BIOGRAPHY
The brightest smile in snowboarding, Aspen's Gretchen Bleiler has reason to beam as one of the sport's most successful women. Her personality and character have exposed millions to snowboarding through her modeling in magazines like Glamour, but her talent in the halfpipe makes a lot more noise. She proved her chops in 2006, cruising on to the Olympic Team and landing a silver medal in Torino, Italy. She made the Olympic team again in 2010 and in that same year nabbed yet another X Games gold medal (her fourth).

With four prominent podiums in 2012 - two on the Dew Tour, the Burton European Open, and the prestigious TTR World Snowboarding Championship - Bleiler continues to be one of the top women’s riders and it seems her momentum is only growing.

GRETCHEN SAYS
This season I built a lot of momentum and had some great results. A concussion cut my season short, but it also has fueled my fire. I'm excited to work hard this spring/summer/fall and am putting together a new a progressive run for the season ahead.  

FIRST TRACKS
When she was 10, she and her family moved from Ohio to Aspen, and then to nearby Snowmass Village two years later. At her school, part of the physical education curriculum allowed students during the winter to spend half of their Wednesdays up on the resort. One of those Wednesday’s Bleiler learned how to snowboard and immediately was hooked. Four years later, Bleiler joined the Aspen Valley Snowboard Club and began competing in local USASA competitions. Her first year on the team, she qualified for Nationals in every event. After graduating from Aspen High School in June 1999, Bleiler chose to defer a year from college to see how far she could take her snowboarding.  Because of her successful results that year, in September of 2000 she was invited to join U.S. Snowboarding and follow her dreams of qualifying for the Winter Olympics.  

OFF THE SNOW
Bleiler says “When I'm not on snow you can find me working with my husband on our new product ALEX bottle (alexbottle.com), working with Oakley on my signature series eyewear and pro rider outerwear and collaborating with K2 to make the best boards, boots and bindings on the market." Aside from the biz, she's into practicing yoga, road biking, surfing, hiking with her adopted dog, Kota and staying involved with Protect Our Winters (POW) and Aspen Center for Environmental Studies (ACES).