Grub Steak Expeditions: Meet the Most Overqualified Tour Guides in Cody

You come to Cody to see the West. We do have Yellowstone as our backyard and are the rodeo capital of the world. Since there’s so much to see, it makes sense to book a tour. We have many tour companies in Cody that can help give depth to your vacation. Today, we take a closer look at Grub Steak Expeditions. Full disclosure here: I used to work as a tour guide for them.

Grub Steak’s Rich History

Grub Steak’s line runs back to the early 1900s, when Fred Richard of the Frost and Richard Ranch guided Buffalo Bill Cody’s guests through the park by stagecoach. The journeys lasted weeks over rough, bone-jarring country. His grandson, Bob Richard, a third-generation guide who also served as a Yellowstone ranger, was grubstaked in 1980 to launch the company under its current name and guided it for more than 30 years. For a few years, Tim and Claudia Wade held the reins of Grub Steak, and in 2022, Rod and Suzie Tripp took ownership, with Rod having already guided the outfit for a decade.

Top Tier Guides

What makes the Cody and Yellowstone area so special? The land. From geology that gives us geysers to open rangelands that create the wide open spaces of the West, this region is like nowhere else on Earth. The various ecosystems provide habitat to wildlife that most people never get to see up close in their lifetimes.

Rod and Suzie have worked to build a roster of extremely knowledgeable guides. The roster is built from people who spent entire careers managing the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, and then chose to keep sharing it. When that’s who’s interpreting a hillside, a burn scar, or a fossil bed for you, it isn’t trivia off a card. It’s the perspective of retired natural resource manager professionals who have lived in the community for years.

• Mike Stewart managed public-land resources across Wyoming and the West for more than 30 years and retired from the Bureau of Land Management in Cody in 2015: wildlife habitat, wild horses, grazing, recreation, and mineral development.
• Clint Dawson spent 40 years with the Shoshone National Forest near Cody, serving as a fire management officer and traveling across the country to help manage some of the largest complex wildfires.
• Gretchen Hurley, a University of Wyoming graduate, has worked for 44 years as a geologist and environmental scientist and, since 2004, has run the solid minerals, abandoned mine lands, and paleontology programs for the BLM’s Cody Field Office.
• Rod Tripp himself came up in rangeland ecology, with a career in grazing management, wildfire suppression, prescribed fire, interpretation, and more than 40 years observing Yellowstone.
• Sandy Ballou grew up horseback, packed and guided seasonally for the R Lazy S Ranch in Jackson Hole before northwestern Wyoming pulled him back for good.
• Lisa Peterman, a nonprofit executive director, has lived in Wyoming for 36-plus years, the last stretch 30 miles from the East Gate in the Wapiti Valley, and treats the park as a standing appointment.

Rod and Suzie will discuss your trip with you and work to pair your interests with the right guide. Rod shared that a couple more top-tier guides may join Grub Steak Expeditions soon.

“The guides don’t really need training. They’re already familiar with the area and highly competent. Instead, we get together each spring, often with Bob Richard, to share information. All of us are always learning. We essentially train each other,” Rod said.

Private, and Built Around You

Grub Steak runs private tours. That means the day bends to you, not the itinerary. Linger an hour watching a wolf pack work a carcass. Sit at the falls until the light is right. Spend the morning on wildlife photography, geothermal features, or Indigenous history, depending on what you actually came for. Your interests set the pace. Because it’s a private tour, it’s you, your family or friends, and the guide. This can make an all-day trip much nicer than sharing a full day with strangers.

With an itinerary built by the day, not the clock, you need guides who can decide where to go next and still get you back in time for your dinner reservations. They are used to this mode and can easily navigate the day, no matter how it unfolds.

More than the Famous Yellowstone Loops

Grub Steak’s trips include Yellowstone, but also reach beyond to help you really see the West. There’s the Washburn Upper Loop and Hayden Lower Loop through the park, the John Colter Beartooth Expedition over the Chief Joseph Scenic Highway, wild horses at McCullough Peaks, dinosaur tracks and petroglyphs out in the high desert, Bighorn Canyon (also with wild horses), and custom backcountry hikes designed around your group. And because Grub Steak runs out of Cody and the park’s quieter East Entrance, you’re coming in the way the crowds don’t.

Rod says, “If someone wants to see the wild horses, we suggest that they take the Bighorn Canyon trip as they’ll also get to see so much more of this country.”

Simple Pricing

Often, there are only one or two people on these private tours, but they can accommodate up to 14, making the larger groups more affordable per person. Grub Steak has guided families visiting Yellowstone for reunions, offered special tours for the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, and taken influencers and reporters on fam tours (familiarization tours) for Park County Travel Council.

“We’ve even had locals get a group of friends together to head out for the day and leave the driving up to us,” Rod shared.

Grub Steak lists every price plainly online — $875 for one or two people and $165 for each additional person. While that’s expensive if it’s for one person, if you have a group of eight, the cost per person becomes very reasonable. They also offer step-on guide service for motorcoaches at $665. This allows motorcoach tour operators to take advantage of the local expert guides for the Cody and Yellowstone area.

If this wasn’t enough, Rod and Suzie Tripp also own Windmill Inn, a bed and breakfast on the North Fork. They offer a Stay & Play Package to make a true customized trip for their guests.

Why it Matters Here

There’s a quiet local story underneath the visitor-facing one. When a fire management officer or a BLM geologist retires in Cody, decades of institutional knowledge about this specific landscape usually just… retires with them. Grub Steak has become one of the places where knowledge keeps circulating. It stays in the community, getting handed to visitors, and, in Rod’s framing, continuing a line of work that started with a man telling stories from a stagecoach box.

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