This past week I noted many great wells being reported and/or a lot of activity by some players that had been relatively quiet over the past couple of years. I caught many of them under "Bakken 2.5" at the top stories for the week. Two operators seemed to pop up more often than the others: Slawson and Bruin.
For the note regarding Bruin E&P, see this link.
I only noted one Slawson well at this week's "top stories" (link above). There were just too many Slawson posts to link. Slawson deserved a stand-alone post. Here is the list of posts that featured Slawson this past week:
- area rich in Slawson wells, Van Hook, north side of the lake
- Slawson's Jughead well, #17864
- Slawson's Goblin well, #19000; at same link:
- Slawson's Waterbond #6
- Slawson's Waterbond #4
- Slawson's Waterbond #3
- a trio of Slawson wells to watch
- Slawson's Gabriel well, #24520
- Slawson's Wolverine wells
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The Travel Page
Boulder, Utah: hopefully I see this most interesting destination sooner than later. Stay tuned.
Khirbet Qeiyafa, Canaan: no, I won't be seeing this site any time soon.
Boulder, Utah: "Why Two Chefs in Small-Town Utah Are Battling President Trump," Kathryn Schulz, The New Yorker, current issue. I don't subscribe to The New Yorker any more. The editors continue to suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome. I haven't read this article yet, but my hunch is that a) it would have been a great article even without the Trump tie-in (I won't know until I finish reading it); and, b) the editors would not have published it had there not been a Trump tie-in. LOL.
Even without a subscription, The New Yorker allows a few free e-articles each month, so if you haven't visited The New Yorker recently you should be able to access the article.
It begins:
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.But this is what the story is all about and why I hope to visit sooner than later: Hell's Backgone Grill & Farm.
From the article:
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.Khirbet Aeiyafa? That will have to wait until the next post.
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