the Golden giddyup

THE CLOSING OF A CHAPTER

Like many of you, we at the Golden Giddyup are all frequent visitors on Jeffco Open Space trails. We live amongst them, drive to them, ride to them, take our friends and our kids and our dogs to them, and escape to them when life begs escaping. These trails are sacred to us, as they are to you.

The Golden Giddyup was created to train and support competent volunteer trail builders who helped maintain some of the most loved, and heavily used, Jeffco Open Space parks. The Giddyup began by engaging mountain bikers to volunteer time and energy to reopen damaged trail systems after the catastrophic floods of 2013 decimated many local trail systems. In the years that followed, the Giddyup Trail Team logged thousands and thousands of hours and engaged hundreds of individual volunteers on Jeffco Open Space parks and the City of Golden land (to help maintain and grow the Golden Bike Park).

The annual Golden Giddyup Race and Expo was designed to be a community celebration of volunteerism, and a fundraiser for ongoing stewardship efforts. In 2019, the Giddyup was notified by Jeffco Open Space Management that the race would no longer be supported [read more here]. Despite the dissolution of the event, the Trail Team continues to improve community trails under the auspices of the Colorado Mountain Bike Association. 

The former Golden Giddyup Leadership Team will be engaging local bike and outdoor recreation businesses and citizens in a collaborative effort to engage in local politics with the goal of influencing decision-making at the municipal and county level for more trail, better trail through the Giddyup Trail Alliance, a Colorado Non-Profit (stay tuned for more information). 

We want to say our most heartfelt thank you to the sponsors, supporters and partners who believed in what we were doing before we knew what we were doing. Yeti Cycles, LAWS Whiskey House, Golden Bike Shop, Clif Bar, and New Terrain have been with us since the very beginning, and helped make the Golden Giddyup a reality. These folks believed in mountain bikers’ potential to make a better, more inclusive community. 

And of course, to our volunteers. The Golden Giddyup was nothing without volunteers. We are what we do, and our volunteers put in thousands and thousands of hours maintaining and improving our trails under our name. The core ethic behind the Golden Giddyup was Service to Others, and these folks provided their community with a great service – it deserves our unending gratitude. Thank you!

As we close this chapter, we owe a great debt to the citizens who came before us and fought to preserve land for future generations to enjoy and escape to. Preserving this land for outdoor recreation was a founding principal of Jeffco Open Space, and we intend to continue to fight for more trails and better trail management for all visitors. 

Stay tuned for more information on how we can continue to steer the ship for more trail, better trail through the Giddyup Trail Alliance.

Thank you from all of us here at the Golden Giddyup.
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