Gravel Adventure Field Guide expands Colorado gravel biking routes

This article appears in the Summer 2026 issue of ColoradoBiz titled Gravel Roads, Take Me Home: Gravel Adventure Field Guide.

Whether the terrain was dirt, pavement, or something in between, Stephen Beneski and Juan DelaRoca bonded over a shared love of cycling in Boulder in the 1990s.

DelaRoca moved to Trinidad a decade ago and found the area ideal for gravel biking, the sport’s fastest-growing segment. What was once a niche now outsells hardtail mountain bikes.

DelaRoca subsequently organized a series of gravel biking events around Trinidad in 2019 and recruited longtime graphic designer Beneski to help with the posters. Then, almost as a lark, they created the Trinidad Gravel Adventure Field Guide, a pocket-sized guidebook packed with gravel route maps, retro art and history, and printed a batch in 2022

“After we finished it, we’re like, ‘Let’s do more. Let’s just reach out to friends and contacts that we know,’” says Beneski, who’s based in Wheat Ridge. “Out of five phone calls, we got three new books. I thought, ‘There’s something here.’”

The project quickly became full-time for DelaRoca and Beneski, who now work with three contract employees to help with production and distribution. They’ve published 25 guidebooks in four years, including eight focused on regions in Colorado, and are scheduled out through summer 2027 with books in New York, Vermont, and Moab, Utah.

“We’re a one-stop shop as a marketing arm,” says Beneski. “We help create the routes, either talking to locals or building off of our knowledge, do the artwork, write the stories, take photos, draw the maps, create the digital file and routes with GPS, design the book, print the book and distribute the book.”

The end result is “a pocket-sized field guide with analog nostalgia and stories and art, but with digital-facing routes,” he adds. “All the content that we create is handed back to that community for their ‘things to do’ page on their website.”

Of a print run of 14,000 to 24,000 copies, about half go to the town and half go to bike shops, and Gravel Adventure Field Guide holds onto 1,000 copies to sell for $11 online.

“The unique part is we support brick-and-mortar bike shops by bringing these books into bike shops for people to have a scavenger hunt to pick them up,” says Beneski. “They’re available in town, but they’re also available at bike shops for free, because we’re using that heads-and-beds tax from the tourism bureaus to help spread the word to go ride bikes.”

One of the most recent publications, the Gunnison County guide, came out in March 2026. “It’s so trendy for destinations to hop on the gravel biking bandwagon, and we were really careful about making sure that we had an extraordinary gravel biking product before we started marketing it,” says Katy Mooney, marketing director at the Gunnison-Crested Butte Tourism Association. “It turns out we have amazing gravel roads. We have more than 1,100 miles of gravel road just on the Forest Service lands in the county.”

The fact that the bulk of the roads are around Gunnison and Pitkin on the south side of the county played into the decision to fund the guide. “This was a stewardship decision,” explains Mooney. “We’re not trying to grow tourism in Crested Butte in July, but we really are trying to help Gunnison businesses and south valley businesses during any month of the year.”

The value proposition offers an alternative to a gravel bike race. “Our theory is that gravel can’t just be races,” says Beneski. “If we can get 12 to 18 people a week to roll into town, stay in a hotel, and ride their bikes, that ends up being a few hundred thousand dollars. Our return on investment is pretty good, because our books come in around $60,000.”

To put that number in context, Beneski points out that the average price for a single mile of machine-made single track for mountain biking is about $60,000. “We’ll use your existing gravel roads, and we’ll create a book for less than two miles of mountain-bike trails,” he laughs.

Online: Gravel Adventure Field Guide: graveladventurefieldguide.com