In south-central Utah, where the topography is spectacular, desolate, and extreme, the pessimistic tradition in place-names runs strong. Head south from Poverty Flat and you’ll end up in Death Hollow. Head east from Dead Mare Wash and you’ll end up on Deadman Ridge, looking out toward Last Chance Creek and down into Carcass Canyon. During the Great Depression, when the whole state turned into a kind of Poverty Flat, the Civilian Conservation Corps sent a group of men to the region to carve a byway out of a virtually impassable landscape of cliffs and chasms. The men nicknamed the project Poison Road: so steep that a single drop would kill them. Midway up, the ridge they were following gaped open and plunged fifteen hundred feet to the canyon floor. They laid a span across it, and called it Hell’s Backbone Bridge.
Today, the entire route built by those men is known as Hell’s Backbone Road. Still largely unpaved, still treacherous in bad weather, it connects the town of Escalante to the tiny hamlet of Boulder, long reputed to be one of the most remote settlements in the continental United States. As late as 1940, the mail there was delivered via an eight-hour trek by mule team; the first lights did not flicker on until Christmas Eve, 1947. Until the nineteen-seventies, locals had to spend up to forty-eight hours in transit to obtain any number of essential goods and services: a new pair of socks, medical care, anything beyond an eighth-grade education.
Eventually, the county paved a different road into town, the two-lane Highway 12; as a result, assuming that you are already in Utah, getting to Boulder is no longer particularly difficult. Yet by contemporary standards the town remains strikingly out of the way. Its population hovers around two hundred and fifty people, many of whom bear the same last names as the earliest Westerners to settle the area: to the extent that Boulder is full at all, it is full of Kings and Roundys, Lymans and Ormonds and LeFevres. Most of those families came to Utah because they were Mormon and came to Boulder to pasture their cattle, and the twin influences of the Latter-day Saints and ranching still dominate today. Boulder is the kind of place where those who aren’t related by blood are related by marriage, and those who aren’t related by either are effectively kin by proximity—the kind of place, in short, where everyone knows everyone else’s children, parents, politics, struggles, scandals, and cattle brands.
Despite its small population, Boulder is geographically large—twenty-one square miles, about the size of Manhattan. Most of that space is occupied by farms and ranches; there is no bank in town, no A.T.M., no grocery store, no fast food, no medical clinic, no pharmacy. For that matter, there is no town in town—no business district, no Main Street, not even a traffic light. Instead, scattered along or just off Highway 12, there is a post office, an elementary school, a town hall, and a state park. There is a ten-room motel, a three-room motel, a convenience store, a church, and a gift shop. And down at the end of town, just before the road starts climbing steeply back into the wilderness, there is a hotel called the Boulder Mountain Lodge, and, on its grounds, a restaurant called Hell’s Backbone Grill.
Actually, the restaurant is the second Hell’s Backbone Grill. The first one opened in 1996, closed in 1999, and sat empty until it was acquired, for three thousand borrowed dollars, by two women who had never attended culinary school or started a restaurant or lived in Utah. Nonetheless, in 2000 they moved to Boulder, reopened Hell’s Backbone Grill, and, in short order, changed everything about it except the name. In the years since then, it has gained a reputation as one of the best restaurants in the Southwest, and also the most improbable. It is an all-organic, sourcing-obsessed, vegetarian-friendly venture in the middle of a traditional ranching community; a part-hippie, part-hipster, Buddhist-influenced culinary retreat in conservative Mormon country; a farm-to-table operation in a landscape not exactly known for its agricultural bounty; and a high-end, foodie-magnet restaurant that is four hours on a good day from the nearest major metropolitan area.
Yet somehow, despite its unlikely vision and inhospitable location, Hell’s Backbone Grill has managed to flourish. Last year, though, the restaurant faced an existential threat—to itself and to Boulder, but also to a place, and an idea, much larger than both. Which is why, in addition to serving apple-poblano pork chops and garlic-scape pesto and elk posole with cotija cheese seven days a week, the owners of Hell’s Backbone Grill have become entangled in an epic battle with the President of the United States.
Jennifer Castle and Blake Spalding, the co-owners of Hell’s Backbone Grill, met in 1997, while working as cooks for rafting trips in the Grand Canyon. In contemporary American life, there are few circumstances less conducive to preparing decent food. The two worked for different outfits, but the routine was basically the same: before each trip, everything they needed, from the salt to the stove, was sealed into waterproof containers and trekked to the bottom of the canyon, where it was loaded onto boats and transformed into meals at portable kitchens reconstituted daily on the banks of the Colorado River. Some days, sand got into everything. Occasionally, a boat would flip and the dairy cooler would vanish downstream. Once, Spalding got into a fight with a ring-tailed cat that sank its teeth into two pounds of roast beef.
Still, it was wild and beautiful and, as jobs in food go, much better than those which had marked the two women’s earliest working years. Both Spalding and Castle came from financially strapped families, started cooking young, and did stints at, respectively, Bob’s Big Boy and McDonald’s. Spalding was raised in New Hampshire and Arizona, by former beatniks who expected their three children to fend for themselves. As the oldest, she was responsible, by age eleven, for getting food on the table several days a week; by twelve, she took her first cooking job, picking lobsters and frying clams at a local seafood shack. Later, she put herself through Northern Arizona University by tending bar and, in the nineteen-nineties, started her own catering company.
Castle, who was raised by a single mother in New Mexico, learned to cook young because it was a way to help at home, and learned “to cook big,” because her mother was one of thirteen and the extended family ate together regularly. At eighteen, she started college in Flagstaff, found it hugely expensive and minimally useful, dropped out, and began working at a café there instead. She stayed for seven years, clocking in at 2 a.m., clocking out at nine, then going straight to the public library to pore over cookbooks, jotting down recipes and refining her own. Eventually, she arranged her schedule so that she could work in the Grand Canyon as well, which is where she met Spalding.
By then, Spalding’s catering career had taken an unexpected turn. One day out on the river, another boat caught up with hers in order to deliver a fax: she’d been offered a job cooking for the cast and crew of MTV’s “The Real World” on an island in the Exuma Cays. She accepted the job, followed by others in reality television that took her everywhere from North Carolina to Suriname. Then the Discovery Channel invited her to cater a show in the Pacific Northwest, and asked if she knew anyone who could help.
The timing was propitious; Castle had just broken up with a boyfriend and was looking to get away. For the next month, she and Spalding lived in a tent, cooking constantly, barely sleeping, and discovering that they worked together exceptionally well. That was partly because, like many successful collaborators, they are strikingly different. Spalding, who is older by eight years, is an extrovert and a risk-taker, qualities that, combined with her placid cheeriness and thoroughgoing sincerity, make her seem something like a good witch: formidable yet benevolent. Castle, by contrast, is a pragmatist and a worrier: systematic, detail-oriented, inclined to lie awake at night contemplating the optimal texture of cake. What they have in common is an intense work ethic, an ability to laugh even in extremis, and an abiding admiration for each other. “I’m just me and she’s just her,” Spalding says, “but between us we’re six people.”
Although Castle loved the Discovery Channel gig, she finished it feeling “done with smelling like garlic and coffee,” and decided to quit cooking. Spalding, however, had other plans. After the job ended, she visited Boulder and found Hell’s Backbone Grill sitting empty; back in Arizona, she asked Castle to help start a restaurant in a remote Utah town. “I was, like, ‘What? No. That’s crazy. And, besides, I don’t want to cook anymore,’ ” Castle said. Spalding, persuasive as ever, pointed out that at least she wouldn’t have to go to work at two in the morning or sleep in a tent. Moreover, unlike many of the places they had cooked, Hell’s Backbone Grill had electricity. It had running water. It had a roof. How hard could it be?
In 1996, four years before Spalding and Castle plated their first meal at Hell’s Backbone Grill, President Bill Clinton announced the creation of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument: 1.7 million acres of Utah wilderness, later expanded by Congress to 1.9 million, to be protected in perpetuity.
Clinton drew his authority to do so from the 1906 Antiquities Act, an influential piece of legislation that permits Presidents to unilaterally designate as national monuments any federal lands they deem culturally, historically, or scientifically significant. It was signed into law during the second term of Theodore Roosevelt, who then used it eighteen times in three years, to protect everything from Devils Tower, in Wyoming—the first national monument—to the Grand Canyon. With the exceptions of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush, every subsequent President has made use of the Antiquities Act. Collectively, they have designated a hundred and fifty-five monuments, from the African Burial Ground, in New York City, to the Gates of the Arctic, in Alaska.
Before Grand Staircase-Escalante joined those ranks, very few people outside Utah knew anything about the lands within it. Even the new monument’s name reflected, on both sides of its hyphen, a certain confusion. The Franciscan friar Silvestre Vélez de Escalante did explore parts of Utah, but he never set foot in the region that now bears his name. The eponymous Grand Staircase, meanwhile, stretches far beyond the monument’s boundaries. That’s because it is not a single geological feature, like the arches at Arches or the bend at Big Bend, but a metaphor for a series of cliffs and plateaus that work their way upward from the Grand Canyon in Arizona to Utah’s Aquarius Plateau, the highest tableland in North America, which runs for a hundred miles along the monument’s northern edge.
Although Native Americans lived in what would become Grand Staircase for twelve thousand years, early European-Americans avoided the area assiduously; so daunting was its terrain that, for centuries, it deflected the otherwise unstoppable force of Manifest Destiny. As late as 1868, a U.S. War Department map of the western United States contained an enormous blank spot where the monument would one day be. In 1871, when the explorers of the second Powell expedition arrived at the edge of that blank spot, their leader looked out on the “multitude of chasms before us,” and declared that “no animal without wings” could cross it. When they crossed it anyway, they encountered both the last river and the last mountains in the Lower Forty-eight to be named and mapped.
Under Clinton, all that land was reborn as the largest national monument in the continental United States. It straddles two counties, Kane and Garfield, which have a combined population of twelve thousand people, most of whom live in towns on the monument’s perimeter. The smallest of these is Boulder, which sits almost seven thousand feet above sea level, in the shadow of the Aquarius Plateau. Although the town’s fate, like that of the rest of the region, has always been tied to the wilderness at its front door, the monument designation reversed the terms of that relationship: suddenly, the same remoteness that had always deterred outsiders began attracting them instead.
That shift reflected a trend that was already well under way throughout Western rural areas: the transition from the Old West, with an economy based on farming, ranching, and resource extraction, to the New West, with an economy based on technology, tourism, and recreation. Like many changes, that one was divisive. Some people welcomed it while others mourned it. Some people benefitted from it greatly, others not at all. And some people, wittingly or otherwise, embodied it.
The early years of Hell’s Backbone Grill, which were also the early years of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, were not particularly easy ones for either entity. Bill Clinton was hanged in effigy and flags were lowered to half mast in nearby towns. Local officials encouraged illegal all-terrain-vehicle activity in the monument and ran bulldozers through its ostensibly protected land. The commissioners of Garfield County turned down a hundred thousand dollars in federal planning funds, deriding it as “blood money,” then spent many times that unsuccessfully suing the U.S. government. Even those in the region who were disinclined to spectacle, litigation, or lawlessness worried about the new monument’s potential impact on the regional economy.
All told, it both was and was not an auspicious moment to open a restaurant in a gateway town. On the one hand, Spalding and Castle could count on revenue from tourists who stopped for a meal on their way through Grand Staircase. “We never would have moved here if the monument hadn’t been declared,” Spalding said. “We’re crazy, but not that crazy.”
On the other hand, it wasn’t an ideal time to settle in Boulder, which, even under the best of circumstances, is wary of interlopers. Nor was the town initially enthusiastic about the new restaurant in its midst. The issue wasn’t expense, exactly; although Hell’s Backbone Grill charges big-city prices, it offered residents a fifty-per-cent discount in the early years, bringing the bill for, say, a ten-dollar pancake breakfast down to what it would cost at an IHOP. (These days, the discount is twenty per cent.) The bigger problem had to do with identity: food typically contains almost as many cultural markers as calories, and the kind that Spalding and Castle serve was, at first, utterly foreign to many of their neighbors.
Spalding had long believed that cooking was a moral and political act, one capable of either contributing to or ameliorating environmental and health issues. Castle came later to food ethics (when she met Spalding, she said, “I thought Alice Waters was Alice Walker. I was, like, ‘I loved “The Temple of My Familiar” ’ ”), but by the time they bought Hell’s Backbone Grill they shared a vision of local, organic, responsibly sourced meals made from scratch. That vision was not shared, however, by most of America in 2000. Organic restaurants were still scarce, the farm-to-table movement was barely getting started, and the word “locavore” had yet to be coined. According to the Salt Lake Magazine editor and food writer Mary Brown Malouf, the culinary culture of Utah at the time consisted chiefly of whatever the Sysco truck delivered.
In that context, what some Boulder residents found off-putting about Hell’s Backbone Grill wasn’t its prices but its dishes: slow-cooked things, grass-fed things, sage-smashed potato pancakes, seared duck with rose-hip cream sauce. A curious feature of the local-food movement is that it is sometimes alienating to actual locals; the people most likely to recognize prickly pears or tumbleweeds in the wild may be the ones least inclined to pay for the pleasure of eating them.
Along with their different ideas about food, Spalding and Castle parted ways with most of Boulder on religion. The town was predominantly Mormon, while Castle was raised Catholic and Spalding has been a practicing Buddhist for twenty-five years; Hell’s Backbone Grill features a statue of Buddha in the garden and prayer flags on the patio. Socially, both women were respectful of the prevailing religion—Spalding, who has a cheerfully foul mouth, learned to curb it in a place where people routinely say “Shut the front door” and “Oh my heck”—but professionally it presented a problem. For restaurants, alcohol sales can be the difference between survival and insolvency, but observant Mormons do not drink, and Utah, known officially as the Beehive State and unofficially as the Behave State, has the strictest liquor laws in the nation. Just before Castle and Spalding bought Hell’s Backbone Grill, the Utah Supreme Court had affirmed the right of Boulder’s town council to prevent its previous owners from so much as applying for a liquor license.
In short, almost everything seemed to be working against Spalding and Castle at first, including the fact that no one wanted to work for them. Their initial “Help Wanted” sign attracted zero interest, until finally the local postmistress took pity and told her teen-age daughter to go on down and apply. The rest of the staff was assembled in similar catch-as-catch-can fashion. At one point, Spalding persuaded her sister to move to town and help out, and when they were particularly shorthanded neither she nor Castle was above begging a pliable-seeming customer to stick around and work in exchange for meals. (Two years ago, a customer named Tim decided to stay for a different reason. He and Spalding now live together in Boulder, with a three-legged cat, a four-legged cat, two dogs, and seven goats.)
If hiring staff was challenging, acquiring ingredients was almost as difficult—chiefly because, in 2005, to make good on their commitment to local food, Spalding and Castle bought six acres of overgrazed horse pasture and started a farm. This was, as Spalding later put it, “a monumental pain in the ass.” Snow fell in June. Freak hailstorms wiped out whole crops. The wind blew away two consecutive greenhouses, inverted a third like an umbrella, whipped a field of peppers around until they effectively strangled themselves, and blew squash plants clean out of the ground. Mountain lions proved fond of honey and destroyed expensive bee boxes to obtain it. Worst of all was the soil, which consisted almost entirely of nutrient-free sand. As a result, the main thing that the Hell’s Backbone farmers had to learn to grow was dirt.
And yet it was this same demanding land that drew Spalding and Castle to Boulder in the first place. On a clear day—and clear days are abundant in this part of Utah, which boasts some of the driest air and lowest pollution levels in the world—they could climb almost any rise outside their restaurant and look out over a hundred miles in all directions. From most places within Grand Staircase, there is, in all that distance, no visible or audible sign of human existence: no roads, no cars, no power lines, no cell towers, no buildings. At night, there are no artificial lights. Overhead, the sky goes dense and dimensional with stars; below, the land is so dark that you can spot a single hiker with a headlamp fifteen miles away.
Filling up all that immensity is some of the most spectacularly wild terrain left on earth. There are the sheer cliffs and forested highlands of the Aquarius Plateau. There are, in shades of cream and copper and flame, the unlikely geometries of eroded sandstone: narrow gorges, strange whorls, sudden holes in the ground. There are California condors and desert tortoises and bighorn sheep and panthers. There are hanging gardens, slot canyons, vegetation that has lingered since the Pleistocene. There are astonishing quantities of two-hundred-million-year-old fossils, and the relics of multithousand-year-old cultures, and the world’s most continuous record of four billion years of geology.
For Spalding and Castle, what was so captivating about Grand Staircase was its vastness of scale, both spatial and temporal. Nowhere else in the country, outside of Alaska, was so large a tract of land so relatively unspoiled—so ecologically close to the condition it had been in before Europeans arrived in North America. Paradoxically, that is a large part of why President Clinton had protected it: because, for millennia, it had done such an excellent job of protecting itself.
Like many things, although not all things, life at the restaurant got better. On their first Fourth of July in town, Castle and Spalding threw an ice-cream social, complete with gallons of homemade toppings, then sat around worrying that no one would show up. Instead, most of the town materialized. The two women gradually befriended some of their neighbors, and, over time, employed many of them, including two identical-twin Mormon ranchers, a former cook at the elementary school plus her three children and two grandkids, a thirty-year-old business manager who began on the prep line as a teen, and seven of the fourteen children of a sixth-generation Boulder ranching family.
Eventually, when good will toward the restaurant had increased but its bottom line had not, Spalding and Castle approached the town council to ask permission to apply for a liquor license. Mindful of the pitched battles fought there over alcohol before, they kept their case to a single fact: a drinks menu would help keep their doors open. To the surprise of pretty much everyone, the council voted to let them apply. They did, and the state subsequently granted them a liquor license, the first in the history of Boulder.
Sixteen years later, the bar at Hell’s Backbone Grill is full, and, from when it opens, in March, until it closes, just after Thanksgiving, the restaurant almost always is, too. Its dining room, which seats sixty-five, looks like a W.P.A. lodge if Martha Stewart had been around to do the decorating: warm and unshowy, with exposed beams, deep-red walls, and light fixtures fashioned from colanders that Spalding bought at thrift shops and spray-painted copper. Because some guests still stumble in by chance while others make reservations months ahead, the clientele is notably eclectic: bow hunters and backpackers, Paul Simon and Scarlett Johansson and Jamaica Kincaid. Some arrive in evening wear, some in flannel, some looking as if they forgot to wipe the grime and sunscreen off their faces. In the spring and the fall, cycling tours bring clients in weekly; one recent night, eight of them were seated next to a table full of the other kind of bikers—Mexican motorcyclists, midway through a Southwest circuit. Nearby, three generations of a family, in from Salt Lake to celebrate an engagement, were on their fifth meal at the restaurant in two days.
As the crowds suggest, Hell’s Backbone Grill is now thriving. The staff has stabilized at around fifty people, many of them returning for the twelfth or the sixteenth season, while the farm now yields some twenty-three thousand pounds of organic produce every year. Virtually all of that winds up on the menu, served up in what Castle and Spalding call “Four Corners Cuisine”: an updated combination of cowboy classics, Mormon recipes, and traditional Southwestern fare. With Spalding’s sister Lavinia, a travel writer and a former Hell’s Backbone employee, Castle and Spalding have also produced two cookbooks, “With a Measure of Grace,” in 2004, and “This Immeasurable Place,” in 2017, which feature profiles of Boulder residents and the restaurant’s staff as centrally as recipes.
Yet it is those recipes which have made Hell’s Backbone Grill so beloved. The restaurant has received accolades from Fodor’s, Zagat, the New York Times, the James Beard Foundation, and a governor of Utah. Salt Lake Magazine gave it seven consecutive annual awards, then put it in the publication’s hall of fame. In 2013, a food critic for the Salt Lake City Weekly came to the restaurant reluctantly, then had what Spalding called “a ‘Ratatouille’ moment, where he literally wept into his posole.” He wrote up a column calling Hell’s Backbone Grill “Utah’s Chez Panisse,” and named it the restaurant of the year.
As Hell’s Backbone Grill has grown more famous beyond Boulder, it has also grown more central within it. The ice-cream social has become an annual ritual; this Independence Day, Spalding and Castle gave away more than four hundred sundaes. Former employees have started other food-related ventures nearby, including a food truck that serves tacos and burritos in the parking lot of the state park. At Spalding’s invitation, a group of monks from the Drepung Loseling monastery, in South India, have spent a week in Boulder almost every year for eighteen years, and their visits are now as much a part of the town’s calendar as the school graduation and the Memorial Day parade.
Although their business runs more smoothly than it did in the early years, Castle and Spalding still work just as hard. When I was in town, they were gearing up for a wedding for seventy, followed by a benefit dinner for five hundred, on top of all the usual restaurant obligations. But these days, at least, they have a day off each week, plus a manageable division of labor: Castle takes the early shift and works mostly in the back of the house, while Spalding takes the evening shift and handles the front of the house. Inside the restaurant as well as out, she is the public face of Hell’s Backbone Grill.
Which, lately, has become a much bigger job. Last year, not long after President Donald Trump took office, he ordered the Department of the Interior to review twenty-seven national monuments, from Katahdin Woods, in Maine, to Giant Sequoia, in California. Seven months later, on December 4, 2017, he issued proclamations dramatically reducing the size of two of them, both in Utah. One was Bears Ears, 1.35 million acres in the southeastern part of the state, protected by President Obama, which Trump reduced by eighty-five per cent. Partly because a historic coalition of Native American tribes had successfully fought for its establishment just a year earlier, Bears Ears attracted most of the news coverage about the monument decisions. But that same day, to considerably less national attention, Grand Staircase was cut almost in half.
As a rule, national monuments are created to end controversies, not start them. Their roots often lie in some public-lands conflict so enduring and intractable that a President finally steps in, Antiquities Act in hand. Tempers flare, for a while the fuss gets worse, then it begins to settle down. Soon, the monument is accepted; eventually, it is beloved. Sometimes Congress goes on to turn it into a national park. Zion, Bryce, Acadia, Death Valley, Joshua Tree, the Grand Tetons, the Grand Canyon: all these and many more were originally national monuments.
That is the general trajectory Grand Staircase was following until President Trump issued his proclamation and, as he has in so many arenas, rekindled old animosities. Support for the monument was broad and bipartisan; among Utah citizens who submitted public comments during the Department of the Interior’s review process, almost nine out of ten wanted it left intact, while a conservative pollster found that two out of three Utahans approved of Grand Staircase. But the commissioners of Kane and Garfield counties opposed it, as did the governor, the majority of the state legislature, and the entire Utah congressional delegation, all of whom had long despised the whole idea of public lands.
That sentiment is common throughout the West, where it is the most notable regional instantiation of the grand American tradition of disliking the federal government. The Sagebrush Rebellion of the nineteen-eighties and the Wise Use movement of the nineteen-nineties both sought to diminish national land ownership and management, and both enjoyed strong support, from Texas up to Washington, Idaho, and Montana. But there is a reason that Trump cut monuments only in Utah. Among other Western politicians, shifting economies and demographics have begun to change attitudes toward public lands, but Utah’s governing class remains intensely hostile to federal authority.
That hostility stems in part from a long history of conflict between the U.S. government and the Mormon Church. Driven steadily westward by religious persecution, the early Mormons arrived in Utah in the mid-nineteenth century and began trying to establish an autonomous theocracy. When the federal government declined to tolerate either that or the practice of polygamy, Church leaders found themselves in a bind. They were acutely aware of the benefits of joining the Union and petitioned to do so constantly over the course of forty years; at the same time, they were, as the apostle Orson Pratt wrote in 1845, “determined to get out of this evil nation.” The former impulse finally won out in 1896, when the Mormon leadership agreed, to the enduring dismay of some of the faithful, to abandon both polygamy and theocracy in exchange for statehood.
Upon joining the Evil Nation, Utahans also found themselves surrounded by it: the United States owns two-thirds of Utah, a higher percentage than anywhere except Nevada. (By contrast, it owns 0.6 per cent of New York.) The federal government compensates states for lost property taxes on those lands and shoulders the hefty cost of managing them, while the states reap the financial benefits of tourism. Critics nonetheless talk about that arrangement as if the Feds had seized the state’s most precious assets, but historically the opposite has been true: for most of its existence, the U.S. government was in the business of transferring land to the states, generally by giving it away for free, through land grants and the Homestead Acts. Most of what it kept for itself was terrain that no right-minded settler wanted—including those millions of acres which so daunted the Powell expedition.
Because all that acreage already belonged to the United States, the creation of Grand Staircase didn’t increase the total amount of public land in Utah. Indeed, by law national monuments can be made only from land the federal government already owns. Clinton’s designation did, however, change what activities were permitted inside the monument’s boundaries: mining and drilling were prohibited, while ranching was allowed to continue. But many locals mistrusted Clinton (he lost the 1992 Presidential election in Utah not only to George Bush but also to Ross Perot), and, despite the grazing provision, many ranchers were convinced that the monument would destroy the cattle industry.
That fear resonated deeply in a region settled by ranchers, and once Trump took office politicians seized on it to make the case for cutting Grand Staircase. The Garfield County commission chairperson, Leland Pollock, claimed that the monument had “eliminated most grazing,” while Representative Chris Stewart said it had “kicked ranchers off the range.” A resolution passed by the Utah legislature and signed by the governor asserted that Grand Staircase “had a negative impact on the prosperity, development, economy, custom, culture, heritage, educational opportunities, health, and well-being of local communities.”
Criticisms like these drive monument supporters batty, for the straightforward reason that almost none of them are true. Prior to 1996, Garfield County had an unemployment rate of more than twelve per cent, the highest in Utah, while its per-capita income was fourteen per cent below the state average. Since the monument was established, though, per-capita income in the region has grown by seventeen per cent, higher than the Utah average, and employment has grown by twenty-four per cent, with Grand Staircase supporting some sixteen hundred new private-sector jobs. Many of those are at locally owned businesses, and not all are in tourism; finance, health care, and construction jobs are also on the rise, and a building boom in Boulder and Escalante has left contractors with multiyear waiting lists. In Escalante, a hardware store opened recently, as did a movie theatre that had been shuttered since the nineteen-sixties; the medical clinic got its first X-ray machine, opened a pharmacy, and began offering dental services.
These gains did not come at the expense of local ranchers, none of whom were “kicked off the range.” Throughout the monument’s existence, almost ninety-seven per cent of it was actively and legally grazed; as a 2017 Bureau of Land Management report noted, “no reductions in permitted grazing have been made as a result of the Monument designation.” The price of a permit remained the same, and the fee for grazing on federal lands is, on average, a tenth or less of the price on private and state property. What hurt ranchers around Grand Staircase was the rise of factory farming, plus other market forces that made everything from fuel to feed more expensive while the price of beef failed to keep pace—factors that long predate the creation of the monument.
No changes to the status of Grand Staircase could reverse those trends, and, except rhetorically, the decision to redraw its boundaries had nothing to do with the cattle industry. It did, however, have to do with other industries. In addition to removing almost nine hundred thousand acres from protection, Trump’s proclamation carved the remaining land into three separate units: Grand Staircase, Kaiparowits, and Escalante Canyons. The logic governing those boundaries became clear this summer, when the Department of the Interior accidentally released a report that contained extensive information—redacted in a subsequent version—on the whereabouts, within the original monument, of oil, gas, coal, tar sands, copper, cobalt, uranium, and other natural resources. The location of those resources made plain that the restructuring amounted to a kind of environmental gerrymandering: Grand Staircase had been carved up to maximize access for extractive industries.
Proponents of that change argue that it will strengthen the regional economy, but that assertion is doubtful. Take coal: there is an enormous amount of it within the monument, but virtually zero demand for it. In a report on the impending closure of a mine just outside Grand Staircase, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis noted, “The overall coal sector, which includes coal plants and mines, is in structural decline. There is no market for the power from the plant or for coal from the mine.” Other resources remain lucrative, but not necessarily for locals: most energy and mining companies are national or multinational operations that bring in many of their own employees, and the industry as a whole is subject to boom-and-bust cycles that can devastate on-site communities both culturally and financially.
In reality, the most lucrative thing about Grand Staircase is the landscape itself. As of 2016, the outdoor-recreation industry in the United States brought in three hundred and seventy billion dollars, more than twice the value of the oil-and-gas industry. Twelve billion of those recreation dollars currently fuel Utah’s economy, but they will dry up around Grand Staircase if it is opened to resource extraction. Any mines or wells in the area would require an enormous amount of new infrastructure—roads, processing plants, storage facilities, pipelines—and industrial pollutants would contaminate air and water alike. All this would affect even ostensibly protected lands, because, under the new plan, Grand Staircase no longer abuts Capitol Reef and Bryce Canyon, leaving those national parks exposed to downstream effects. Indeed, two of the three new mini-monuments don’t even abut each other, eliminating not only ecological buffer zones but also wildlife corridors.
In shrinking Grand Staircase, Trump parroted critics who claim that they don’t object to the monument per se, only to its size. But ecologists have known for decades that, in the long run, one of the single most devastating things you can do to an ecosystem is make it smaller. Put a road through Grand Staircase and you don’t just bisect it; as the science writer David Quammen once observed, you tear it in half, like fabric, and the natural world on both sides begins to unravel. In Grand Staircase, that logic extends to the human world as well. Whole communities and careers and lives have grown up around the monument; now, with its protections gone, those are threatening to come apart as well.
Shortly after the 2016 election, Spalding and Castle sat down to talk about their future. They knew that Grand Staircase would soon be in Trump’s crosshairs—and, given how high emotions were running, they knew that coming to its defense could land their restaurant in trouble. But they also knew that any major changes to the monument could likewise imperil their livelihood. It didn’t take them long to decide what to do. In the Grand Canyon, they had been taught that, if the boat tips and you fall into the river, you don’t panic and look around for someone to save you. “You get your bearings and swim like hell,” Spalding said. “You participate in your own rescue.”
One virtue of life in a small town is that getting your bearings is relatively easy. At most, Spalding and Castle were a degree or two removed from everyone in the region, and they began reaching out to others who cared about the monument. They met with business owners who depended on it for income, conservationists who valued it as wilderness, and scientists who regarded it as one of the planet’s greatest field-work locations. (With less than seven per cent of it surveyed, the monument has already yielded some six thousand archeological sites and forty-five new paleontological species, including twelve previously unknown dinosaurs.) They joined Grand Staircase Escalante Partners, the official friends group for the monument, and got to know its executive director, Nicole Croft. Between rejiggering the menu and replacing the fan in the walk-in freezer, they began speaking out—to neighbors, customers, politicians, the press—about their devotion to the monument.
This change was not entirely easy for either woman. Spalding has always cared about politics and long been an evangelist for ethical food—she is happy to explain to customers for the umpteenth time why they shouldn’t want to see salmon on the menu in Utah—but she also possesses enough empathy and business savvy that she was mindful of potentially alienating neighbors or customers. Castle, meanwhile, is “by nature a behind-the-scenes worker” who would rather be in the relative privacy of the Hell’s Backbone kitchen than onstage for a land-use panel. On top of that, neither of them was in the market for a longer to-do list. After nearly twenty years, life at the restaurant had achieved a more reasonable rhythm, and spending what little free time they had on political organizing was not part of the plan.
It was, however, part of a phenomenon. For some left-leaning Americans, many of them middle-class white women whose prior political frustrations were tempered by a buffer of distance and privilege, life under the Trump Administration has produced an entirely new experience: the disbelief, impotence, and rage of being unable to prevent immoral or unlawful actions. The shock of that experience has galvanized some of those women, sending self-described little old ladies to their first protests, motivating suburban moms who couldn’t previously name their political representatives to start calling them daily, and inspiring twentysomethings to run for office. Taken as a whole, such women are neither exceptionally driven nor exceptionally radical; other activists have been at it far longer, and for more progressive causes. But of all demographic groups in America, the Harvard sociologist Theda Skocpol and the University of Pittsburgh historian Lara Putnam observed in a study earlier this year, it is these women whose “political practices have most changed under Trump.”
For Spalding and Castle, as for many others, that change began with trying to get their representatives to represent them, an experience that was reliably frustrating. They got up before dawn to drive two and a half hours to a county-commission meeting to voice support for the monument, only to have the commissioners unanimously pass a resolution in favor of shrinking it. Together with all fifty-three members of the Escalante and Boulder Chamber of Commerce, they tried to tell Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke how much Grand Staircase meant to their business—first in letters, which got no response, then in person when he visited Utah for a “listening tour,” during which he met only with monument critics, and finally by sending a delegation to Washington, D.C., where he likewise refused to see them. “I called his office daily,” Spalding said, “saying, ‘I’m Blake Spalding, I’m the largest employer in the north end of this county, we pay nearly a million dollars a year in payroll, I want to talk to you about what the monument has meant for our business.’ No one ever called me back.”
When public pressure didn’t work, Spalding and Castle started looking for other options. One of these walked into their restaurant last year, in the form of Garett Rose, an attorney with the international law firm Covington & Burling. Rose (who now works at the Natural Resources Defense Council) had flown to Utah to meet with Grand Staircase Escalante Partners, and, at Nicole Croft’s suggestion, came by Hell’s Backbone Grill to discuss possible legal remedies if the monument was altered. Over the course of two days and several meals, he outlined what the firm had in mind: suing the President of the United States.
As with so many of Trump’s actions, the decision to shrink national monuments was so unusual as to raise the question of whether it was also illegal. In the hundred-and-twelve-year history of the Antiquities Act, Presidents had expanded their predecessors’ monuments frequently but contracted them in any significant measure only four times. (Minor reductions in acreage were common, and one President, William Howard Taft, reduced his own monument significantly.) None of those major reductions were ever litigated, leaving a constitutional question unanswered: does the authority to reverse a monument designation lie with Congress or with the President?
To Covington & Burling, the answer was clear: it lay with Congress, and, if Trump arrogated that power to himself, the firm was prepared to take on a lawsuit pro bono. At the lawyers’ request, Spalding and Castle drew up an affidavit describing what would happen to their restaurant if the designation changed. On December 4, 2017, the day the proclamations became public, Covington & Burling, acting on behalf of Grand Staircase Escalante Partners and two other nonprofit organizations, sued Ryan Zinke and Donald Trump.
That lawsuit was one of five filed that day against the President. Two of the suits concerned Grand Staircase and three concerned Bears Ears; they have since been consolidated, so that the cases about each monument will be heard together. In the meantime, Covington & Burling has filed a motion for summary judgment, while the Department of Justice has requested a venue change, from Washington, D.C., to Utah, a move that all the plaintiffs oppose. Those requests are presently awaiting rulings by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Since the monument cases raise a previously unlitigated question concerning the separation of powers, they are, in all likelihood, headed for the Supreme Court. But lawsuits tend to move slowly, and by the time Grand Staircase Escalante Partners et al. v. Donald J. Trump et al. gets litigated at the district level and then, inevitably, appealed, we will be past 2018, past 2019, probably even past 2020. A new President may or may not be in the White House; a new ethos may or may not prevail about public lands.
Disinclined to sit around in the interim, Spalding and Castle, like many of their fellow-activists, have increasingly turned their attention to electoral politics. They still speak out about Grand Staircase, and they still bring allies over for strategizing and dinner. But, mindful that only political change will protect the monument in the long term, they have begun campaigning for Marsha Holland and Shireen Ghorbani, pro-conservation candidates running for, respectively, the Utah and U.S. House of Representatives, and they have thrown their weight behind Better Boundaries, a bipartisan organization with an anti-gerrymandering measure on the ballot in Utah this fall.
Neither Spalding nor Castle has any illusions about the magnitude of the battle they are fighting: they live in one of the most conservative regions of one of the most conservative states in the nation. Still, as the owners of a successful farm-to-table restaurant in rural Utah, they are perhaps less daunted than most of us by long odds. More to the point, they can’t imagine any other course of action. “I made a deal with myself when I saw the writing on the wall,” Spalding said. “I would say yes to everything I could to save the monument. When all this is over, whatever the outcome, I want to be able to say that I did everything I could.”
In the meantime, there are black-powder biscuits on the breakfast menu at Hell’s Backbone Grill, and a Backbone B.L.T. for lunch, and braised beef with green-chile polenta for dinner. There is a “Save Grand Staircase” sign out by the Buddha in the garden and, at the hostess station, a stack of fact sheets about the monument, complete with contact information for Congress members.
Spalding, manning the late shift, still offers a buss on the cheek to old friends, a how’s-your-meal to new arrivals, a complimentary bottle of organic soda to a customer reluctant to try it. But beneath her unfailingly warm and calm demeanor, she says, “I’m in a rage, to be quite honest. I’m nice to the monument opponents I know, but I do not hesitate to tell people when they get here that they have arrived at a remote outpost of the resistance.”
Out of other restaurants come celebrity chefs; at Hell’s Backbone Grill, Spalding and Castle have become activist chefs instead. In doing so, they have learned the lesson of countless other outspoken citizens before them: when you stand up, you stick out. They do their best to brush off vicious Facebook comments and hostile visitors and bad-faith bad reviews (“People write us shitty Trip Advisors and I’m, like, ‘You didn’t even eat here,’ but whatever,” Spalding says), and they’ve learned that denatured alcohol and sandpaper will remove graffiti written in permanent marker. (“Liberals are the new Nazis,” someone scrawled this month in both of the restaurant’s bathrooms.) Other things, however, are harder to ignore. Last summer, Spalding, speaking at a major pro-monument rally in Salt Lake City, criticized Utah’s government for not defending public lands. Not long afterward, she and Castle were notified that Hell’s Backbone Grill had been selected for a comprehensive four-year audit by the state. The only other two vocally pro-monument businesses in Boulder were also audited. Whether or not the move was punitive, they worry about other forms of retaliation, and find themselves increasingly embattled. “There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t feel like we’re doing some kind of hand-to-hand combat,” Spalding said. “The effect it’s had on us and our staff is extremely destabilizing.”
It remains to be seen what other effects the shrinking of Grand Staircase will have on Hell’s Backbone Grill. Boulder is still a gateway town, only to a much smaller monument with a different name, Escalante Canyons. It is also now the gateway town to the first industrial incursion since Trump’s proclamation. In June, a Canadian mining company acquired cobalt and copper claims on land that was previously part of the monument. Those will likely be rendered void if the Trump Administration loses in court, but in the meantime—and the meantime could last a long time—the company has announced plans to begin surface exploration soon and drilling shortly afterward.
If those and other developments proceed, Spalding and Castle know that their days at Hell’s Backbone Grill could be numbered. People seldom make reservations months in advance to eat at restaurants in mining towns, or plan sightseeing vacations or cycling tours near trucking routes and pit mines. What took two entrepreneurs twenty years to build could be gone in a fraction of that time, together with things that took nature twenty thousand centuries.
That kind of rapid destruction has happened in the region before. When the first ranchers arrived in Boulder, they encountered nearly ideal rangeland: dense with bluegrass and bunchgrass and wild oats, veined with natural troughs to channel the rain. In the words of Nethella Woolsey, the daughter of the rancher John King, who arrived in time to enjoy the bounty, those were the “good old days”: there was nothing to do but turn your livestock out on the range, and no fees to pay in order to do so. Word soon spread, and men began bringing in cattle and sheep by the thousands.
The good old days lasted ten years. By 1905, Woolsey wrote, “the rich meadows on the mountain plateau had turned to dust.” Cows died by the hundreds. The bloated bodies of sheep washed into streambeds, poisoning the drinking water. Overgrazing so denuded and compacted the hillsides that they couldn’t absorb rainfall or snowmelt. Instead, water poured off them in floods, eroding the ground as rapidly as in a time lapse. That pattern, repeated all over the West—the famous tragedy of the commons—is why the federal government finally stepped in, determining how much livestock the land could sustain and issuing permits accordingly. The ranchers, in the main, were not grateful.
A century later, however, with that same land facing a different threat, the rest of us could learn a lesson from their mistakes. It is terrifying how quickly something can be destroyed, how fragile a seemingly robust system can turn out to be. Institutions that appear solid can crack, protections can decay, democratic norms can erode faster than riverbanks. A nation can seem as durable yet be as vulnerable as its physical terrain. One of the most beautiful things about being in Grand Staircase is that, out in the deep middle of it, with all of prehistory underfoot and twelve-billion-year-old starlight overhead, the world feels enduring and eternal. But that is, of course, an illusion. All things change. The only question is whether they change for the better. ♦
