NMH Magazine : Fall 2005

Extreme Talent

Don’t ever try to put Greta Gaines ’85 in a box. TV show host, songwriter-singer, fly-fisherwoman, snowboarding champion, feminist, rock-chick cowgirl. See? The lid won’t stay on.

These days you can catch her hosting segments on ESPN Outdoors’ BassCenter and New American Sportsman. Before that she hosted the Oxygen network’s FREERIDE with Greta Gaines, a show dedicated to music, extreme sports, and the outdoors. She’s taken Ted Nugent white-tail deer hunting, taught Courtney Love to snowboard, and tracked grizzly bears with Sheryl Crow.

She comes by it naturally: her father, Charles Gaines, is a well-known sportsman-author who wrote Pumping Iron, the book-turned-documentary that delivered Arnold Schwarzenegger to the masses. She grew up fly-fishing with her father and started snowboarding in her yard in New Hampshire before anyone had heard of the sport. She went on to become the first women’s extreme snowboard champion in Valdez, Alaska, in 1992 and ran Wild Women Snowboard Camps from 1993 to 2003. Gaines lost interest, however, as snowboarding became increasingly mainstream. “I like sports where a few hard-core, crazy people are into it,” she says, citing kite-snowboarding, the Arctic Man Challenge, and catfish noodling as examples. (Never heard of ’em? That’s the point).

Music is also a guiding passion. She started her career in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in the early 1990s, playing guitar and singing in cowboy bars—a fitting venue, considering she wrote her thesis at Georgetown on the spirituality of cowgirls. She’s toured with Alanis Morissette, Tori Amos, and the Goo Goo Dolls and spent six years in Nashville soaking up the scene. Her new EP, The Flavor, comes out this October and was produced by her brother, Shelby Shook Gaines ’87. She describes it as “hick-hop”—a blend of hip-hop and southern rock. Gaines produced two previous records, Greta Gaines and It Was Hot; her songs have stayed at number one in the alternative rock genre on MP3.com and played on MTV, Oxygen, ESPN, and radio stations around at the world. Her music is available on her eponymous website, www.gretagaines.com; in bypassing major record labels, she says, “I completely own my soul.”

Nowadays she’s living in New York City with her ad executive husband and their one-year-old son, Cassidy. She’s pitching an extreme fishing show to the networks and would like to make a children’s record. Still, she says, “It’s really people that turn me on. I’d like to become this edgier, feminist, extreme Charles Kuralt. Before we become just one Gap-filled superhighway with drive-through Starbucks, I’d like get into some of the isolated pockets in this country. I’m fascinated by who’s still out there off the grid.”

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