Profile: Gareth Van Dyk

by Dawne Belloise

On a somewhat hazy morning, Gareth Van Dyk notes that the valley had been graced lately by actual clearer skies and fresher, smokeless air – except for today. There was a bit of orange haziness again on the mountain where he lives. But he wasn’t complaining, he’s grateful to be here immersed in nature, optimistically living cancer free after a colon cancer scare, and waiting for snow so he, a former freeride competitor, can get back on his board.

His name, Gareth, is Welsh. He is the firstborn of fraternal twins, with his brother Nick arriving shortly after. At the young age of five, his parents moved them from Wisconsin to West Africa where they worked with the United States Agency for International Development (USAIDS).

“Dad was an audio-visual specialist, and Mom was a midwife helping to deliver African women’s babies,” Gareth tells of their year and a half in Burkina Faso. “I remember it all vividly as a five-year-old, a towheaded blonde kid in the 1970s living in a village, hours away from the city on a dirt road. The tribe did ritual scarification as a rite of passage. The elders would file their teeth to points. It’s one of the poorest countries in the world so it was very defining for our psyche” as he witnessed the realities of life in a third world country and his parents didn’t shelter them from it.

His parents enrolled them in the little public school where they were the only two white kids and Gareth recalls, “They were the nicest people you’d ever meet. They have nothing but they’re willing to give you everything.” He remembers his parents getting them two bikes and they gathered all the kids, “and we all learned to ride the bikes together.”

Even at his young age of seven, returning to the U.S. was culture shock. However, they only spent a year-and-a-half stateside as his parents took another job in Africa, this time in Senegal on the island of Goree off the coast of Dakar. Gareth and Nick were enrolled in a French public Catholic school. The tiny island had a little mountain on one side with cannons and tunnels. “We did normal kid things, exploring and running amok.” When they left a year later, Gareth says, “It was hard leaving our thick-as-thieves friends,” as it was every time they had to move.

He was nine when they moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he started fifth grade, and again, it was culture shock. “I was lucky to have my twin because we were best friends and could bounce things off each other.” Gareth says it was difficult because they were bullied and teased. They were in Santa Fe from fifth through seventh grades before again returning to another African country in 1985 when Gareth was almost 13. This time, they were in Niger’s capital city of Niamey that borders the Sahara Desert. “It’s another very poor country, where leprosy still exists and there are blind and crippled people in the markets and streets. It’s not like there’s a system to take care of them so they become beggars.” They attended an international school.

He says those childhood experiences shaped him. “It forced us to grow up quickly. I saw the dark side of life really early. We were shown life and death whereas some kids were sheltered. It perpetuated a live-in-the-moment kind of mentality. Nothing’s guaranteed. Don’t have expectations because they can just be taken away. Don’t think you deserve things. We’re all just skin and bones living on this rock and all in the same boat.”

Gareth was an early teenager when they returned to Santa Fe where he became obsessed with snowboarding when it was still in its infancy. With Santa Fe Ski Basin only an hour away, he had skied it in fifth grade. The infatuation with snowboarding developed from the chaos of his childhood life. “Snowboarding was like a release, an escape,” Gareth feels. “We were the first boarders at the Santa Fe resort,” where they were required to take a test and get certified, “to prove you could snowboard.”

Gareth graduated high school in 1991 but discovered Crested Butte during a college day where one of the presenting schools was Western State College (WSC, now Western Colorado University). His friend had returned raving about the deep powder in CB. Gareth bolted to Gunnison to attend WSC, later graduating with a degree in communications with an emphasis on mass media. “I liked filming and editing.” But the real perk was the mountain. “They had the trimester system then so a lot of us powder junkies figured out how to beat the system and take off eight weeks that coincided with the month-long Christmas holiday break so we could ride every day.”

He got a night laundry job at the Grand Butte, “and it was the greatest job ever because you didn’t start until 4 p.m. We were bad,” he laughs about the dryer rides and shenanigans, the bong stash behind the sheet folding machine and the hackie sack tournaments in the middle of the laundry room. But there were epic highlights like, “scaring the shit out of ourselves on the North Face and challenging ourselves by hucking off the gnarly runs and cliff features.”

In 1995, Gareth moved up to CB from Gunnison. “We packed the three-bedroom house to the gills with at least nine people. We literally put up plywood sheets for room partitions. I had the upstairs hallway nook,” where he paid $125 a month. He got into the freeriding competitions and the tribe that formed through the contests. He did well enough to get sponsored, enabling him to, “Make enough to get to the comps and pay my rent.”

Gareth traveled to the international comps with CBMR footing the plane tickets and even managed to win a couple in 1998 in CB. He was entered into the King of the Hill World extremes in Valdez, Alaska but the contest got cancelled. He went anyway and ended up staying there a month, meeting locals, couch surfing, even living in a snow cave for a couple days on Thompson Pass. “At the time, it was the ultimate destination for freeriders. It was a big dream realized for me at the time.” Ultimately, Gareth was invited to a freeride competition in Switzerland, Bec de Rosses. “My biggest career highlight was competing in that with 10,000 spectators and a jumbotron screen.”

He competed from 1995 to 2000 and returned to it in 2004 through 2008, which was his last year competing. He had moved to San Diego with a girlfriend in a 1980 mini-Winnie. “I got hooked on surfing and wanted to be by the ocean.” They lived in an RV park a couple of blocks from the beach, “There was a donut shop across the train tracks, and you could get your coffee and donuts on the way to surf.”

But winter still called him. “I wanted to go back to the mountains,” so they moved to Lake Tahoe for the winter of 2001. Gareth got a job as a night shuttle driver at Squaw Valley. When the couple split, she got the Winnebago and he bought a minivan and moved back to San Diego to surf. “Living in vans and surfing is iconic,” he grins. To keep his days free for surfing, Gareth worked at health food stores at night which also gave him free meals. Enjoying that lifestyle for several years, he saved money and moved to Stevens Pass, Washington, for a winter where a season pass cost $400 and $200 paid his seasonal van parking.

He moved up to Whistler in Canada in 2003 for the winter, returning to San Diego to surf in the summer. Gareth returned to CB with an opportunity to work events for CBMR, which gave him a season pass. He met his now wife, Sarah Madaj, at the Talk of the Town. The two camped all summer in a van on the Slate River to save for a month-long snowboarding trip to Las Lenas, Argentina. They repeated that scenario for three years in a row, traveling between CB and Argentina chasing snow.

In 2008, they bought a deed-restricted one-bedroom flat in Pitchfork. Eighteen years later, it’s still their home. “We went from living in a van to finally getting a home.” He was hired as a night shuttle driver at the San Moritz, a job he’s had for the last 18 years. Gareth also started his own company in 2012, GVD Window Cleaning, which he’s still doing. “I have more work than I can handle. It’s a self-perpetuating business.”

In 2024, Gareth was diagnosed with early-stage colon cancer. “I was lucky. We caught it very localized so no chemo. The diagnosis reshapes your whole mental process. You focus on the moments. It never goes out of your psyche. It’s with you forever.” He’s checked regularly and feels optimistic about his future. “Living Journeys and Gunnison Tough really helped me out and I can’t thank them enough. My heart is full from all their charity,” he says.

The community and the friendships Gareth formed from the time he arrived in this valley at only 17 years old are precious to him. “I came during the most interesting time,” he feels. “It was the first year of free ski month,” he recalls, November of 1991. “It was like a Dead show, all those people just showed up. They were camping, creating this culture, and then you mix in the Texas tourists. Then that led to the naked free ski fiascos, naked going up the Paradise lift, rolling up to the chair tripping and we were butt naked,” he laughs. “I can’t think of anywhere else in the ski world where naked skiing developed from a free ticket culture.”

As for all the places that could pull him away, Gareth says fondly of CB, “I’m a lifer. I’ve looked far and wide, trying out other mountain towns and surf culture. I realized my true home really is Crested Butte.”