The story of Cowboy Country Inn at 25 South 100 West in Escalante goes back to 1945, when C.R. (Claron) and Ruby Griffin bought a building on Main Street and opened a café alongside a dress shop. By 1946 they had acquired three motel cabins from Leo Munson. By 1952 they had added a general store. The Griffin footprint on Main Street Escalante kept expanding — they purchased the Cowles General Merchandise in 1962 — until the motel changed hands in the 1970s and went through a period as the Quiet Falls Motel.
Elaine and Emilee Lott — Claron and Ruby Griffin’s granddaughters — repurchased the property in the late 1990s and ran it for five years before converting it temporarily to a boarding school during a tourism slump. In 2016 they brought it back as the Cowboy Country Inn, with Ethan Griffin serving as General Manager. The current operation is a motel-plus-gathering-space positioned for the Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument visitors and the Scenic Highway 12 travelers who need a clean, honest place to stay in a remote town fifty miles from the nearest city of any scale.
Three generations of the Griffin family on the same Escalante block, through motel, store, café, and school and back to motel again — that kind of persistence in a place this remote has a name, and it is not entrepreneurship. It is rootedness.
**Verification notes** Website live; founding by C.R. and Ruby Griffin in 1945 confirmed on site; complete property timeline confirmed on About page; Elaine and Emilee Lott as current owners (Griffin granddaughters) confirmed; Ethan Griffin as General Manager confirmed; address 25 S 100 W, Escalante confirmed.