By Donna Price

dprice@americanpress.com

Story, photos by
Mary Richardson

Special to the American Press

he mountain lion’s menace was palpable, yet I was filled with awe looking at this huge, sleek, golden, dangerous cat, only a few feet from where I was standing.

Thankfully, it was stuffed and hanging on a wall of the Broken Spur Inn and Steakhouse in the town of Torrey, Utah, gateway to Capitol Reef National Park and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. My husband, Joe, and I were about to eat home-on-the-range type rib-eyes that had been aged, cut and cooked in this very place.

It turned out that stories of our steaks and the cougar on the wall were connected. This cougar had developed a taste for calves, specifically calves being raised by the co-owner of the restaurant, Gary Hallows. But the cat had chosen the wrong cowboy to mess with. Hence, its current abode on the wall.

For me, that story turned out to have more nuances than just a cougar hunt. It connected the history of the people who settled these lands long before the parks and monuments existed, people whose descendants live in Torrey today.

Capitol Reef
 and Escalante

The day had been exhilarating. We had been driving on “Jeep” roads (roads best suited for 4×4 wheel drive, high clearance vehicles) through Capitol Reef and Escalante. Numerous signs noted that the roads were impassible after a rain, but it was November; no rain in sight, just beautiful blue skies.

The park has been called the neglected cousin of the other national parks in Utah. Far fewer people visit it, even though sections of it easily match the iconic scenery of both Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks. On this November day, it was almost deserted. The whole expanse of red cliffs and banded white mountains was our playground.

We couldn’t help noticing that our playground was showing us the geological history of our world. We were playing in dust that dated back 200 million years. Layers of sediment from multiple geological periods were visible in the arches we climbed through, the cliffs we looked up at, and the vitas we looked down upon. We had seen fossils of oysters that had been alive when an ocean covered Utah.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt protected the area as a national monument in 1937. He wanted to preserve all of the canyons, ridges, and buttes, but he was especially interested in a feature revered by geologists – the Waterpocket Fold. This fold is a 100-mile long “wrinkle” in the earth’s crust. It was created about 65 million years ago when geological forces thrust the land almost straight up. It is the “reef” in the name Capitol Reef; early explorers referred to all parallel, impassable ridges as reefs.

During the first couple decades the monument was extremely inaccessible, so much that the official opening to the public was delayed until 1950. Most vehicles couldn’t get there until 1962 when State Route 24 was built through the canyons. President Richard Nixon finally made it a national park in 1971.

A quarter century later, the adjacent Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument was created. President Bill Clinton reserved 1.9 million acres in 1996, but President Trump reduced it to 1 million acres in 2018.

Today, Capitol Reef is still not an easy park to visit. People get a glimpse of its scenic possibilities by driving along a 21-mile paved scenic drive, but it doesn’t show its magnificence until visitors drive the Jeep roads, or hike into the interior. We planned to follow the historic Notom-Bullfrog and Burr Trail Roads into high desert country. The road would be crisscrossed by gorges and canyons, and climb right through parts of the Waterpocket Fold.

Warnings read, “If you have a problem, help may not arrive for hours or even days,” and “Cell phone service is unreliable,” and “Beware of abrupt dropoffs due to washouts.” In other words, it was going to be magnificent.

It was. But what we didn’t realize at the time was, while we were awed by the magnificence of geological history, we should have also been awed by the human history in the area, especially the history of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the Mormons.

The Mormon and
their Descendants

The Mormons came to Utah to find “the promised land” in 1847, ending a 1,000-mile treacherous trek at what is now Salt Lake City. Then, in order to create a Mormon Kingdom, they spread out. In the 1870s, they arrived in the Fremont River valley. Both Capitol Reef and Grand Staircase-Escalante were created from parts of the area they explored.

There are signs of their struggles and successes throughout the area, especially in Capitol Reef. There they established the small settlement of Fruita and planted apple, peach, pear and apricot trees – orchards the park still maintains, along with their schoolhouse, blacksmith shop and one of the homesteads. They also created parts of the very roads we were driving on.

When we took a dirt road to the Devil’s Garden, an area of red rock arches hoodoos, red and cream colored sandstone formations that sit precariously on rock pedestals, we didn’t realize we were walking on the footsteps of Mormon pioneers. They defeated steep slickrock and sheer cliffs to build the roads we so blithely traveled to play in the rocks.

Like most of the people living in Torrey, population 200, the owners of Broken Spur Inn and Steakhouse are descended from those Mormon pioneers. Their personal history and the history of the parks and monuments have intertwined, but not always harmoniously.

The Cowgirl and
the Cowboy

Gary Hallows and Francine Ellet grew up near Torrey, within spiting distance of each other. Gary was four months older than Francine, and she remembers him as “a little pill” in grade school. But they started dating in high school. Marriage and five children followed.

Both of them had been raised to ride horses and understand nature, and their married life revolved around ranching. Francine got involved with the tourism industry when she reluctantly agreed to manage property catering to tourists. Eventually she found herself serving as a board member on the Wayne County Travel Council.

That led her to casually mention to Gary that the old Sandstone Inn in Torrey had gone into foreclosure. A few days later Gary said they should buy it. Her response, “Buy what?” and then, “No.”

“But he told me we had put a lot of time and effort into other people’s property, and it was time we owned something themselves,” she said. “I kept saying no.”

Gary had served on the Utah Cattleman’s Association and had a hankering for his own steakhouse. He eventually persuaded Francine to take a look inside the restaurant. She looked and said no, absolutely no.

Time passed. They made numerous trips to Torrey, just happening to find themselves driving by the property. In 2012, their banker told them another person was about to make an offer. Francine sighed, then she and Gary drove to the bank, signed their names, and bought it. Their relatives, Travis and Holly VanOrden, wanted to join them, so the four of them became joint owners of a motel and steakhouse.

The first thing they did was change the name. “It’s got to reflect who we are,” Francine said, “and we’re cowboys. We’ve been cowboys our whole lives.” They chose “Broken Spur” – “spur” because Gary was a collector of spurs (which now hang throughout the establishment), and “broken” because both Gary and Travis have broken so many bones they’ve lost count.

So Gary had his steakhouse, but he was still a cowboy. He still managed a cattle ranch that runs 700 to 1,100 cattle on 700,000 square miles of rangeland. The ranch borders both Capitol Reef and Grand Staircase-Escalante, and almost reaches the border of Bryce Canyon National Park.

The relationship has not always been symbiotic. Most of the conflicts occur during cattle drives. Grazing on the Utah high desert is sparse, so before the cattle can be sold for meat they need to be shipped to Iowa for a diet of wholesome mid-western corn. Herding cattle around the park borders is dangerous.

The worst accident occurred when they were herding cattle up a 70-foot cliff on the border of the park. “Fourteen cows and 10 calves fell into the forest below,” he said. “It was terrible.”

When the acreage of Escalante was reduced, moving cattle was easier. “It allowed us to do business again,” Gary said. “Our ranch was on the edge of the Staircase, so before we had to run our cattle all the way around the perimeter of the park. Now we can go across land that was off-limits before.”

Gary and his extended family hunt every fall and winter for fun. “We’ve always done it,” he said. “We make it into a big event.”

They eat the deer and elk they shoot. The bear and cougar are a different story. They hunt those animals to protect their cattle.

The cougar on the wall

Not that it’s easy to hunt the big cats. Gary says he’s always been afraid of them. When he was a young teenager, there was a market for live mountain lions and Gary and his cousins hunted them with tranquilizer guns. When they had the lions safely back home, it was his job to shoot rabbits to keep them fed. He remembers the fear. “When you see one in the wild, it’ll scare you,” he said.

He ignored that fear when it came to the cougar on the wall. That cat had developed a taste for his calves. After the fifth dead calf, Gary was determined to find it and kill it.

So his cousin and a man who owned cougar-hunting dogs joined him one winter day. It was a long chase. A couple times the dogs treed it, but it got away. Then it went up a cliff and into a cave.

Gary climbed the cliff after it. He entered the cave. For awhile it was all confusion because he had to get the dogs in back of him, not between him and the cat, and all the while the cat was hissing its anger.

When the opportunity came, Gary shot it between the eyes with a Ruger 22 caliber pistol. Then they tied its legs together and slid it down the mountain on the snow.

Today, tourism has indeed come to Torrey. It is the gateway to national parks, monuments, bureau of land management lands and national forests. New hotels and restaurants line the main street. People know the value of their location.

Yet, tourism does not define the town. The Hallows and others still define themselves as cowboys. Many of the residents are farmers and ranchers; some still make a living by selling the pelts of animals they’ve trapped. The town celebrates its Mormon history and knows the contributions their ancestors made in settling this land.

It’s a place where you can come in from the wilds of nature and find a good, home cooked steak waiting for you – provided you don’t mind an outlaw cougar watching from above.

l

Update: Because of the Covid-19 virus, Capitol Reef and Escalante are both closed except for through traffic. The Broken Spur Inn is still open but the Steakhouse is closed. The owners are looking forward to reopening and firing up the grill.