Dirty Mateo

Order Book Open. Shipping November 2026.

A few years back, while traversing the dirt roads of Northern Baja, we stopped at a roadside garage for some much-needed work on our bikes.  

Mateo Rojas owned the solitary, corrugated-steel garage at the edge of the peninsula, right where the scrub desert gives way to the Pacific salt flats. He was an off-road recovery specialist and custom fabricator, the guy you radio when your bike snaps a chain fifty miles from the nearest paved road. Mateo didn't talk much, communicating mostly in nods, grunts, and the sparks flying off his angle grinder. His hands were permanently stained with a mixture of motor oil, copper grease, and alkaline dust, earning him the moniker "Dirty Mateo" from the local desert racers and overland guides who rely on his mechanical witchcraft. He lived on black coffee, street tacos, and the adrenaline of a salvaged engine roaring back to life.

Being hat-guys, we immediately took notice of the one he was wearing.  His face lit up when we asked about it, and he said it was given to him by Steve McQueen who stopped in a few times to have work done on his dessert sleds.  Right...

At some point we decided to try to make a similar hat.  We actually found a photograph of McQueen wearing it, and enlisted our friends at Drunk Hare Co. (West, Texas) to reproduce it for us.