is that we’ve incorporated many significant changes, and with all of your support, we have made great strides toward stabilizing, but we’re not “out of the woods” yet. (Any Taylor Swift fans out there? That’s the song that’s been in Blake’s head all season.)

Some excellent news is that we are beginning to foresee a more gentle and sustainable future. Under the steady hand of our general manager, Morgan Reedy, we have built a terrific team in the kitchen and front of house, with a lovely combination of our amazing long-term Hellions and really remarkable, talented, and caring additions—and they’re almost all planning to return next year, which will make getting season 25 off the ground much more joyful and sane. Tock has helped us maximize our dining room seating in a manageable way and has greatly reduced the number of last-minute cancellations and “no shows.” Probably the most relieving and exciting update is that in September we accomplished the signing of a very supportive lease agreement with our landlords, the owners of Boulder Mountain Lodge. We are grateful that they're working with us where we are, in this time of our applied efforts toward recovery.  We’re still very much in an ambitious and complex process and are just profoundly grateful for the ongoing support, concern, and love from all of you. We feel the love and send it streaming back to you.

A Monumental Relief

We posted about this on Instagram, but for those who don’t follow us there, we recently celebrated the 27th birthday of formal protections for the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. As many of you know, we would never have moved to Boulder to open the restaurant if not for the work of President Clinton and Bruce Babbitt to establish GSENM, so we’re extraordinarily grateful for their foresight and efforts to preserve and protect these 1.9 million acres. We also bow deeply to both President Biden and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland for restoring these precious public lands after they were downsized and opened up to extractive industries. And we were monumentally relieved recently when the lawsuit by the state of Utah against President Biden and Secretary Holland to again overturn the monument designations was dismissed with prejudice by a district judge! Find out more about supporting the monument through Grand Staircase Escalante Partners.

That said, we want to remind you how important it is to work on your voting plan. The House of Representatives determines appropriations and protections for public lands, so those of us who love wild places need to focus all our efforts on regaining the house and keeping the senate. We ourselves remain committed to fighting to keep our monuments safe and intact in perpetuity.

We are also committed to staying hopeful—and we invite you to stay hopeful with us! We recommend a few outstanding books that offer hope: Not Too Late, the most recent by our friend Rebecca Solnit (and Thelma Lutunatabua) and the anthology All We Can Save by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katherine Wilkinson. Our friend and mentor Terry Tempest Williams has co-created a book that’s just come out, called A Wild Promise: An Illustrated Celebration of The Endangered Species Act with artist Allen Crawford. It is a sort of visual praise poem for the animals protected under the Endangered Species Act. We are excited to hold it in our hands when our copy arrives next week. Blake’s also been listening  (again) to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass and finding it a balm for her psyche, soul, and heart.

We invite you to join us in phenology! This restaurant season (a season for which we are especially grateful, since we almost didn’t open our doors this year), we’ve introduced a formal practice of noticing into our family meals. Every day we’re open, we provide a pre-shift sit-down “family meal” for our whole team, and this year, during the meal and pre-service meeting, we decided to focus on the theme of noticing, and how, if we are noticing, we’re spontaneously moved to a place of gratitude in our minds. If we are noticing the trees, for instance, we’re moved to consider the oxygen they produce for us. If we are noticing the rain, we notice it created habitat for pollinators, which led directly to the profusion of fruit on the trees. If we are noticing, we notice that everything in the natural world is worthy of reverence, because the planet makes it possible for us to live. And so, once we notice, how could we be anything but grateful and awed and filled with wonder? With our team, we take a moment to invite everyone to feel what they’re grateful for. And whether it’s gratitude for one another, the community, our guests, or our planet, it always makes for a better dinner service.

"Knowing that you love the Earth changes you, activates you to defend and protect and celebrate. But when you feel that the Earth loves you in return, the feeling transforms the relationship from a one-way street to a sacred bond."
-Robin Wall Kimmerer

This season, as we’ve noticed nature responding to seasonal shifts, we’ve also reflected on all we’ve learned from the seasons before, and before, and before, and all the ways in which we’ve changed and grown. We are proud of everything we’ve accomplished, and we hope for many more years with you. So, as we spin busily through the final seven weeks of our 24th season—and as this beloved planet spins—we take a moment to find stillness, and notice, and say thank you, again, for being here with us, season after season.

In gratitude, 
Blake, Jen & the Hellions