Winter's Champion

SPRING 2017

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WINTER’S CHAMPION GRETCHEN BLEILER: ON A MISSION TO PROTECT OUR WINTER

WINE | DINING | ART | FASHION | PLAY

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OLYMPIC ATHLETE, ENVIRONMENTAL ENTREPRENEUR, AND SPIRITUAL ACTIVIST GRETCHEN BLEILER IS CHAMPIONING THE ART OF ‘LIVING EXTRAORDINARILY’

BY AMANDA RAE | PHOTOGRAPHY BY NICK TININENKO

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t’s February 18, 2010 at the XXI Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver, B.C., Canada.

American snowboarder Gretchen Bleiler drops into the halfpipe at Cypress Mountain for her second and final run. Despite an eleventh-place ranking following a first-run tumble, bets are on her to bring the gold medal home to the United States.

Three weeks earlier, the five-foot-five, blonde fireball had won her fourth X Games gold at Buttermilk Mountain in her Aspen hometown; four years before that she snagged an Olympic silver in Turin, Italy. Competing since the age of fifteen in 1996, Bleiler won more halfpipe contests in 2003, 2005, and 2006 than any other female, clinching major endorsements from Oakley and K2 Snowboarding. In 2008, she became the first badass babe in action sports to grace the cover of ESPN The Magazine.

Bleiler’s megawatt smile, golden tresses, and tanned, toned bod—flaunted famously in a metallic body-paint bikini on the cover of FHM in 2004—combined with a honeyed voice and humble ’tude in interviews may well have helped her earn her status as America’s snowboarding sweetheart. Anyone who witnessed her crush a run would most definitely declare, “Goddamn, that girl can shred.”

Tonight in Vancouver, thousands of spectators flank the frozen channel commanded by Bleiler. When she stomps out a 720-degree upgrade on her signature stunt, the Crippler—a 540-degree, frontside-wall spin-flip combo of her own invention—the cheers, shrieks, and cowbell clanging roar to a deafening extreme.

Then, on her next trick, she falls. Again. Uninjured, but perhaps shaken in baggy, red-white-and-blue Burton plaid, Bleiler pushes herself back up. All momentum is lost, though, and the judges’ final scores capture the sadness of one sudden mistake: 3.0, 2.8, 2.9, 3.0, 3.0.

So…why the heck is Gretchen grinning?

“I knew I had sabotaged my full potential,” Bleiler says to a roomful of fans gathered at the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies (ACES) at Hallam Lake in February. “I got in my own way.”

Huh? “I went into those Olympics kind of pissed off—at America, at our society—for being so medal-hungry,” she explains. “It was the gold, the gold, the gold! [I’d] been miserable the past five years.

I’d had friends who won the gold in 2002 and 2006, and I saw their lives go in a similar trajectory—getting run around by this gold medal. I was totally in rebellion to everything that success was. At the same time…I really wanted a gold medal.”

Bleiler had Olympic glory on her mind since age seven. An avid hockey and soccer player, she discovered snowboarding at eleven—way before snowboarding was added as an Olympic

event (in 1998, Nagano). Her family had relocated from Toledo, Ohio, to Aspen when she turned ten; one year shy of graduating from Aspen High School, she entered the X Games. During what could have become a gap year before college, she was working at Main Street Bakery and nailing technique. But the next season, 2000-2001, she turned pro at age twenty.

Not only did Gretchen Bleiler morph into a brand arguably as recognizable as many of her sponsors (GoPro, Giro, Aspen/ Snowmass), but she also cemented her status as a snow queen turned sports icon with serious style. She’s designed clothing, gear, and snowboards. National Geographic named her Adventurer of the Year. She’s been inducted into two different halls of fame.

Today, she has 41.8k Instagram followers and counting.

Beneath her bubbly, Cali-chick coolness and superstar swagger, and in the face of a ferocious, relentless appetite to be number one, however, Bleiler was consumed by dark inner conflict.

“I went into those Olympics with this unconscious, limiting belief that success equals misery,” she says, as images representing five years of saying yes—to photo shoots, Conan interviews, 50 Cent hangouts, a Sports Illustrated cover—flash on the projector screen behind her. “I was stressed out, burned out, spread thin, and drained.”

That fateful flub in Vancouver, capped by a million-dollar smile, marked a turning point. “That,” Bleiler says, “was the beginning of the end of my career.”

Though she continued to compete—and rise like a phoenix— until retiring four years later, thus began the journey of Gretchen Bleiler 2.0. She reinvented her snowboarding, thanks to honing in on yoga and meditation, a practice initiated in 2009. After a freak trampoline accident in 2012 almost blinded her right eye, squashing her shot at the 2014 Olympic team, she delved deeper.

A Chopra Center retreat in southern California led her toward earning teaching certification in mantra-based primordial sound meditation, right around the time she retired from snowboarding after the 2014 X Games.

Then she found Rod Stryker, the world-renowned yogi who happens to reside in Carbondale. One year of seminars later, in early 2016, she flew halfway around the world to attend Stryker’s intensive meditation workshop at the Himalayan Institute in India. Spending a month in yoga’s birthplace and meeting Stryker’s own spiritual guru “was soul food for me,” she tells the ACES audience. “It’s the root of my health and wellness and curiosity and passion. Yoga and meditation connect us back to that part of ourselves that is whole, peaceful, and content.”

Stryker, who telephoned from Australia to rave about the “incredibly sensitive and insightful” Bleiler, suggests that her first twenty-four hours in the ancient metropolis of Varanasi,

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This page: Growing up in Aspen fueled Bleiler’s staunch environmentalism and inspired the launch of the ALEX water bottle.

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ASPEN, TO ME, IS BEING ON THE MOUNTAINS. NATURE IS A LUXURY!

Yoga and meditation has helped redirect her focus post pro-snowboarding.

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46 A S PE N LU X U RY L I F E “Aspen, to me, is being on the mountains,” says Bleiler, who adds that riding powder is still her “most favorite thing to do in the world.”

“SHE DIDN’T SNOWBOARD JUST TO WIN A MEDAL; SHE SNOWBOARDED TO INSPIRE OTHERS” —MAYA MURIC

“Growing up here I had such a connection to and respect for nature,” Bleiler says. She recalls her surprise, as a young pupil at Aspen Country Day School, upon learning that “avalanche danger days” were legit.

“This is a town of such abundance—natural abundance, human-potential abundance, and material abundance,” she adds.

“Aspen, to me, is being on the mountains. Nature is a luxury!”

Striving to share the wealth with her community, Bleiler teaches meditation at Shakti Shala (expected to reopen in a new location in March). She revels in small moments: morning walks with Hotell and shelter dog, Kota, to score croissants and coffee at Louis Swiss Pastry; treks ending at far-flung 10th Mountain Division huts.

“Riding powder is still my most favorite thing to do in the world,” she gushes. “The evolution from the park, halfpipe, jumps, and how many lift laps can you do? to slowing down, getting on a splitboard, hiking up a mountain, and earning your turns— that’s a cool metaphor for my life. You can’t say ‘less is more’ unless you’ve experienced ‘more.’”

Reckons Murić, “There’s no fakeness about her. She’s as real as it gets. She has the power to move people. She didn’t snowboard just to win a medal; she snowboarded to inspire others. She’s extremely generous and genuine—she never takes anything for granted.”

When Bleiler readily admits—while having her eyes smoked out by a makeup artist pal prior to this story’s photo shoot— that she would gladly nosh a pesto wrapture from The Big Wrap every day for the rest of her life if her schedule cooperated, I see it. When she invites me to peep ALEX Bottles at BLK MKT after the ACES talk and before a New York Pizza dash, I get it, too. And when she declares that her trip to India—where she returns soon for another six weeks—made her realize that “success without happiness is incomplete,” I take it as a gift.

“When I met her, she was big into the question of, ‘What’s next?’” Stryker says. “Now she’s living the answer.”

Aspen-based writer and editor Amanda Rae quit ski racing to start snowboarding in 1996 at Jiminy Peak in Hancock, Mass. amandaraewashere@gmail.com

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a “melting pot of ideas and strange experience of humanity… stirred something very profound in her.”

Bleiler chased the “total culture shock” of that trip with a stint at the Himalayan Institute outpost in Honesdale, Pennsylvania.

“India was my rehab, and Honesdale was my halfway house,” she quips. “[Husband] Chris [Hotell] came with me to make sure it wasn’t some crazy cult. I dove into the deep end.”

Today yoga and meditation—“a science and path for living your life in balance, happiness, and fulfillment,” she says—fuels her work as an environmental entrepreneur and advocate. In 2014, she and Hotell, also a former pro snowboarder, launched ALEX, a company whose abbreviated name stands for “Always Live EXtraordinarily.” Their inaugural product embodies the concept that one small change can turn something ordinary into something inspirational: the reusable, 26-ounce, stainless-steel ALEX Bottle, which unscrews in the middle for easy cleaning and can be used as two cups or a cocktail shaker, even to transport a beer bottle into a movie theater.

“We set out to raise $50,000 for the first production [via Kickstarter], and we raised $185,000,” says Hotell, who cut a prototype with a hacksaw. “It’s very much a family business.”

(Hotell’s mom helped with early design and Bleiler’s brother Andy is on staff.) This winter’s BLK MKT pop-up in the old Boogie’s building helped put colorful, customizable ALEX Bottles into the hands of chic, outdoorsy Aspenites. (Find them in stock at the Aspen Art Museum and Radio Boardshop.)

“She draws energy from the mountains—that’s why she gives back to the mountains,” says friend and mentor Maja Murić, the Croatian tennis player and fellow former Olympian (Atlanta, 1996). “She’s passionate about the environment because it’s essential to her existence. Her energy is contagious.”

True: Bleiler preaches the gospel of Protect Our Winters (POW), the nonprofit climate advocacy group founded by pro knuckle dragger Jeremy Jones. Comprised of top snowsports athletes including local Chris Davenport, the POW Riders Alliance champions for change via school visits, events, and policymaker meetings. Naturally, pow-thrasher Bleiler is a diehard member, jetting to Capitol Hill to talk sustainability with members of Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency.