Honey Rock Landing

The turn is at Mile Marker 57 on U.S. Highway 50, between Grand Junction and Delta. From there a dirt road runs three miles by the farm’s count, or four miles of gravel by the Delta County Independent’s, down to the Gunnison River. At the bottom is a block of fruit trees under the cliffs of Dominguez Canyon. At the edge of the orchard, a shelf of red Entrada sandstone has doors and windows set into its face. Behind them are three guest suites, a dinner hall, a farm store, and a fermentation cave, all blasted out of the rock.

Honey Rock Landing is a certified organic orchard at 2444 Dominguez Canyon Road in Delta County. The Denver Post gave the orchard as 77 acres. The High Country Spotlight put the whole property at 130 acres, 75 of them in fruit. Cherries, peaches, and pears are the main crops, and in 2026 the trees carried none. An early bloom followed by a late spring freeze took the entire crop, worth about $300,000, according to sales and hospitality manager Erica Frank. The farm’s own pages say the trees remain healthy and will bear again. Through the summer of 2026, with no fruit for U-Pick, the farm opened its grounds to the public free on Friday afternoons.

“Farming does not pay the bills,” Frank told the Denver Post. “The only thing making money on this farm right now is the suites and these events.”

Three suites in the canyon wall

Each suite measures 400 square feet. A king bed stands on the main floor, and a loft above holds two queen beds. Each has a kitchen with an electric range and oven, a bathroom with a copper soaking tub and a walk-in shower lit by a skylight, radiant heat in the floors, and hand-plastered walls. A private patio faces the orchard. Overnight guests find a light breakfast waiting in the refrigerator each morning. Stone blasted from the hillside was reused for the walls, paths, and terraces outside. Cell service gives out near the river, and Wi-Fi comes by Starlink.

The suites opened in the fall of 2025. In September 2026 the farm counted more than 400 guests in the first year and quoted one who called the suites “out-of-the-box luxury.” Weekday guests share the grounds with a construction crew, which works Monday through Thursday on an expansion of the suites due in 2027.

The rest of the rock holds other rooms. The event hall is cooled by the stone overhead and serves as shelter when wind, rain, or heat comes up during a wedding. The gift shop is also built into the earth and stays cool through the summer. On the rock patio, the Farm Stand Cave sells fruit and vegetables picked by the staff, since guests are asked not to pick for themselves outside planned events.

Crawdads from the pond

The kitchen belongs to Chef Mike Winston of Le Snack Fine Foods. He came to the farm with more than 20 years of cooking behind him, including the Sonnenalp Resort in Vail and kitchens on Martha’s Vineyard. On weekends he cooks breakfasts, lunches, and dinners for suite guests. He also writes the menus for the harvest celebrations, long-table dinners open to the public about once a month. The farm’s celebrations page lists four: the Summer Solstice Soirée on June 20, the Peach Festival on July 11, the Colorado Lobster Bash on September 12, and the End of Season Celebration on October 17, 2026, from 4 to 8 p.m., with wine from Ordinary Fellow Winery. Diners are invited to come early to walk the orchard rows and market garden or to get into the river before the meal.

The farm’s announcement of the September 12, 2026, Lobster Bash laid out the evening. Guests caught crawdads from the pond, and the catch was boiled with classic seasonings. Chef Mike then made paella on a giant pan with Gulf crawdads flown in for the night, Honey Rock produce, local sweet corn, and artisan sausage, while Sauvage Spectrum poured five wines. On Sunday, October 11, 2026, the same pond is set for paddleboard yoga.

Weekend stays run Friday to Sunday, April through October, and end in a Saturday harvest dinner. The program may include a movie night in the cave, flower picking, orchard and greenhouse tours, a vegetable U-Pick, demonstrations by Chef Mike, morning breath work, sound healing, and yoga.

The river at the foot of the orchard

The farm’s put-in on the Gunnison lies west of Delta, between the Escalante and Bridgeport access points. A float from the orchard to the Bridgeport takeout runs three to four hours. The river rules are short: lifejackets always, no diving. Near the water are a pond for paddleboarding and swimming, a boathouse, a sauna, and a zipline, and a rail line runs along the property. The farm’s river page offers launches to the public by reservation. Its club page describes the river, pond, and trails as reserved for members, a status that suite guests receive with their booking. Everyone on the grounds signs a waiver and watches a two-minute safety video.

Honey from a rock

The name comes in two halves. “Landing” is for the river frontage, where rafters pull in their boats. “Honey Rock” comes from Deuteronomy 32, the Song of Moses, sung to the Israelites wandering the desert after Egypt. Rocky Mountain PBS rendered the line: “God set them atop the highlands, to feast on the yield of the earth; nursing them with honey from a rock.” Colby Barrett borrows his father’s description of the country along the highway above: “the stinking desert.”

The ground was in fruit long before the Barretts arrived. Colby Barrett said in 2023 that the land had been farmed as far back as the 1890s, and that he thought of his work as bringing an orchard back into production. In 1929, G.P. Broughton bought property in the canyon as an apple orchard. His family’s Dominguez Canyon Fruit Company, now run by his great-grandson Drew Broughton and Drew’s wife, Kelli, is called the oldest family-owned orchard in Delta County by the county’s tourism office. Honey Rock’s orchard was once part of those holdings. When Colby and Leslie Barrett bought it in 2018, it was still part of Dominguez Canyon Fruit and farmed conventionally. The owners point to an old waterwheel, root cellars, and Native American artifacts that surface during planting.

Barrett described the east side at purchase as “under-tree, kind of mismanaged and falling apart.” The earlier growers had relied on fertilizers and harsh sprays. Aphids came every spring, and the standard answer was to spray them, which, Barrett said, also killed the predatory insects. He stopped spraying. “The first year we stopped spraying, the aphids were pretty bad,” he said. Each year after, the crew released more ladybugs, and the ladybugs rose as the aphids fell. Chickens were bred to forage the tree blocks for pests and to lay an egg of a set color, to be sold as a Honey Rock egg. “We always joke that we’re too lazy to fight nature,” Barrett said. Leslie Barrett gave the orchard’s values the name Prosocial Farming. Over six years the couple rebuilt the soil, planted new trees, and brought every acre under organic practice. CCOF certified the farm under the USDA National Organic Program on August 1, 2024. Solar panels and electric equipment run the operation.

Miners in the orchard

The caves began with cold storage. Leslie Barrett describes her husband as a geological engineer; the Spotlight calls him a geotechnical engineer with a background in rockslide mitigation. He suspected a sound sandstone shelf at the orchard’s edge. “But we didn’t know for sure until we started blasting,” Leslie Barrett told the Delta County Independent. “We brought in some talented local miners who were able to blast out some great space for our cold storage. It worked so well, we just kept blasting.” The blasting produced the event space, the underground farm store, the fermentation cave, and the suites, which Colby designed. At the ribbon-cutting in October 2025, visitors walked a cave passage back to a fermentation wine cellar and a large reception area deep in the rock.

The same week brought a setback. At the October 7, 2025, meeting of the Delta County Commissioners, the Barretts’ plan for an RV park ran into an unexpected road bond for upkeep of Dominguez Canyon Road. The commissioners approved the conditional use permit unanimously. Its conditions included removing the RV sites along the river and paying a $7,500 annual bond for magnesium chloride. Commissioner Wendell Koontz called the plan the definition of agritourism and wished the owners success. Leslie Barrett said the requirements had left them “questioning whether we will be able to move forward with this project as planned.”

Other work continues. Leslie Barrett described a larger underground house with a full kitchen and an underground pool, and the Spotlight called its design Moroccan in inspiration. A natural swimming pool by the suites was one Frank expected to be filled before the end of the 2026 season. The greenhouse kept vegetables coming after the freeze and a hard summer in the outdoor market garden. Frank calls the whole undertaking a “thousand-year plan.” The farm’s U-Pick page lists cherries for June 2027 and peaches for August 2027.