Yellow Shirts, Green Pants, and Enough Tri-Tip to Feed a Small Town
Updated: 5 minutes ago
Asphalt Cowboys’ 72nd Community BBQ once again turned Lake Redding Park into the North State’s biggest backyard cookout.
If you rolled down Benton Drive on Sunday, September 13, and caught that first whiff of oak smoke and garlic bread, you already knew what was going on. The Asphalt Cowboys were at it again.
They call it a Drive-Through BBQ, and yes sir, you can stay in the truck, hand over a ticket, and roll out with a plate of world-famous tri-tip or chicken, cowboy beans, coleslaw, and garlic bread without ever unbuckling. Folks do it by the thousands. In 2025, they figured more than 3,000 cars used that drive-thru lane alone.
But anybody who thinks that’s the whole story hasn’t parked under the oaks at Lake Redding Park.
Plenty of folks treat it like a family reunion with better meat. They pull in, find a patch of grass, unfold a chair, and settle in for the afternoon. Kids run. Neighbors bump into neighbors they haven’t seen since last September. Deputies and firefighters wander through in civvies, plates in hand. The yellow shirts and green pants are everywhere—laughing, carving, pointing people toward the beans. It’s a drive-thru that somehow turns into a picnic, and that’s the charm of the thing.
The Cowboys fired up the 72nd Annual Community Bar-B-Que from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. at the Lake Redding Park Pavilion, east side of the park. Tickets were $13 if you were smart enough to buy ahead from a Cowboy, Lulu’s downtown, or Paint Mart on Larkspur. Fifteen bucks at the park if you waited. That’s still one of the best plates in Shasta County, and everybody knows it.
This year’s plan, announced before the first brisket hit the grate, was the usual mountain of food: about 5,000 pounds of tri-tip, 2,500 pounds of chicken, 500 gallons of cowboy beans, 500 pounds of coleslaw, and 1,100 loaves of garlic bread. That’s the kind of grocery list that makes a Costco manager sit down. They expected to feed around 8,000 people before the last loaf disappeared.
They’ve been cooking numbers like that for years. In 2024 they said they put out more than 5,500 pounds of tri-tip and 2,500 pounds of chicken and saw close to 10,000 folks come through. In 2025 it was “over 5,000” of tri-tip and 2,500 of chicken again, with six pits on the beef, two on the chicken, one on the bread, and a couple cords of firewood going up in smoke. Tom Spade—who’s been an Asphalt Cowboy for 49 years—likes to remind people that the first BBQ he worked fed about a thousand, and they thought that was the end of the world. “Since then,” he said, “it’s gone about nine times that size.”
Official 2026 totals—how many plates actually went out, how many dollars were left after the meat bill—haven’t been posted yet. The Cowboys have never been the type to stand on a picnic table and shout a net number. What they do talk about is where the money goes.
The September BBQ is their biggest fundraiser of the year. It helps keep Redding Rodeo Week in May free to the public. It buys equipment for local law enforcement—Search and Rescue radios, tactical shields for school resource officers, that sort of unglamorous, necessary gear. And it funds scholarships. This year, before the first ticket was sold, they handed out three $2,000 scholarships to local students, a lot of them headed toward first-responder work. Top Puncher Mike Ursitti put it the way a Cowboy would: nobody may ever know they gave that kid a check. “But we do, and they do, and that’s in the end the most important thing.”
People see 8,000 plates and 130-plus helpers and figure there must be a small army of official Asphalt Cowboys. There isn’t. The club started in 1953 with 25 local businessmen who wanted to promote the Redding Rodeo. These days the official roster still sits in that same neighborhood—about 38 to 45 members. That’s it. Yellow shirts. Green pants. Sidearms that make a racket. A little clubhouse by the rodeo grounds.
The army is the volunteers. Members’ wives. Shasta County Search and Rescue. Enterprise High football players. Friends who just show up because their grandpa was a Cowboy. It takes around a hundred people on a lean year and more than 130 on a big one to keep the line moving from 11 to 6. That’s the secret. A small outfit with a big town behind it.
Lake Redding Park on BBQ Sunday has its own little carnival of side attractions. In recent years there’s been a live auction in the early afternoon—houseboat weeks on Shasta Lake have been known to walk across the block—and live music drifting over the picnic tables while the drive-thru keeps humming down the lane. Beer and wine in the park, water and sodas for the folks who stay in the car. You can eat in ten minutes or stay till the pits cool. Both choices are correct.
That’s the whole trick of the Asphalt Cowboys Community BBQ. It looks like a production line and feels like a potluck. You can drive through. A whole lot of Shasta County would rather park, sit down, and stay awhile.
"Come hungry. Bring the family. Leave happy." They’ve been saying that for 72 years, and on September 13 they meant it again.
