A Farm-to-Table Overnighter with Yeehaw Giddyup

Look around at your neighbors, maybe at yourself. The world as we know it is falling apart. Depression rates are skyrocketing, people are isolated and alone, and we are stuck in our spheres of increasing polarization and anger, screaming into the void. Help me, listen to me, witness me, anyone! We don’t know how to talk to strangers anymore. Kids are on screens almost all day long. My grandparents are, too. We don’t have purpose, goals, or ambition for the future. “Over-worked and under-f*cked,” as one viral Tik-Tok puts it. We are addicted to painkillers and anti-anxiety medications. Our world, the one we were promised, is collapsing. And we’re all just going to watch it from the screens glued to our hands. 

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In my lifetime, we have witnessed the hollowing out of many of America’s social institutions. No one goes to church. The Boy Scouts, rocked by allegations, has shrunk. Summer camps and the YMCA have dwindling numbers. Schools, universities, and workplaces are increasingly online. Cafes are now just MacBook orgies. So, where do we meet? Where do we gather? How can I find someone else who’s seeing all this crazy shit happen? What comes next? 

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Enter Yeehaw Giddyup, a big intro for a small ride. Essentially, it’s a bikepacking farm-to-table event. Josh leads the group on a day’s ride through windy singletrack, and Bailey greets them at camp with their own locally sourced, sustainable, excellently crafted, four-course meal. The suggested donation is $80 a person, including drinks, and the proceeds are donated to the local Native tribes whose land is traversed. Now in its second year, Bo and I were lucky enough to join on the August ride out of Winter Park, Colorado, snaking through 20 miles of singletrack and aspens, over rivers, and under the fierce call of granite-peaked mountains, camping, feasting, chilling, and just… talking at the St. Louis Creek Campground, returning the next day. 

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We meet in a parking garage in the middle of town. We awkwardly shake hands and shimmy our bags tight. The few loose comments. “Nice bike! Where ya from?” And we push off. The sun is out. The summer rain clouds don’t threaten us today. It’s a peaceful enterprise, poking out of town and onto a dirt back road. Watch out for the Rivian, watch out for the fly rod poking out the back. We ride through the aspens, zipping along singletrack, fixing flats and waiting up, picking wild raspberries and rinsing in the cold snow melt. We yip and yell as we lace and squirm through berms and over rollers. We move together, as a unit, all pointing at the same mountains, laughing at the same jokes. The conversation gets deeper. We feel closer. For me, it is all about this. That beautiful progression from strangers to friends as we move through the world, understanding both our commonality and our differences. 

Bailey is already at camp as we stumble in. They’ve set up a tent and plated the wooden table. Bouquets and a tablecloth too. We’re sweaty and gross. But we feel fancy as we sit and sip on our cocktails and begin to pick at the rosemary olives. We talk about the day. We really just wait for more food. 

We are the B.F. Skinner rats, pressing our buttons, waiting for dopamine. Bailey brings round after round of food. We sit there, staring wide-eyed as they say what all was made, and we try our best not to eat it in one bite. We start with jalapeño poppers wrapped with bacon. Then pan con tomate, a garlic explosion of tomato on locally made sourdough, toasted on the cast iron. Then a verano salad with a peach vinaigrette and roasted shishito peppers and peaches and goat cheese and almonds and oh man… I’m hungry again. 

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Then Bailey brings out a steaming plate of paella for everyone, with chorizo and shrimp and olives and radish and sprouts and lemon and that saffron, yellow rice that sticks to the ribs and makes you sleep like a baby. And then we have a heavy and dense olive oil cake, not too sweet, just right. It is pure bliss. 

We sit around, us dopamine-addicted dirtbags, stuffed and happy. The conversation meanders. All of us are in our 20s. The only other time any of us had a similar farm-to-table experience was when three of them did the last Yeehaw Giddyup. “It’s easily the highlight of my summer,” Jaron says with a satisfied glow on his face. We all nod in agreement, and our eyelids grow heavy, and Bailey and Josh do the dishes, and we all stumble off into our tents. 

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In the morning, they’ve brought coffee and apple cake, and we scratch at our puffy eyes and descend back into town. Some load up for the ride back over the pass and back home, some drive, and we all split apart. I follow Josh to the gas station to get the scoop. Josh says that after years of working in the commercial photography industry, he was burned out. He says the work was exciting but lacking purpose. “I was selling Gore-Tex jackets to people who already had Gore-Tex jackets,” he tells me.

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We’re standing in the aisle of candy and snacks, and Josh is stuffing his pockets with colored plastic packages before a race against the summer storm clouds dangling over Rollins Pass. Josh ultimately left commercial photography and started volunteering at his local co-op bike shop, rebuilding abandoned bikes, teaching new rider classes, and leading bikepacking workshops. He says he found purpose in putting someone on a bike for the first time and watching them see the world differently. It is not the glamor of selling useless shit in an already over-cluttered world. It’s giving life to a piece of trash and a new way for someone to interact with the world. 

Bailey comes from the Eastern Plains of Colorado, where the flat farmland stretches into Kansas and down to Missouri. Bailey met Josh on a photo shoot, Josh shooting, Bailey modeling—the only person they could find who could ride a motorcycle and a snowboard. Josh would eventually get Bailey into bikes, and now, together, they could scheme. Bailey found cooking during the pandemic, and the two went to their first and only farm-to-table experience. For $300 plus drinks, they were toured around a farm and given a four-course dinner. They sat next to the personal sommelier for Kimbal Musk, and the two found the experience both exciting in its local involvement and extremely offputting in its elitism. 

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So, Yeehaw Giddyup is their brainchild. Bailey wants people to feel attended to. They want us to eat locally sourced and sustainable foods. They think everyone should experience a fine dining atmosphere once, and together, we all believe that in doing it after a bike ride, eating great food always tastes better. And eating great food, staring at the waning moon rising over the mountains, with the crickets in the background and a small brook not far off, with the warm glow of string lights and rambling conversation with new friends, well, that’s just heaven. It’s the perfect antidote to the digital world. It is the perfect first bikepacking experience. And it is the perfect way to appreciate a summer evening.

You can learn more about Yeehaw Giddyup and find details about upcoming events at Yeehaw-Giddyup.com and on Instagram.

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