Maddox: Perry

In general, I’d rather be naked. Preferably outside. This passion of mine doesn’t get much exercise in Winter, though; desert pot holes are frozen over or empty, rivers build ice bridges that crack and are carried downstream, and layers and layers of cappeline, fleece and wool keep my poor skin warm but suffocating. Which is why I am especially grateful for tectonic rifts. Not the rifts of millions and billions of years ago, rifts that spawned mountains and spewed magma. I mean the great great great great grandchildren of these mountain building events. I am grateful for cracks. For fissures. For wounds in the otherwise very solid igneous protrusions we are blessed to have so many of here in the West. I am particularly grateful for the happy coincidence of these steaming, smoking peepholes into the underworld and water. I am grateful for hot springs. And if the hot spring bubbles up right next to a dogwood and willow lined river, so much the better.


Right now, it’s hailing. The hail plings off my cheeks and eyelids and shoulders. It is thrown by gusts of wind against the tin roof covering the picnic area next to me. It pings and pongs off tiny windmill blades 50 yards away. The windmill chirps as the wind rushes the blades faster, then quiets as the winds ease. I couldn’t care less. I’m almost oblivious. I’m floating, body draped over three bright purple and blue foam noodles in a 30 foot, 100degree pool. I am happy and as naked as I can get in polite company. Which thankfully, there is none of right now.

The pool in which I so luxuriously recline, hat pulled down over my face to protect my eyes from the hail, bikini strings floating out from my neck and hips, was originally dug by the Hopkins family when they homesteaded here in 1913. Lucky bastards. In the 40’s, the spring was open for commercial use and was also home to a burger joint which apparently was famous for their homemade cheese. Damn, a few decades too late. The most recent owners bought the land in 1998 and opened Maple Grove Hot Springs to the public in 2003, after giving the property a serious overhaul.


Given the fact that we are in middle-of-nowhere-Idaho, that every house we have passed on the way here has had pioneer built outbuildings, half a dozen horses and some cows on their property, that every vehicle we have passed has been a larger than life truck with a gun rack on top, the Maple Grove Hot Springs come as a bit of a surprise. When we first walk in the door to the Pool House, we are greeted by a man with waist long dreads wearing a green dress. With him are an equally dready woman, brushing her teeth and wearing pajamas, and a girl in a peasant blouse, standing at the kitchen sink washing dishes. They don’t own the place. Rather, they have been staying the night in the little 1950’s era trailer you can rent just a few minute’s walk from the pools. It’s turquoise.


Looking around, I’m guessing the people that do own the place wouldn’t find a room full of dreadheads alarming or strange. The check-in desk features a display of their home-made soaps and lotions, containing jojoba and almond oils, shea butter and essential oils. The property is completely off the grid so any power used is generated by solar panels, windmills and a little generator. The grounds are xeriscaped, decorated with beautiful stones (obviously local) and native plants, now bare stalks and chaff, bending beneath the weight of snow.

The property runs along a narrow shelf of land between the Bear River and some gently sloping, but still big enough to loom, juniper and fir covered hills. Just downriver, the hills shoot down right to the river’s edge, slotting up to form a gorge. There is only one other house around and it’s set back so artfully into the trees, you barely notice it’s there. We are 24 miles from the closest thing resembling a town (Preston). There is no sound except the pattering of rain and hail on water.

After discovering the gate closed at Diamond Fork Hot Springs one too many times, I found near-naked-refuge last winter at Crystal Hot Springs in Honeyville, Ut. My need for warm water in February kept me coming back but if I’d known I had other options, I never would have put myself through it. Crystal Hot Springs, while boasting the most mineral rich waters in North America, is filthy. The bathrooms and locker rooms are beyond shabby and coated in years of hair and rust. The main pool is perpetually covered in floating layers of green scum. The pools are located just beyond a feed lot, so every so often your soak is interrupted by heavy wafts of cow. Despite all of this, the place is regularly packed. A friend and I made the mistake of going there on Martin Luther King Day. Who knew that celebration of the civil rights movement inspires hundreds of whiteys to skip work and get (semi) naked. There was literally no room to move.

Maple Grove on the other hand is utterly still. There is no water slide, no drifts of hair, no diapers, no cows. The Pool House has a little kitchen, fully stocked with dishes and open for visitors to use. The bathrooms and locker rooms smell like the homemade soap and are lined with beige tile, immaculately clean. The shower, as opposed to the group showers at Crystal that never really work above a trickle, is enclosed and getting into it, I don’t worry that I’ll come out with some gnarly foot condition.

The Pool House opens onto four developed pools. The largest, also the coolest, is the one in which Adam and I happily float and occasionally paddle. The remaining three can be reached by following a quaint pebbly and lantern lit path north along the river. Each of these pools is stone lined, big enough for maybe six people, and separated by little hillocks of raised xeriscaped beds and fruit trees. Water runs into the pools down handmade wood and stone waterfalls. The pools are kept clean by the constant flow of water in from these little falls and out through a drain on the downhill side of the pool. The drain then opens up on the downhill slope, allowing the water to run in little stream-bed-looking troughs to the river which is less than 10 yards away.

As we float, the hail shifts to rain. All around, the rain drops make little ripples as the water in the pool splashes up to meet them, plip plip. We float for three hours, occasionally hopping out of our pool to race barefoot down the hill to one of the smaller, warmer pools. Watching the river through the steam, we see two swans floating casually downstream. Just above the Springs, the river spreads out making a marshy area. The marsh is thick with red dogwood and tall grasses. I imagine that just a little earlier in the season, this must have been an amazing spot for watching bird migrations. Behind us, two deer munch on fallen apples from a small, fruit-heavy tree. Since these aren’t sulphur springs, the air is simply sweet with wet fall smells, decaying apples, wet grass and junipers. Looking up into the sky, if I let my eyes go kind of lazy, I can see the rain drops leaving the clouds and falling to earth.


We start our trip back as the skies above us clear. Another group shows up, tallboys in hand. They’re a little more rowdy than we’re in the mood for so we use their raucous laughter as the motivation to finally pull ourselves from the water. A quick bathe in the perfectly acceptable shower and we are off, taking the windy way home to avoid driving through downtown Logan.

Our intention is to stop by Maddox Ranch House and Drive-In on the way home. Maddox is located right next to the Wellsville Mountains in Perry, just south of Brigham City, so despite the gathering clouds, we take Sardine Pass. What is usually a 20 minute drive turns into 50 minutes of white out. We should have known better. By the time we pull up to Maddox we are freezing, snowy and more than a little tense. The combination moves me to suggest that we sit in the restaurant instead of the car-hop like we usually do. I have never been in the restaurant and have no idea what to expect.

The first time we pulled up to Maddox last summer, it was eleven o’clock in the morning. Even though the restaurant doesn’t open till eleven-thirty, the car-hop was already lined with cars. Maddox boasts that it serves 3, 000 meals a day on average and I believe it. Irv Maddox opened the place just after WWII as a lunch counter with seven stools. After a few years, he moved the restaurant into a log cabin up the street and expanded to serve dinner. The original log cabin is supposedly still part of the building, but you couldn’t tell to look at it. Because we’ve always gone to the car-hop, it took me a few visits to realize that Maddox isn’t so much a restaurant as an institution. You can get married here, have family reunions here, hell, you could probably have a funeral here.


The restaurant was a mistake. First, it’s a zoo. We’ve seen no more than 8 people all day and here, there are at least 200. On entry, we are faced with a wall sized portrait of a woman in a wedding dress and her groom, dressed in cowboy garb, standing in a field of sage brush. The whole picture has been air brushed, but not well. After sitting on an overstuffed leather couch in a cabin-esque waiting area filled with very blond families watching football (or was it basketball? You can tell how much I care…)on the huge screen TV for twenty minutes, we are seated at a table that looks like it came out of a very nice retirement home. The table cloth is flowered and the walls have pictures of picket fences and gardens painted on them. I can get into this kind of decors if it’s straight up small town kitsch, but someone thought they would combine what could be cute with their sense of Park City fancy and well…it sucks. Opening the menu, I start to panic. Where is my small town list of sandwiches and fried food baskets with their small town prices? Instead of burgers and hotdogs, my happy delicious burgers and hotdogs, I’m looking at a description of a 30$ filet mignon and 27$ bison cutlets. I look at Adam. “We don’t have to stay,” he says. I plead illness, trying to look ill isn’t all that hard right now, and flee.


Twenty minutes later we are cozied up in Adam’s truck, looking at pictures of dancing hotdogs that have probably been hanging here since the 50’s. Behind us, a sign on the car-hop wall proclaims, “Over 4, 000 head of choice beef used annually!”. The choice beef is out back. I can see them milling around just down the drive-way. A teenager in tight jeans and a sweatshirt braves the wind to take our order and asks us to flip our headlights on if we need anything else. We don’t. On our laps and on the plastic trays hanging from our car windows are baskets of fat golden fries, a bison burger, friend chicken, cornbread, a roll with honeybutter, mashed potatoes and gravy, a homemade cherry pie and a mint chocolate chip malt; all for under 20$.

The burger is good. Really good. Of course it could be that I’ve been swimming all afternoon and then driving in a panic (well, Adam was driving), facing my death again and again on icy black roads, for the last hour. But I’ve eaten here before and I know it’s good. The meat, seeing as it was alive not so long ago, doesn’t have that dead and gone smell cheap patties often have. Adam doesn’t usually eat his fries, but after a few minutes of scarcely chewed inhalation he turns to me and practically moans, “These are good.”

My fried chicken is awesome. The batter is just a light layer skimming the chicken and the meat is fall-apart tender so that when I bite, the crisp of the batter holds just a second before giving in. Juice, not grease runs down my chin. The batter is in just the right proportion to the chicken, too. It’s there to give the chicken a little something instead of masking the fact that there isn’t any chicken. My mashed potatoes are real with no lumps and my cornbread is in the shape of an ear of corn. De-lightful.

The shake is bright green. I think it’s too sweet but Adam insists that it’s really good. It’s made with hand churned ice cream, thick and creamy with chunks of chocolate so big Adam can’t suck them up with his straw. A word about Maddox shakes: last summer when we were here, I ordered the fresh strawberry shake. Our car-hop chic had tipped me off to the fact that the restaurant has their own orchards and gardens. The strawberries, she told me, had been picked that morning. Sold! I was stoked. Until I got the shake...they runied it. It was beautiful, chock filled with strawberries and then they had to go and put tons and tons of some kind of pink strawberry syrup in it. So for future reference, the fresh fruit shakes can be awsome, just make sure and nicks the pink guck.

 The pie, well…I’m kind of devastated. The filling is unnaturally red, like maraschino cherries and tastes so much of corn starch that I can’t take more than a few bites. The crust is just weird. Can crust be too flakey? Cause this one seems to prove that it can. I think they used pastry dough instead of making real honest to goodness pie crust, and they basted it with something…sugar maybe? Seriously, more sugar? It’s filmy and coated and feels strange against my teeth like Styrofoam. On the other hand, Maddox makes their own sarsaparilla and root beer, and it’s pretty good, so all is not lost. So the final verdict on Maddox: Skip the restaurant and head for the car-hop. Trifecta? Almost…I don’t know, but I’m still holding out for someplace that makes their own fries. They are out there somewhere. I just know it.

A little bit of usefull information...

Region: Northern Utah

Contact Info:
Maddox Ranch House
1-800-544-5474


Rating out of ☼☼☼☼☼:

Burger ☼☼☼☼     Fries ☼☼☼.5     Shake ☼☼☼

You may want to visit Maddox if you are:
*Visiting Crystal Hot Spring
*On your way to the Spiral Jetty
*Fishing or kayaking or birding on the Bear River
*On your way to Lava Hot Springs
*On your way to Downata Hot Springs
*Bird watching at the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge
*Horse back riding in the Wellsville Mountains
*Hunting in the Wellsvilles
*Going boating on Bear Lake
*On your way to climb at the City of Rocks
*Canoeing around on the Great Salt Lake
*Picking fruit in Perry or Willard Bay
*Coming home from Maple Grove Hot Springs!