Boulder, Utah
I met Blake Spalding at her restaurant, Hell’s Backbone Grill, while I was on a reporting trip for the Guardian. Hell’s Backbone Grill is located in the Grand Staircase Escalante national monument, a remote stretch of southern Utah that’s found itself at the center of a bitter battle over America’s public lands.
A meal with Blake is the kind where bottles of wine disappear quickly and the sky fades from pink to plum to black before you’ve noticed. Great food, sharp conversation and an astonishing backdrop.
But Blake had something big on her mind. In 2017 Donald Trump slashed the monument in half, opening the door for the energy industry to lease land that was once off limits.
While some welcomed the change, local residents such as Blake saw it as a death sentence. Their hard won tourism industry could rapidly decline, while resource extraction goes everything this eco-conscious community stands for.
Blake and I met up to talk about how she and other activists are defending the monument. We also met up to eat. I was intrigued yet puzzled by the premise of her restaurant – a farm-to-table dining experience tucked in one of the most sparsely populated parts of the country. And while it’s gorgeous, the Grand Staircase looks like the sort of place where growing food would take a miracle – more martian moonscape than fertile farmland.
But Blake and her business partner, Jennifer Castle, have embraced isolation like a seasoning, establishing their own six-acre farm nearby and filling the menu with its offerings: eggs, lettuce, fruits and vegetables, as well as homemade pickles and jams. Local lamb and elk can also be found on their tables.
We spoke for hours about politics, food, and what she describes as her “love affair” with this land. I can see why the monument – fierce, unyielding, magnetic – has seduced her. But she and her restaurant have, in turn, seduced those around her. Others I spoke with in town described Hell’s Backbone Grill as a pillar of the community, and an embodiment of the pioneering spirit that makes this place unique. I don’t think they’ll go down without a fight.
“I understand the power of wilderness and a decent meal”
Jen and I moved here at the end of 1999, two and a half years after the monument was declared. Previously we had been doing extremely niche catering on the river in the Grand Canyon. The only thing that could have pried me out of the Grand Canyon was the chance to live and work in an extraordinarily beautiful place like this.
Things have changed a lot in the last twenty years – we now do in a month what we once did in an entire year. Back then we had much more free time to hike and to garden. The town of Boulder hasn’t actually changed much, except that our restaurant and our staff has grown.
Jen and I travelled a lot before we started this. Our dream was that the restaurant would be appropriate to this landscape and the magnificent otherworldliness that exists here. Think about when you go to Italy: you go to a restaurant and you eat everything Italian. When you go to a countryside restaurant, you want to have that authentic experience – you aren’t going to be served Spanish jam, French ham and New Zealand lamb. So here, too, we have really endeavored to do that.
Because I’m a river guide, I also understand the power of wilderness and a decent meal. You want to celebrate your accomplishment, your achievement. We wanted to create a metaphoric warm hearth, where people could get their courage and their fortitude to go out into a wilderness. That happens here every single day. Our servers know where people are going, and they let people know that if they don’t come back, we’ll be worried about them.
Eating is like sex – it’s an an intimate act of taking something into their body. So I’m really careful about what I eat. I wanted to do a farm-to-table restaurant because for me, it’s the only logical way to eat. But it wasn’t popular at the time. Plus when we started, the only farm-to-table restaurants were on the coasts – place like Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse. But here we have a captive audience: it’s so remote, people can’t just go to a Subway or a Red Lobster. That gave us the opportunity to teach, and to move the needle on the way farm-to-table is perceived.
Of course there was hostility at first. We give a 20% discount to locals, and we started hosting parties for local people to try and make a stake in the community. And I would say we were doing great, until this whole monument disembowelment happened. But the tensions that were here when we arrived have really been laid to rest. One of the first thing we did was hire the teenagers of local ranchers. Most of the kids in Boulder have worked here at some point.
Our first cookbook, This Immeasurable Place, was conceived as telling the story of our love affair with the monument. It was crazy because we got the book in our hands and literally within days, Trump signed the executive order [to downsize the monument]. And then suddenly we were sold out of books.
“The notion that we need an extractive industry is a lie”
I’ve been very outspoken about protecting the monument. I published an Op-Ed in the Salt Lake Tribune, and the New Yorker did a story on us. The monument has been incredible for this place. It’s hard for people to understand just how isolated we are; Garfield County is bigger than Delaware and there are only 5,000 people. Boulder has 300 people. But this area bring in millions of dollars in tourism. So it’s a no brainer that it is a good thing.
People who are anti-monument seem to think tourism money is a bad thing, that the work isn’t secure, that it’s no way to make a living. But there are entrepreneurial opportunities galore here. You can start a guiding business. Some of our former employees started a food truck. There are many stories like that. My employees are buying land, building homes. It reminds me of a Buddhist saying: we are beggars sitting on a bag of jewels.
Of course there are bad tourism jobs. But more people means more jobs of all types – we need janitors, electricians. We have an intense labor shortage here. My boyfriend is a builder and carpenter and he literally has people begging him to build. We only have one electrician in town. I tell my staff all the side, if you have a side business you want to start, I’ll lend you $500 dollars to start it. I can think of 10 businesses you could start with that money here today.
The notion that we need an extractive industry is a lie. It’s promulgated by a delegation of politicians who receive their re-election financing from the extractive industry. They have an agenda to manipulate rural people, and it’s really disturbing.
People always want me to talk about the economic benefits of the monument but that’s the least of it for me. For me it’s about our grandchildren’s grandchildren and giving them access to a wild place. What humans need more than anything is to experience themselves outside of modern convenience. Here you have an experience of freedom in wilderness – nobody check you in, nobody check you out. You can camp somewhere for two weeks, you can bring your dog, you can build a fire. This national monument is 1.9m acres – 99% of the people who come here are never even going to get to the heart of it. This monument has biodiversity, endless archeological sites … if that goes, we can’t get that back. The Fremont people will never inhabit this area again, they’ll never leave sandals behind. Dinosaurs will never leave their bones here.
If anything the monument should be bigger, not smaller. If our planet has any hope of recovering then what we need is vast, untrammeled swathes of wilderness. That alone makes it worth saving.
First, second and final photo by Charlotte Simmonds. Aerial photo by Bruce Gordon and Eco Flight.