The First Annual Run What Ya Brung Family Picnic

Editor’s note: This is the first guest blog post on the site. Graham has been a friend of mine for over a decade— we originally met downhill skateboarding and have made many memories over the years together. You’ve definitely seen a lot of his photos on the blog, and below are his words and film photos. Dig it!

It's January in Michigan, and I'm looking over my Strava heatmap. There isn't much riding to do in the winter months in the Midwest outside of fat biking through the snow, so instead I’m reminiscing on the events of the past season and coming up with rides for the summer months ahead. Last year’s Hodag Country Ramble (organized by Jeff Frane in Rhinelander, Wisconsin) was an eye-opener for me, an event that brought together the colorful community of “alternative cyclists” and took us through some gorgeous Midwestern forest roads. I look back on the miles and smiles I shared with my best bicycling buddies, and a route begins to form along the map of my previous gravel rides through the Manistee National Forest.

It's a concept we can all appreciate: the route is predetermined and dinner is handled. Just show up with an open mind and a willingness to ramble through some unknown terrain, and know that no matter what happens, there's a burger waiting for you at the finish line. Of course, relying on public forest land for camping, we'd need to keep things relatively small. Camping in a National Forest is free, and you can pitch your tent virtually anywhere, as long as you can fit your group. Fortunately, I've camped this area many times, and I know that with a reasonable group, there will always be a few decent options, you just need to stake your claim.

The route I whipped up would pass by, as a requirement, a number of potential backcountry camp sites. It also would take us down the rather wild Pine River Road, a rolling forest two-track primarily used by off-road vehicles. We would be crossing the Manistee and Pine Rivers three times, including once over the Manistee on a wooden suspension bridge, barely wide enough to allow a handlebar through. There aren’t many businesses along this route, just a couple of convenience stores with water, snacks, and some basic hot food at best, so I planned for an “aid station”, where I would stash a cooler full of water and adult beverages near the halfway point. Through a democratic process, we picked a date that would work for most of those interested, and the Run What Ya Brung Family Picnic was born.

Fast forward to July, and Picnic weekend arrived. As I loaded my car up with camping, bicycling, and grilling supplies, a rogue software update pushed out by one of the world’s largest IT providers caused the most widespread technological outage in history. Flights were canceled, banks closed, hospitals struggled to provide services, and we left our cell service and running water behind to go ride bikes in the woods. I drove up north ahead of the group to secure a camp site. Upon inspection, our first choice would have required driving down some sketchy two-track meant for ORV’s, so this location on Pine River Road became our “aid station” instead. I filled a cooler with water bottles and Modelo and stashed it fifty feet into the woods, leaving a stick as a marker that would help us find the spot the following day. I drove to the secondary camp location and found a much more appropriate camp site, with room for all of our tents and cars, close enough to the Manistee River to ride over for a swim. I set up my portable propane grill and prepped some food for the next day. By sundown, the rest of the crew had arrived and set up their tents.

Our group brought an eclectic set of bicycles. Hardtail mountain bikes, drop-bar gravel rigs, fully rigid, single-speed, all were represented. I chose to ride my late-80’s Specialized Hardrock that I’d attached a Wald basket to for short trips into town. Was this the best bike for this ride? No. It’s not even the best bike for this ride that I own, but I felt that it followed the “Run What Ya Brung” ethos, and if nothing else, would be a unique experience. On the morning of the ride, we made estimates on how long the 52-mile route would take us to complete, accounting for one or more stops along the way. 6 hours seemed conservative, but that was the general consensus.

We rode down stretches of quiet forest two-track past rows of red pine, planted by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s. We labored up some of the longer climbs in the Lower Peninsula and flew down the other side, my Wald basket rattling the whole way. We shared Pine River Road with groups of Jeeps on 35” tires and convoys of side-by-sides carrying families down the off-road vehicle track. We stopped to climb to an overlook above the Pine River and saw a group of 50 or more people floating in inner tubes 150 feet below. At the “aid station” we retrieved the hidden beverage cooler and met up with Dan, who wasn’t able to ride with us due to injury, but brought fruit to share. We made one more stop at a convenience store, enjoyed some giant stacked deli sandwiches, chips, and ice cream bars. Having experienced large amounts of rain earlier this summer, followed by a hot and dry stretch leading up to the Picnic, the forest roads were a bit sandier than I’d expected. The ride along our route through the beautiful Manistee National Forest would take us over 7 hours to complete. After the final stretch of sandy gravel to our camp site, our group was tired but had a shared sense of accomplishment. We grabbed a few beers and rode down to the river to cool off.

Dinner was in the Picnic style, of course. Burgers and hotdogs on paper plates. We sat around the campfire, enjoyed some grub, talked about bikes and music and our jobs and mosquitoes. The weather was perfect for sleeping outside: no rain in the forecast, and temps dropping into the mid-50s overnight. Around midnight, I climbed into my tent and fell asleep within minutes, no rain fly necessary. On Sunday morning we said our goodbyes, packed our things up and left. I spent the drive home thinking about route improvements, alternative camp locations, and how grateful I was that I could convince a group of friends to leave the comforts of home behind and ride bikes with me in the woods. The “1st Annual” Run What Ya Brung Family Picnic was little more than a group of buddies camping and going for a ride, but I have hope that this is the start of a small tradition, one that we can extend to an even larger Family next time around.

Film photos of the ride were shot from in-the-saddle on Graham’s Pentax SF10.