Rebecca's Private Idaho becomes The Big Lost

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We would normally call this the "Two weeks out" email because most of the events we produce begin and end on Saturdays. But not this one. RPI's first community gathering takes place on Tuesday, September 8th, which means that two-week warning window has come and gone. The Queen's Stage Race rider meeting at Zenergy Health Club & Spa will be upon us in ten (10) days. Dang, that's close. Heck, if you're coming to us from Miami, you should probably start driving.

Now, as we head toward the 14th year of RPI with the metronomic march of a clock, we also want to get ahead of some big and historic news, and some genuinely uncharted territory for this ride that Rebecca dreamed up and built in Ketchum, Idaho.

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2026 will be the last year that RPI will bear the name Rebecca's Private Idaho.

You heard that correctly. As the Queen of Play (formerly the Queen of Pain) rides her story into the backcountry of this majestic place that RPI has called home since the very beginning, a torch will pass. After the show concludes on Saturday, September 12th, Rebecca's Private Idaho will continue under a new name: The Big Lost, named for one of the strangest rivers in the world, the one that's been running alongside you in Copper Basin and Wildhorse this whole time.

A river that quite literally gets lost.

People call this a bucket list ride. We hear it every year. It gets grouped in with the rides everyone says you have to do once, and Global Cycling Network rated it a Top Five Gravel Event while Outside put it on their list of the 25 Best Bike Rides in the World. We're proud of that. But a bucket list is still a list, and the point of a list is that you cross things off and move on to the next one. That's not what happens here. Most of you don't come once. You come back.

Saturday's main event roams through a geological wonder. The Big Lost gathers itself out of mountain streams on the valley floor and then does what a life does. It picks up strength. It picks up momentum. It meanders out into the plains of central Idaho, weathering rock into smaller and rounder stone the whole way. And then, past Arco, it stops. Not into another river. Not into the sea. It sinks into the ground and it's gone.

Except it isn't. That water drops into the Snake River Plain aquifer and travels underground for somewhere between 50 and 700 years before it surfaces again at Thousand Springs, a hundred miles from where it went under, clear as it's ever been. The river doesn't end. It just goes somewhere you can't watch it go, and it comes back changed.

That's a fair description of what this place does to a person who keeps returning to it. It strips away layers until you're another version of yourself. We think we shed a tear. We definitely shed a tear.

It's a big change for us. It's a big change for you. It's also a natural one.

Rebecca, thank you. You took a place you loved and talked a few thousand people into loving it too, which is harder than it sounds and rarer than it should be. The name goes with you. Everything you built stays right here.

The Big Lost.

Sincerely,
All of us at Rebecca's Private Idaho, for one more year.