Sweet Turns: Tele May Save Us All

This willingness to reconsider tele skiing is encouraging. It bodes well for the sport, but more importantly, it may signal a return to thoughtfulness more generally. This will take some time. Apart from emotional dimensions, an institutional understanding of telemark has been eroded. The crowd BLISTER sourced was likable and more or less informed, but the ratio of 3 skiers who tele-ed back in the day to 1 with an active practice gave the conversations a rote throwback vibe.

Rather than outing myself as a fastidious Besserwisser a-hole by rebutting each dated, evasive, and incorrect point, I’ll address the fundamental shortcoming: no one dared champion tele when invited to do so. While it’s-not-better-just-different is a defensible party line, it’s beneath this platform’s swaggering manifesto; “we publish in-depth conversations with the most interesting founders, athletes, filmmakers, scientists, and authors who are shaping our world, raising the bar, and challenging the status quo.” And so, for the sake of narrative shift, I’ve sketched out some ways that tele does shine.

Best. In. POW.

22Designs makes Tele is for Powder Lovers stickers. And in the “How To Tele” Blister Podcast episode, raconteur and lapsed telemarker, Dan Abrams, seems to second this. He describes tele snow as feeling deeper because tele skiers are lower down, ergo … more face shots. Sure. But I would argue that the glory of powder days is more about levitation than inhalation.

The panel gives sound advice about weighting front and rear feet somewhat equally, but it’s worth grasping what that means beyond blue groomers.

In deep snow, tele skis co-function as one expansive platform. Not only does this enhance buoyancy, it allows for a different vocabulary of turns. One of the most endearing things my wife said last winter was, “I thought you were a snowboarder coming down.” Tele skiers can emulate Craig Kelly surf carves, the pumping hoppy-hops of fixed-heelers, and various combinations thereof.

In other words, what I’m saying here is that tele skis provide the best ride on deep days. They can float like a snowboard, traverse like skis, and slog out snowshoe-style if need be.

Nice on Knees

The following is from the National Library of Medicine study Telemark Skiing Injuries: “Telemarkers’ overall rate of injuries is comparable to alpine skiing injury rates…(but) knee injuries sustained by telemark skiers appear to be less severe than alpine skiers, with less duration of disability and lower surgical rates. (National Library of Medicine, pubmed.gov).

So if you like your knees, drop a knee.

Hardshell Kicks: Comfort and Flow

What ever became of the DPS ski-boot project?

In his conversation with Jonathan Ellsworth in 2017 about ski-boot innovation, Stephan Drake, said:

“What we’re going for is that same cool sensation that you have when you’re riding a surfboard or a longboard skateboard … where you just feel very connected to the ground and the board you’re riding. On skis, you don’t really feel that. Most of us [now] ski from the cuffs of our boots… not through our feet. That’s kind of a disconnected weird feeling, and it’s not as pure as skiing should feel.” (Blister Podcast episode #38)

Drake’s tele envy came to mind when Geoff McFetridge, BLISTER’s lone tele delegate, said: “I ski in walk mode” (GEAR:30, episode #95) since retiring a pair of “decomposing” Garmonts that, let’s face it, came out of the box kind of squooshy.

Some tele junkies do tie-off with Booster Straps, but others leave their cuffs open, and some stalwarts still rock Fonzarelli duckbills in this third decade of the 21st century. No matter where on the spectrum one stands though every tele skier has a few great runs each year with no idea they’ve been in walk mode. It’s sloppy and drifty but not distractingly so. To a greater degree than with alpine (or “parallel”) turns, tele is in conversation with the terrain.

The tradeoff for powerful gear and techniques is that alpine skiers have become somewhat insulated. That purity of feeling Drake describes is about being less fortified and more engaged.

Question: How many telemarkers does it take to change a lightbulb?
Answer: 1 to screw it in, and 6 or 7 or 20 more to say, “Sweet turns.”

It’s hacky and mostly told by tele skiers to one another, but the premise is sound. This joke recognizes how gooood well-executed turns feel and look. Alpine turns could also be this cool, but the general custom is to do them in service of other objectives. They are under-celebrated as pursuits unto themselves. Parallel turns change one’s direction and/or velocity, they make big lines and trickin’ and billy goating possible, but tele turns can blossom into their own dreamy digressions.

For instance, think of Dan Abrams’ lament that, “This whole chase for the holy grail of a boot that could go back and forth from an AT binding to a tele binding, it kind of killed the sport for a lot of us.” I can appreciate Dan’s wistfulness; once upon a time, tele and fixed-heel skiing informed one another. That time has past, and something has been lost. And when this is coupled with Stehan Drake’s melancholia, one might begin to sense that alpine skiing might long for some lost tele ethos, for its dynamism and comfy boots and footskiingness.

Boot manufactures have experimented with suppleness along the way. The ergonomic bellows of vintage Scarpa F1s and F3s are still coveted in splitboard and tele tech circles. Elan’s U-Flex kids’ boots appreciate that skiing, walking, and hanging out are not divergent activities. If progressive boots did more than hinge at the cuff, we could evolve the useful-but-finite “R.O.M.” (range of motion) up to “Scope Of Motion” or “Bootflow Gamut” or whatever intangibles that strategic foot flex could open up.

Skis are sufficiently awesome for now. (A favorite of my quiver has been in production and unchanged since 2012/13.) But while boots have been highly refined, what was the last truly revolutionary development? Plastic shells? Tech inserts? Skiers are overdue to have their minds blown (and knees left intact).

The visionary who contributed to holy grails like the Tabula Rasa and Phantom could help make alpine skiing not only high performing but groovy. And to draw this tangent further out, it’s also worth noting that driving to and parking at resorts, trail heads, etc, has only become increasingly fraught. Anything that opens us up to other modes of transit — a walkable boot, for instance — would not only be grounds for Drake’s MacArthur Prize, but might help ween ski culture from car dependency.

So if you’re keeping score at home, we’re now in the process of establishing that tele turns are (1) totally cool, (2) consciousness expanding, and (3) part of The Solution. But there’s more…

Dual Duel

Telemark Parallel Sprints are the most interesting race on snow. They’re more nuanced than just, GO FAST — in fact, FIS takes 10 pages to describe them.

Succinctly put, a Telemark Parallel Sprint is a head-to-head GS with a jump placed part way down the course, then both racers funnel into a 270° berm called a reipelykkja (RAP-uh-LOO-sha, Norwegian for rope loop) with a gated nordic sprint to the finish. The race is timed, but racers are also judged and given penalties for shoddy turns, timid jumping, and dickishness. (Imagine an intimate ski cross that climaxes in a lung-busting crescendo.)

And while the vast majority of parallel sprints end with opponents high-fiving and hugging one another, finish line tussles very occasionally occur. Both responses humanize the athletes differently than solitary fist pumping or mugging with logos.

The Tele Conundrum (or Way Ahead of the Curve)

We mostly agree that garbage gyres and landfills are suboptimal. Our mode of innovation is a capitalistic ouroboros: consume more stuff so there is more stuff to consume.

To a palpable degree, the tele market exists outside of this paradigm. Its compactness validates not a “D.I.Y.” ethos but a “D.I.We” ethos differently than the strictures and motivations that benefit parent companies. In practical terms, telemarkers are said to enjoy gear five-times longer than skiers typically do. Philosophically, these quips sketch an apt portrait:

• “Telemark skiers are killing telemark… You guys aren’t consuming enough:” – AdamX (The Pursuit, Episode 79, Sept. 2022)
• “What is the right price for telemark gear?… The same price as your backcountry lift ticket!” – Mark Lengel (inventor of telemark tech bindings / owner of Olympus Mountain Gear) (Absolute Telemark Tips Podcast 16, November 2015)

Such pith!

Lengel handily dissects both a difficult business model and a nebulous values system that celebrates DIN-schmin non-releasable libertarianism on the one foot, and a leftnick we’re-all-in-it-together-ness on the other. (Think tele fests compared to ski comps; the tele tribe compared to ski community; early adopters as opposed to beta testing conducted by professionals; etc.)

The discourse has lately developed an evangelistic, “let’s grow telemark!” streak, but for the foreseeable future, a tele marketspace will remain subordinate to its athletic and cultural gravities.

I can’t help but identify with these truths: if tele skiers would only consume more, then corporations would develop more tele products, tele elites could heli-ski for Instagram, and shareholders could buy more Teslas.

We are at a crossroads, though. Old wisdoms are being reconsidered. Rather than framing telemark as some indigent hobo industry, it could be pioneering a necessary ethos. Or maintaining an old one that’s coming back around. Reducing supply chain waste and gratuitous packaging are worthwhile gestures. Building skis that destruct into constituent parts is a cool exercise. But simply getting full use from existing stuff is more sustainable. This is from a promo for Patagonia’s Worn Wear program that repairs damaged apparel free of charge: “By using your gear nine months longer you already reduce the consumption of carbon, waste, and water by 20 to 30 percent. In addition, you also reduce CO2 emissions, production waste and the average amount of water that would be generated in the manufacturing process. That’s why repairing your gear is a radical act that helps to relieve the burden that lies on our planet!”

Radicalism has become deviously subtle. Going out of one’s way to not sell more!more!more! rebuts some basic assumptions about market capitalism. It’s as critical as Patagonia’s phasing out prominent logos so products circulate longer, and bequeathing a billion-dollar company to a not-for-profit. That last mic drop resounds well beyond the climbers, tech bros, and dog-walking moms who love the brand.

Teleskiing is dwarfed by each of these groups, yet it looms over this context. This linking of business to green ideals seems consistent with the writing of the foreword to a book known as the telemark bible, “Free-Heel Skiing: The Secrets of Telemark and Parallel Techniques – In All Conditions”. (Paul Parker, 1988. foreword by Yvon Chouinard).

I concede that cause-and-effect narratives sometimes stray into fiction, yet I am convinced of some connection between Yvon Chouinard’s relationship with tele skiing and his willingness to bend capitalism toward conservation. The divided this-edge-then-that-edge mode of alpine skiing is instead a co-operative this-edge-plus-that edge in tele; it’s freeheel AND parallel turns together taking on “all conditions.”

Similarly, the two solitudes of business and activism need not undermine one another — commerce is ultimately a social arena after all. Rather than fake-a-marking or apartheid-edging into the future, Chouinard committed to an elegant, counterintuitive, and strangely polarizing change of direction. We should all be muttering, “Sweet turns, Yvon.”

Who’s It For?

Telemark as bastion of the conspicuous left is an antiquated notion, and its days as the “in-thing” for a GenX cohort have also passed. It is skiing … yet it is somewhat independent from the mainstream culture of new gear each winter, on-demand rental fleets, and it feels no compunction to entertain questions like, Why ski?

There are telemark “crews” on the internet, and the term tele tribe has yet to be cancelled, but my experience has been that telemark is not a groupthink pursuit. I’ve dropped knees with farmers, a kindergarten teacher, a tobacco exec, and a civil engineer. This is neither a voting bloc nor friend group. There is, however, mutual understanding and respect. So score the following questionnaire as you like — it’s more for teasing out your proclivities than definitive diagnosis:

• Which skiing/snowboarding sensation are you more in love with, control or abandon?
• Which martial art do you find more compelling, Krav Maga or Capoeira?
• On a scale of hot dogs to chopsticks, how do you fill your maw?
• Is your passion for slide sports becoming habitual? Are you prone to straightlining, long lunches, inordinate validation in “social aspect”, etc?
• Could you graciously accept that friends who began skiing as toddlers will blow your doors off even with a few tele seasons under your belt? Would this reveal inherent deficiencies or a journey to telemark proficiency?
• Would you rather learn something new or enjoy being good at something you do well already?