The land of surprises
Twist canyon lives up to its name, writes Dina Mishev
LIKE most hikes and drives in south-central Utah, tackling Lower Muley Twist Canyon is heavenly and hellish for someone curious about what’s around the next corner – and I am. It’s possible to hike down the canyon, in Capitol Reef National Park, for 20km and turn at least three times as many corners.
I’m somewhat familiar with the area, but there are plenty of hikes and back-road drives I haven’t done. Also, one of my favourite restaurants, Hell’s Backbone Grill, is here.
Doing pre-trip online reconnaissance, the full 20km Lower Muley Twist Canyon endeavour piques my curiosity. I don’t have the physical fitness to do it in a day, though.
Still, I don’t trust that this is reason enough to make me turn around, so I make a 6.15pm dinner reservation at the farm-to-table restaurant in the traditional Mormon town of Boulder (population about 250). Hell’s Backbone Grill serves “four corners cuisine”, which draws from Mormon pioneer recipes, Puebloan cultural dishes, cowboy fare and whatever grows on its farm, situated at an altitude of 2 100m.
I reason that if I hike about 3km down the canyon from the trailhead on the Burr Trail Scenic Backway and then retrace my route, I’ll have just enough time to drive back to Boulder, check in at the Boulder Mountain Lodge – which is the only lodging “downtown” – and shower before dinner. Mine is the only car in the small trailhead parking lot. The trail immediately descends about 10m through Utah juniper trees and on to the canyon floor, which is a dry creek bed. I’m quickly dwarfed by undulating red sandstone formations. The canyon lives up to its name; every twist reveals another twist. And every corner reveals a surprise.
One corner delivers a section of narrows, where the canyon walls suddenly come together and the sandy path down the middle shrinks to a width of 6m. Coming around the next corner, there is a “weeping wall”, where seeping minerals make the otherwise vermilion, 152m high sandstone wall look like it is crying soot-black tears. And then comes a corner that is itself a corner: an undercut, 90m-long, 90º bend in the canyon that, when Lower Muley Creek floods, is the scene of much violence. The bottom 4.5m of the sandstone bears the scars of all manner of injury. There are holes, dents, dings and scratches.
Before I know it, I am 1.6km past my planned turnaround distance and have a blister on my left foot. But I’m not ready to turn around. After all, Hell’s Backbone Grill, and pretty much everywhere for hundreds of kilometres in every direction, doesn’t care if I shower before dinner.
I get around two more corners before I realise I’ll miss my meal if I don’t turn around and run back to the car. But the extra corners are worth it. The last opens into a blocky rock garden at the base of Zion-like sheer cliffs that appear to be illuminated from within. I first think that my polarised sunglasses are playing tricks on me; when I take them off, the cliffs have every bit as much glow.
Driving back to Boulder on the Burr Trail Scenic Backway, a 106km paved and dirt road between Boulder and Bullfrog Marina on the north-west shore of Lake Powell in the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, it kills me that I don’t have time to stop and take photos. Near the start of the drive, I see Peekaboo Arch to the west. Next comes a high desert forest of pinyons and Utah junipers. Even though some of the juniper trees might be almost 1 000 years old, I don’t think any are more than 6m high. From about AD400 to 1200, the Puebloans who lived in this area made use of both of these species as food. I open my front windows so that the junipers can infuse the inside of my car with their sweetly resinous smell, similar to that of cedars.
I exit Capitol Reef National Park and enter Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and its 404 685 hectares of sinuous slot canyons, mesas and cliffs. Not taking photos in the 11km-long Long Canyon, with sheer, golden and dark red sandstone walls that stretch several hundred metres high, takes more self-discipline than turning around in Lower Muley Twist Canyon did. But driving past the white sandstone sand dunes at 6pm, which I know are 9.5km from the lodge and restaurant, I allow myself a brief photo stop. The clouds, like down pillows, split the evening sun into biblical beams.
You might think that no restaurant could be worth a popped blister and speeding through the Burr Trail’s landscape. You’d be wrong. I talked myself into missing the surprises around future Lower Muley Twist corners because the constantly changing menu at Hell’s Backbone Grill is a guaranteed good surprise. I’ve eaten there four times before.
When former president Bill Clinton established the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in 1996, it was big news, but it wasn’t until the grill opened in 2000 that the monument, and Boulder, came on to my radar.
At the turn of the millennium the grill was the Rocky Mountain West’s only woman-owned, chef-owned restaurant operating its own farm. In 2002, it made national news by obtaining Boulder’s first liquor licence. That was when I took the time to look it up on a map. My search revealed that Boulder was far off Highway 12, and on the road to nowhere. The nearest airport was four-and-a-half hours away.
Someday I’d get there. As it turned out, that day was more than a decade later, in 2012.
From that trip, my strongest memories are of the restaurant’s and Highway 12’s “stars”. At the former, it was the spicy meatloaf, which was every bit as good as the reviews said it would be. On the latter, it was the hogback, a 3km section of road with sheer drop-offs of more than 300m on both sides. I have returned to Highway 12 and Boulder several times since. I make an effort to search for subtler joys, even though the hogback was repaved and the restaurant has gained more and more recognition. (It has been named Utah’s best restaurant several times and, last year, co-owners and co-chefs Blake Spalding and Jen Castle published their second cookbook, This Immeasurable Place: Food and Farming from the Edge of Wilderness.
It has a 2.6ha farm – named Blaker’s Acres after Spalding – that annually grows about 10 500kg of produce and keeps more than 150 chickens, and the farm staff tend about 150 fruit trees (including five kinds of apricot trees), so the menu continually changes.
This evening, as I am dining alone, choosing is more excruciating than usual. How to pick between goat-cheese fondue and a steamed artichoke served with lemon aioli made from eggs laid by Blaker’s Acres’ chickens? I settle on the artichoke. And that’s just the appetiser. I then order a New York strip steak. The beef is from a cow that grazed in Grand Staircase-Escalante.
It might be my imagination, fuelled by driving through the forest on the way back from Lower Muley Twist Canyon, but when the steak arrives and I begin to eat, I taste notes of pinyon and juniper. – The Washington Post