Interview: Steve Vanderhoek - "It Actually Has to be Really, Really, Really Big in Order to Translate on the Camera"

Steve Vanderhoek broke his wrist while filming with Remy Metailler on In and Out Burger in Squamish a couple of weeks ago and so he's currently unable to ride or work his day job as a firefighter for the City of North Vancouver. We thought it would be the perfect opportunity to find out what drives him to build steep, committing lines, how he started riding with Remy Metailler and Yoann Barelli, what it was like doing all of the Sea to Sky's gnarliest features in a day for the Tour de Gnar video, how he works with his fiancé on his edits, and what it's like to have the mountain bike community suddenly know his name.

How did you get into riding?

Steve Vanderhoek: My dad got me into riding. I can remember being strapped to my dad's motorcycle or to the back of his bike, before they actually had the nice child carriers. He just got me on two wheels. He'd set up jumps for me. We'd be pushing ramps back as far as we possibly could and my mom would be super terrified.

As I started getting better and started getting more injuries, my dad hired Ken Maude to take me out. He coached me down 5th Horseman when I was just a tiny little kid on a Norco A-Line that was way too big for me because my parents wanted me to grow into it. That trail means so much to me because that's where it all really started for me.

Is your dad a bit of a daredevil?

Steve Vanderhoek: He's a complete wild man. Cliff jumping and scooting across the Rice Lake pipe bridges, the ones that are hundreds of feet in the air, he'd scoot across those as a kid. Yeah, he's a crazy guy. He's into cliff jumping, motorcycling, mountain biking. He actually fully fractured his hip and broke his pelvis a couple years ago on 7th Secret and they said "You'll never walk properly again. You'll never ski. You'll never bike." And he's just fully back ripping bikes again. I get all of it from my dad.

So your dad would actually strap you to his bike so that you wouldn't fall off when he's hitting jumps?

Steve Vanderhoek: I honestly can't remember because I was so young, but my mom just tells the story that we were in our Lynn Valley house and we'd be going off drops in the backyard on a motorcycle in a fully residential area and somehow I'm fixed to the motorcycle and I'm just bobbing around. I'd have to ask my mom how it was actually done. Then he had me ride motorcycles before I could even actually get my feet to touch the brakes and the gas. I would crash into things because I couldn't actually operate the motorcycle.

We used to ride dirt bikes up the mountain highway all the way up to Grouse when it was allowed. There were no mountain bikers on there. We would just motorcycle all the way up to Grouse. Never saw a mountain biker there. That was before the scene seemed to really explode for mountain biking there actually.

Would you say your first sport was motorbiking then?

Steve Vanderhoek: Yeah, dirt biking. We'd travel all over British Columbia and camp and go to the Chilcotins and just dirt bike around. That was my first thing I did.

From there, you started getting some parts in some of those North Shore Extreme videos, how did that happen? Was that the late 2000s?

Steve Vanderhoek: I've got to double check, but I think it was probably 2006 or 2005 that I did that North Shore Extreme. I graduated high school in 2007 in Lynn Valley. All the mountain bike kids on the Shore, we grew up watching all those handheld camera videos. I look at Gully and Wade, Vanderham, Shandro, all those guys. I'm like man, this is just so so sick.

Then one of my buddies, his dad was good friends with Digger, and he was like, "Oh man, you should chat with him." So I ended up getting to chat with Digger. He's like, "Well, let's see what you're made off." So he took me out and he would just get me to guinea pig his fresh stunts that he built. I ended up getting an opening scene in North Shore Extreme 8 where I was just a young kid hopping myself off sketchy ladder bridges in the fog.

How much exposure did that give you at the time on the mountain bike?

Steve Vanderhoek: To be honest, not a ton because it was still quite small and those North Shore Extreme movies, I don't know what their reach was outside of the Shore. But that linked me up with Dan Cowan, Dangerous Dan, and then I ended up doing The Flow Show for quite a few years.That was really cool. Traveling around as a young kid, doing Crankworx in front of a crowd, pushing ramps back and getting paid $90 a day. I was like, "This is so awesome, getting paid to ride mountain bikes." But yeah, to be honest and I just did a podcast with Blister and they didn't even know what The Flow Show was. So that gave perspective to me of how core the Shore scene really was. The exposure was not that big and that never really would've brought me anywhere with mountain biking.

It seems to me almost like you were the wrong mountain biker for the times, almost. You're a little bit younger than all those freeriders that came before you like Tippie and Gully and Wade Simmons, but you were a little bit too early for those video parts to actually be getting lots of views.

Steve Vanderhoek: Totally. Yeah, those guys are always gnarlier than me, but at the time when I actually wanted to push and maybe do something professionally with mountain biking, Slopestyle was the end all be all of mountain biking. It was the Crankworx slopestyle events and you had to be able to do backflips and combos and all those tricks. I could kind of 360 and I could flip most things, but I just didn't stand a chance at that style of riding. Pretty much at the time, for my interest in biking, there was just no nowhere for me to go with it. Not that I ever really actually wanted to push professional mountain biking too much, I just loved it so much. But yeah that wasn't really my style of riding, so I just didn't really ever receive any support.

Was it that you weren't interested in being a professional mountain biker? Or would it have been something you'd be interested in if the time had been right?

Steve Vanderhoek: It just didn't seem like there was company support for the style of riding that I actually did and I just don't think I was good enough to be a professional rider to be very honest. I just really enjoyed the freeriding, going to the backcountry, finding new features and digging lines. That's just what I always loved doing and I didn't really like the competitive side of it. I just go into the backcountry and build my own lines and film that. That seems to have taken off now and that's what I've always loved doing. In the past, that wouldn't have really got any attention. What I'm doing right now is what I've always done, it just seems to be people enjoy it more right now.

And to be honest, I just never really cared too much about making the biking my full-time thing. I just love it so much and it's what I do all the time. So I naturally since I'm just out there all the time, sometimes that gets a little bit of attention, but I'm not really pushing for anything besides just having a good time on the bike.

Did you know from a young age then that you wanted to pursue firefighting?

Steve Vanderhoek: I knew from a pretty young age. I had some friends of my parents who were firefighters and I knew quite a few and it just seemed like such a cool job to me. I grew up really close to the fire hall in Lynn Valley so I'd see the firetruck go by and that was always something I wanted to do. I became pretty focused on that before I graduated high school. I just always wanted mountain biking to be fun and there was no avenue to pursue my style professionally. And yeah, firefighting was just always something I really wanted to do so I started driving for that immediately after high school.

I'm sure you see some pretty horrific things in your day job, how does the adrenaline of being on a call as a fireman and of being first on the scene of an accident or fire compare to the adrenaline of dropping into some of the lines that you do?

Steve Vanderhoek: I like that question actually because it relates to my style on the bike as well. You see some people psyching themselves up for lines by smashing their helmet or screaming, "Let's go" and that's just not my style at all. For certain more intense and severe calls that we go to at work, you have to just stay calm and actually think through what's happening despite how loud it is and how much is going on. You actually have to take in the information, process it, think clearly and make a smart decision while still being calm and remaining calm throughout because as soon as you let the panic or anything like that come in, then you could fall apart and you're making poor decisions. And that's very similar to how, when I'm riding a line that is truly life-threatening, if I screw up, that I could die. It's the same way I collect myself and visualize how I'm going to do the line and then drop in.

What are you typically responding to in North Vancouver? Do you see a lot of car crashes, but also go to some mountain bike crashes as well?

Steve Vanderhoek: I'm North Van City, so I'm central. The District of Vancouver is on the outskirts and they deal with the majority of the rescues for the canyon and everything. The majority of what we go to is car accidents. Fires are obviously more and more rare as sprinkler protection systems are more advanced. Mostly car fires, car accidents, tons of medicals. We respond to a huge portion of the medical calls with Ambulance. So, cardiac arrest, industrial accidents, falls from ladders, basically everything.

We go to absolutely everything you can think of. You've just got to be ready for absolutely anything because you have no idea what is going to come in. You can truly go and someone will be asking you to get their cat out of a tree or you might go to a fully engulfed multi-residential structure fire where the fire is engulfing the whole condo kind of thing. You never know what you're going to get and there's sleepy days and then there's busy days.

How do you balance your days off? Is it shift work? How do you recover from each and make sure that you're not too tired to work optimally at both ends?

Steve Vanderhoek: That's something I'm getting better at. As I'm getting older, I'm getting less able to just handle full sleep deprivation and I do notice my abilities to ride and make good decisions will decrease. So usually after a night shift, I take it very easy and I may go for a mellow ride in the afternoon. Then I do the same leading into my shifts, I usually try and have a bit more mellow ride so I'm actually mentally and physically able to do the job.

I wanted to ask your about into your relationship. Your partner Kelsey films all of your riding, how did that get started? Is it her full-time job?

Steve Vanderhoek: She does all my photos and all of my videos. Her full-time job is all photography, but the majority is real estate photography. That's her main bread-winning job. We've been together since high school in 2007 and then we got engaged two years ago so we're just waiting for Covid to end so we can actually get married because we don't want to have a weird Covid wedding - have a big party.

Even when we first started dating, she'd bring her tiny little camera out and film our snowboarding. She loved watching the New World Disorder movies and all the Cranked movies and she always wanted to make her own movies. For the early part of the relationship, we didn't really do much shooting, but then around the time when she started getting her cameras and good quality equipment for the real estate photography, I put in that really crazy line, and so she came out and filmed it and then it ended up on Pinkbike homepage. Then companies started to offer some things and that helped to pay for more camera equipment and then we've just been progressing from there.

This is more a question for her, but I'm sure you've talked about it. What's it like for her to watch you do some of these very committing lines?

Steve Vanderhoek: We talked about that quite a bit and she's known me for so long that she knows my head space and how I process things. She knows that saying anything to put doubt in my mind will only make things worse. She's fully calm and collected to the point that sometimes I'm like, "do you even care about me? You're not even showing anything whatsoever." We're so dialed in with how we work together that she knows just not to say anything like, "Oh I don't know if you should do that." She handles it very well. It was just the two of us when I filmed one of the biggest lines I've ever done and there was nobody else around and the sun was going down and she handled it great. She knows not to scream and have a big reaction on the camera for at least 10 seconds after I ride it out. We wanted to do a compilation of just all of the celebrations because behind every shot that's cool, there's always the big scream from her which is so funny. Some people are like, "That's our favorite thing. You got to put that out."

So she basically just really trusts your riding and lets you do what you think is right?

Steve Vanderhoek: Yeah. She is very trusting with that. I'm very confident with how I ride so I'm not usually just risking and exploding myself all that often. For the most part we talk about the shots, we plan it out and for the most part it goes pretty well. There are a few crashes and you can hear her concern in the video, but she nails 99% of the shots. She rarely misses a shot. So I have full trust in her and she has full trust in me.

You build a lot of your own features, how do you go and find those lines? And then how do you guinea pig them the first time?

Steve Vanderhoek: I've grown up watching mountain bike videos my whole life and one thing that always stuck with me is how hard it is to portray how gnarly a feature is. I remember watching these videos and then going out to the Shore or Kamloops or Williams Lake and then seeing the feature in person and being like, "Wow, that is absolutely insane how big that is and how much scarier that is in person." So when it comes to building, I'm always aware that if you want it to actually look impressive, it actually has to be really, really, really big in order for that to translate on the camera. So generally when I'm hiking around, I'm looking for really large scale things that will be a challenge to build and challenge my riding and something that will look cool for the people that are watching.

And then as far as guinea pigging, I'm building it so generally I've seen it and I visualize the line so I'm pretty sure it's going to work. I put a lot of effort into ensuring that everything is safe and that it's actually going to work. One of the features I built is called "The Dice Roll" and that was the one where I just wasn't sure if it was going to work. I was pretty sure, but like all guys will say when you're guinea pigging a line for the first time, it's a bit of a roll of the dice and sometimes you just have to trust your skills and you don't know how it's going to go exactly. You just have to trust that your skills and intuition will take over.

Could you just delve a little bit deeper into what that visualization process is like for you?

Steve Vanderhoek: I step out of my comfort zone a fair bit, but my specialty and what I really enjoy is steep rock big mountain lines that require braking control and reading the terrain. When I'm doing these lines, I'll sometimes try to piece the line together in multiple pieces. If it's a massive tall rock face, I can start a little bit lower down and just test the run out and see how the speed is going to be for that. And then those are little check marks in my brain - "Okay, now I know how the run out is going to feel like. I just have to prepare for that with a little bit more speed." And then just actually looking at the features and seeing where I'm going to bounce and where I can put my brake control. Looking from my exits if I make a mistake.

Are you actually thinking about your bail out options and worst case scenarios at the top of the line?

Steve Vanderhoek: Generally, and I said this before, I don't drop in on something unless I'm extremely sure that it's going to go well. So I can side with that and I'm not really thinking of what's going to go wrong because I do in the beginning when I'm first processing. I'm like, "These are the things that could go wrong. I could bounce off here, I could go here." And then as I'm narrowing in and getting closer to actually hitting the feature, I drop in when I'm sure that I've pushed those thoughts out of my mind.

I'm like, "I know that this could go wrong but as long as I land in this one area, apply my brakes, my tire pressure, my suspension is all correct. There's very little chance that that's going to happen." So that's little mental check marks. I push those out of the way and then once I'm ready to actually drop in it's because I'm 99.9% sure that I've dealt with all those possibilities.

Do you set up your bike differently when you're doing some of these features in the Tour de Gnar that you were doing with Yoann Barelli? How picky are you with that kind of thing?

Steve Vanderhoek: Yeah, I'm pretty picky. Yoann's not. I don't think I've ever seen him touch his bike. I think the two things I change the most for a day with large hits and big impacts are my fork pressure and my tire pressure. It doesn't feel great on actual trail riding or small bumps, but I want it to actually be able to take that large impact and be able to push into my suspension rather than fold in half. Because once your suspension is fully bottomed out, there's nothing left but your arms and then that's a huge impact. And then for tire pressure, that final line that we did in the Tour de Gnar, I dropped my tire pressure way, way down to a point that you're sacrificing the integrity of your wheels because you're for sure going to be having rim dingers. But traction was so important there so I had a little tire gauge with me and I dropped my pressure way down for maximum grip.

I think I was down to probably 18 front and rear with two CushCore inserts. And that's about what I can get away with before it starts feeling squirmy. I'm usually up at around 23 in the front and 25 in the back. At least for conditions like that. The We Are Ones held up well, no damage to those, but on that line in particular I wasn't taking any chances. I wanted to be gripping as best as I could.

How did you meet Yoann Barelli and Remy Metailler and start filming with them?

Steve Vanderhoek: I've always been a big fan of Remy and I loved watching his videos. I just figured I'd reach out to him when I put in one of my lines and I'm like, "Hey man, I put in something pretty crazy. You don't know me, but I feel like you'd really enjoy this feature because so far it's only me that has done it." I think he gave me a pretty generic response like, "Cool man" because I can't even imagine how many messages that guy must have, but I was persistent. I hit him up again and then we ended up going for a ride in Squamish, He was just vetting me but we got along super well and we had an amazing ride.

Then that's when he came over and we did that video where we were gapping into Dynamite Roll. Then I was showing him my lines and it went from there with him. We get along super well. Our styles compliment each other with how we like to process features and take our time. And then I met Yoann through Remy. They were going for a ride Squamish and he's like, "Hey, you should come out. Riding with Yoann." So I did and also hit it off great with him. They're both very different personalities, but I just get along so well with both of them and they're riding style is just so fun and they love riding as much as I do.

They come across pretty differently on camera, what's it like to ride with them?

Steve Vanderhoek: They both love riding the exact same stuff. Yoann's got a racing background and he just looks like a panther as he's coming towards you. He's so fast and low. He just drops me everything and that's really impressive. Remy is extremely calculated, extremely precise on the same feature. Then Yoann, he's just like, "Yeah looks great. Let's send it." They both make it look great, they just have totally different styles. And then there's me in the middle of just trying to not die.

How much do you think people knowing your name now has come from being on Remy and Yoann's YouTube channel?

Steve Vanderhoek: I joke about it all the time. It's 100% those guys that put my name out there and it's opened up cool doors and cool opportunities to new friends and photographers and the ability to actually put out videos that people see. As far as social media numbers go, I think I had 1200 people on Instagram and then I started riding with them and it went up quite a bit. 100% those guys and their massive following. I'm just happy to tag along and ride with them.

Do you ever see yourself making your own YouTube channel?

Steve Vanderhoek: To be honest, I don't really think so. I have one where I just put my edits, but I do have the full-time job and that's still so much mental and physical stress and effort on its own. To actually start a YouTube channel where I'm constantly putting out content and having people like and subscribe seems like a little more than I'd like to do. But you never know, we'll see.

You said you've grown your social media following recently and people know your name now, what's it been like for you? Has it changed your life in any ways in the last couple of years?

Steve Vanderhoek: Not at all really. The only thing that has changed has been a little bit more company support from companies like Devinci and We Are One Composites. Other than that nothing has really changed and that's really important to me to ensure that it stays that way because biking is just 100% fun to me. I don't want to make a career out of it, but it's great to be able to ride and push it like I like to and have the companies be able to back me up and support me if anything breaks. So that's so valuable to me. Especially at this time with the difficulty and availability of parts. If I need bearings or if I were to damage a wheel or anything like that, I know it's coming right away.

We talked a little bit about the Tour de Gnar. What was that like? When Yoann approached you with that idea, were you totally on board? Were you excited about it?

Steve Vanderhoek: I was so excited about it, beyond excited. I thought it was such a cool idea and it just aligned with everything that I loved doing. We chatted about it for probably a month, throwing out a feature and saying yes or no to each one. It was all about trying to balance enough features for the day so that it was a super busy day, but a lot of the features that are so amazing are one hour access into the backcountry or a one hour peddle.


You read the comments and people are like, "What about this feature?" Well, there would have been three features done in the Tour de Gnar if we added that feature, that's a three hour hike into the backcountry. It was really awesome that Kelsey was invited out to be the filmer for that because she had a great time with that. She actually edited that video in one day and spent 16 or 18 hours on it and just pounded that edit out and then released it two days later. So that was pretty funny. But yeah, I was a 100% on board for that. That was such a cool experience.

How did you choose the features?

Steve Vanderhoek: It was a mixture of stuff that I'd done and stuff that he'd done and then there were a few that we had both done together and actually built. And then there were a couple for each of us that neither one of us had hit. The second feature of the day was a 35-foot unbelievably awkward double. And it was 6:00 in the morning and I'd never hit it. And trying to wrap your brain around that at that time in the morning was very difficult. And then the last feature of the day almost, that big cliff sideline, Yoann had never hit. So that was pretty crazy. At 100% exhaustion, trying to wrap your mind around one of the gnarliest features around.

How mentally fatiguing and physically fatiguing it was? How did you get through it?

Steve Vanderhoek: I woke up at 3:45 in the morning at Nairn Falls camp ground. Then we were at the base of the Mackenzie Basin FSR for 5:00 am to start at sunrise. Started with obviously tons of energy. I think it was 32 degrees that day and the bugs were pretty bad because of the flooding in Pemberton. We were nonstop till we finished Trespasser in Whistler and that was at around 12:00 or 1:00 pm and then we took a lunch break and that was the only break that we took the whole day. Physical exhaustion came first. I actually started to cramp and feel like I was bonking a little bit.

In the back of our minds, we all knew that no matter how we felt at the end of the day, it was going to be the absolute gnarliest feature. We didn't really speak about that very much but we both knew that we had to hit this thing that was so intimidating and high consequence. I can recall two or three times where you could see Yoann dipping down and getting tired and not looking as into it and starting to feel like, "Oh, we might have to start deleting some features because we're not going to be able to actually make this." And then I'd motivate him to come back up and then the adrenaline of being successful with one feature would totally bring us back up to another level of an adrenaline high.

Then the adrenaline would dip off again then I'd start feeling extremely tired and I'd be like, "I can't do eight more of these features. I'm so tired." And he would bring me back up. So that was the wave that we're riding all day. It was each time you do a hit successfully that you're really concerned about, you get that spike of adrenaline and then you'd have it crash again. We were really good up until 2pm and then it was just a struggle all the way through the night.

The other thing that was really difficult was just how dry and loose it was. A lot of the features were just so loose and so dry that there was no traction. I'd hit a lot of these features before, but riding them in those conditions, it was close to feeling impossible to try to keep it under control. You do your best to actually portray how steep things are, but they're obviously steeper than they look on camera. We were so borderline to crashing so many times. It was just like riding on marbles on concrete. And that was another huge difficulty to the whole day, was conditions - the heat plus the bugs plus just extreme dryness. I'm from the North Shore so my specialty is being able to ride really wet, slippery stuff and the dry is not my specialty, so that was tough for me.

Is there anything that you're working on with your riding that you want to improve on?

Steve Vanderhoek: For me the biggest thing I want to improve on is just a stronger body position and cornering speed and consistency. I've really been loving watching the Enduro and Downhill races. I've never been that fast of a rider and then when I do go really fast, sometimes I just crash. I'm riding with a lot more guys that are racers and fast and so I'm working on just making smarter line choices and carrying speed.

You've said you're pretty calculated with your riding, but is it different being filmed versus not being filmed? Or riding with Remy and Yoann? Do you find yourself pushing your comfort zone more and more in the time that you've ridden with them?

Steve Vanderhoek: I'd say yes for sure. I have been pushing it more. In the back of my mind, I have my career and it's very important to me to stay in one piece. I'd say I'm pushing it but within areas of my skillset. I like really big jumps, but they're not my specialty. So I probably wouldn't be the guy to guinea pig a really big jump because I just don't trust my speed and intuition to be able to ensure that I nailed that. That would be something I'd follow guys into. But the reason I love riding with these guys so much is their riding style and what they love doing just aligns so much with what I like which is steep, gnarly, raw technical terrain where braking control is number one for success. I may not be the fastest, but I really enjoy being able to make my way down a feature in a really controlled manner.

You got into riding pretty young, but then you said you took some time off when you first started fire. Has it always been something that you were doing while you were in fire? How did that relationship with riding change throughout your years?

Steve Vanderhoek: I got hired in 2012 at the fire hall and you're on probation your first few years so you don't really have much sick time banked up. I spent the first couple of years just really focusing on the job and making sure I was in one piece. I actually didn't have a bike for the first two years, I sold my mountain bikes.

It was terrible, but it was really important to me to solidify myself in a career which I love. I love the job. But yeah, I didn't have a bike for two years and then I picked it up again and I rode really mellow up until 2017, when I started to pick it up more aggressively again. Then once I built a few of those features and filmed them with Kelsey, that's when things started to ramp up a bit more for me as far as photography and filming and just riding all the time.

What are your hopes for the next couple of years with your career and with your riding career?

Steve Vanderhoek: To stay happy and healthy and just continue doing this. I just want to just keep meeting really amazing people that like doing what I do. I recently met Micayla Gatto and she's good friends with us now. Kelsey films her. I've always looked up to her and her riding. So getting to ride with her, Gulevich, people who just love riding as much as I do, is pretty much my plans for the future. Just keep doing this - making cool movies with Kelsey, building unique lines and just having a good time on the bicycle.