Last year, Amy Charity baked a lot of chocolate chip cookies.
The founding partner and CEO of SBT GRVL, one of the country’s largest gravel bike races, and her staff made dozens of batches last spring before splitting into teams and fanning out across rural Routt County. Their mission was equal parts goodwill gesture and public information campaign: knock on nearly 300 doors along the race route before thousands of Lycra-clad cyclists descended on Steamboat Springs and spread across its famed “champagne gravel” roads.
One stop took them to the home of fourth-generation rancher Jo Stanko.
Stanko had just finished lunch when she invited Charity inside. As they talked around the kitchen table, Charity asked the question that had consumed her for nearly three years.
When had all the tension over the bike race begun?
Stanko laughed.
“Oh, about the 1800s.”
She wasn’t talking about SBT GRVL, of course. She was talking about something much older: the uneasy relationship between ranching, recreation, and growth in northwestern Colorado. Long before gravel bikes arrived, Routt County was wrestling with who gets to use the land, who bears the burden of preserving it, and who benefits when outsiders come to enjoy it. That history helps explain how one of America’s premier gravel races found itself at the center of one of the sport’s most contentious community battles.
Since launching in 2019, SBT GRVL has grown into one of the country’s marquee gravel events, attracting thousands of amateur riders, some of the world’s best professionals, and major industry sponsors to Steamboat Springs each summer. But as the race grew, so did frustration among some residents who live along its route. They complained of congested county roads, disruptions to ranch operations, trespassing, litter and public urination. Race weekend overlapped with the Routt County Fair, making an already busy weekend even more difficult for families who live outside city limits.
After the 2023 race, those frustrations boiled over. Residents organized opposition campaigns, and county commissioner meetings filled with angry speakers. The future of SBT GRVL, once lauded as one of gravel’s biggest success stories, suddenly looked uncertain.
This summer, however, the race received unanimous approval to expand again — and looks a lot like the original 2019 version. But getting there required a yearslong effort to address complaints, rebuild relationships, and rethink nearly every aspect of the event. SBT GRVL nearly lost its home not because people hated cycling, but because the race became a flashpoint for long-simmering tensions over who benefits from Colorado’s rural landscapes.
“We had nearly double the demand of what we could accommodate”
From the beginning, SBT GRVL seemed like a perfect fit.
In 2018, inspired by the growing popularity of gravel racing and by wildly popular events like Unbound Gravel in Kansas, Charity and the other founders of SBT GRVL envisioned something different for Steamboat Springs: world-class production layered onto the region’s extensive network of gravel roads.
“We have these perfect gravel roads in Steamboat, but we also wanted to give people a really high-level event experience,”she said.
The formula worked almost immediately. The inaugural event sold out its 1,500 entries in less than a week. Within a few years, thousands of riders were entering a lottery for a chance to participate. By 2023, the event was capped at 3,000, with another 1,000 people on a waiting list.
Professional gravel racer Lauren De Crescenzo, who has competed in every edition of SBT GRVL and won the women’s race in 2021 and 2022, said the event quickly became one of the sport’s crown jewels.
“The roads are incredible, the scenery speaks for itself, and from the very beginning it felt like a world-class event while still feeling authentically Colorado,” she said. “It was one of the original marquee gravel events, yet still felt like a hometown race.”
By 2023, SBT GRVL appeared to be firing on all cylinders. NBA Hall of Famer Reggie Miller and Formula One driver Valtteri Bottas mingled with riders at the expo (and both raced the next day). The professional fields — especially the women’s — were among the deepest in gravel racing.
“The energy was explosive,” Charity said. “We had nearly double the demand of what we could accommodate. We had so many people trying to get into the event, we joked that even Barack Obama couldn’t get in. Gravel was exploding and we were up there with one of the best in the country.”
The problem was, not everyone agreed.
De Crescenzo remembers noticing the shift during the race itself.
“The first time it really hit me was during the 2023 race when I saw a ‘No SBT GRVL’ sign along one of the rural roads,” she said. “It was clear that the success of the event didn’t necessarily match the concerns of the people who live and work on those roads every day.”
One of those people was Tony Rosso.
Rosso doesn’t dislike cycling. In fact, the owner of Forever Fit Physical Therapy in Steamboat Springs has sponsored cycling events, and for years he tolerated SBT GRVL rolling past the home he shares with his wife, whose family has ranched in Routt County for generations.
“My son even had a lemonade stand during that weekend,” Rosso said.
But after the 2023 race, he decided enough was enough. Race day had morphed into race week, with cyclists arriving early to ride the county roads in large groups. During the event, two-way cyclist traffic clogged some of the narrow roads, making it nearly impossible for residents to turn out of their driveways. Families struggled to get to the county fair. Trash remained after the event.
So, when Routt County commissioners were considering SBT GRVL’s special-use permit the following year, Rosso joined dozens of residents speaking against it. The frustration, he said, extended beyond the race itself.
“This is the problem I had,” Rosso said. “We’re burdened with preserving this rural landscape. We’re burdened with carrying on this Western legacy that the county is selling, but they don’t reciprocate in any fashion.”
Because of zoning restrictions, most of the business, lodging, and sales tax revenue generated by the event stays inside Steamboat Springs, while many of the impacts fall on residents living in unincorporated Routt County.
In early 2024, Routt County commissioner Tim Corrigan told Sun reporter Tracy Ross that Routt County has very restrictive zoning regulations that mostly prohibit commercial activity as well as an outright prohibition of short-term rentals in unincorporated Routt County.
“So, practically speaking, there aren’t any stores (except the small store in Clark), lodging facilities or any other operation that could benefit from any of this activity or any sales tax collections for the county,” he said. “Short of some kind of direct payment to the affected residents it’s hard to see what kind of positive impact there could be.”
Given those realities, Rosso said, the county should have asked rural residents what they needed before issuing permits. Instead, many felt their agricultural heritage was being marketed without benefiting the people preserving it.
“You take Larry Monger, he’s lived out here for years,” Rosso explained. “He is exactly what Routt County is selling — this old cowboy rancher that skied. However, he can’t rent out his bunkhouse short-term. So you can sell his image, you can run 3,500 riders down his road, but he can’t VRBO his bunkhouse during this event?
“This land isn’t cheap to preserve,” he added. “There’s a real emotional and financial cost to maintaining the place people come here to experience.”
For Charity, the realization that public opposition had started to coalesce came a few months after the 2023 race during a community listening session at Alpine Bank. She expected a few people to show up. Instead people packed the conference room to the point of overflowing.
“We wished we’d known before it got to that tipping point,” she said. “We didn’t hear anything until we heard from everyone.”
Addressing complaints
Most events facing this level of opposition either fight back or disappear. But Charity and her team didn’t want to back down.
“I just can’t imagine this event causing more harm than good,” she said.
So, rather than abandon the event or fight critics head-on, the organizers chose a different approach: They listened.
Charity said her team eventually compiled a list of roughly 85 complaints.
Some fixes were relatively straightforward, while others fundamentally changed the event. In 2024, the race courses were redesigned to eliminate two-way cycling traffic. Riders received repeated education about respecting private property, staying off ranch land and using restroom facilities, with organizers making clear that violations could result in disqualification. They also created a dedicated command center to better respond to issues during the event.
Despite the ongoing presence of anti-SBT GRVL signs dotting the course, the organizers felt that the event had assuaged some of the major complaints of the community.
But when Charity went to apply for her 2025 permit, the Colorado State Patrol and Routt County Sheriff’s Department threw another curveball: Citing safety concerns, they requested that the organizers cap participation at 1,800. So, the race team pivoted, splitting the event into a two-day format with fewer people riding on each day. They moved the pro race to Hayden, far from the roads where drama played out the year before.
Last year, they also made perhaps the most consequential decision of all: moving the race off Routt County Fair weekend in August to the last weekend in June.
“That was the number one issue,” Charity said. “Someone would say, ‘I’m trying to pull out of my driveway to get to the county fair.’ Those are real complaints. That’s really unfair to them, and that was a mistake on our part.”
Other changes — like separating the amateur ride from the professional race — felt less like solutions to community concerns than compromises required to satisfy permitting agencies. What makes SBT GRVL special, Charity said, “is the start and finish on Yampa Street and having the pros finish and do the same course as the amateurs. That’s a really big deal and people love it. Having the expo over two days, overlapping with the farmers market — all of that matters.
“We did it because we had to stay alive,” she said. “But we really lost the essence of the race by doing it.”
Riders noticed, too.
“Last year’s format improved safety and reduced the race’s impact on the community,” De Crescenzo said. “But it also felt different from the point-to-point adventure many of us think of as the spirit of gravel. But most riders understood the bigger picture. We’d all rather see the race evolve than disappear.”
For this year’s event, Charity entered the permit process with something she hadn’t had the year before: confidence.
By this point, the organizers had spent nearly three years working through the community’s concerns one by one. They moved the race so it wouldn’t coincide with the county fair weekend. They redesigned the courses. They increased rider education, added designated litter zones, rented dozens of additional portable toilets and overhauled their operations in ways both riders and organizers could feel.
When SBT GRVL returned before the Routt County commissioners last year, Charity asked permission to restore much of the event to its original format — bringing riders back to Steamboat Springs and increasing participation to 2,750.
A year earlier, more than 100 people had packed the hearing room to oppose the race. This time, there wasn’t a single speaker lined up against it, and the permit passed unanimously. One of the people who wasn’t there was Tony Rosso.
Instead, Rosso called Charity to apologize — not for his convictions two years earlier, but for directing his frustration at the wrong person.
“There was zero dialogue with the people this impacts,” Rosso said. “No one ever asked, ‘How do we work together?’ … That’s why I reached out to Amy. That wasn’t her responsibility. That was the county commissioners’ responsibility.”
The conflict over SBT GRVL, Charity now believes, was never unique to Steamboat Springs. As mountain towns across the West grow, attracting more visitors, more recreation and more wealth, the same questions keep resurfacing. Who benefits from that growth? Who bears its costs? And how do communities built on agriculture make room for an economy increasingly driven by tourism and outdoor recreation?
“We’ve actually had other communities call us because they’re dealing with the same thing,” Charity said. “This is a bigger issue than Steamboat Springs.”
Places like Routt County, she said, are bound to wrestle with those tensions because they’re exactly the kinds of places many types of people want to experience — including the 2,750 cyclists and their friends and family who will be there for SBT GRVL this weekend. For communities built on both ranching and recreation, the challenge isn’t choosing one identity over the other. It’s figuring out how both can coexist.