After ten years of quiet gear revolution, telemark is poised to jump into the future. It may even reclaim some of the status it’s lost along the way. But telemark stands where it does now in large part because of one man’s blog. Meet Craig Dostie and his humble website, EarnYourTurns.
Back to where it all began - Dostie on California's Bloody Mountain, 1991. Photo credit Joe McBride
A single website may have saved telemark skiing. This statement drips of hyperbole – it overlooks a slew of important figures and outlets both historical and contemporary in free-heel skiing . But don’t forget how often the term ‘telemark is dead’ has been uttered over the last twenty-some years, decades that have been both uniquely fraught for telemark, and full of embellishments at its expense. But maybe telemark did nearly die. And maybe one blog was more than a little influential in its survival.
This one site offered both a doomsday shelter for the telemark faithful and a bastion for reporting the revolution that was taking place in free-heel bindings. All during the depths of telemark’s dark ages. Most people had already cast telemark off as gone. But this website held firm.
Meet Craig Dostie’s blog EarnYourTurns.
You may have never heard of Dostie or come across his work, especially if you are on the outside looking in on telemark. But his influence on modern skiing is hard to overstate. Dostie has been at the forefront of the backcountry scene for nearly 40 years. Terms so ubiquitous in skiing they seem to have evolved out of the snow itself – phrases like earn your turns and alpine touring – were coined by him. And his magazine, Couloir, was the first and preeminent backcountry skiing rag before it merged with Backcountry in 2007. Today, though, Dostie is best known as telemark’s sage.
Because no other site has so precisely recorded the zeitgeist of telemark skiing over the last decade-plus as EarnYourTurns. More importantly, EYT shepherded telemark – the ancestor to all American backcountry skiing – through one of its most desperate eras, giving the sport a refuge where the new gear could gain visibility and where the culture could survive when there were few other places else to go.
Though the blog currently acts as an archive instead of a living, breathing mechanism – and the long-form baton held by Dostie is currently left uncarried by telemark’s next generation – Dostie’s EarnYourTurns remains the chief recorder of the niche sport’s modern course, without which telemark would be truly adrift.
Dostie’s winding career in skiing began with a newsletter aimed at Los Angeles-area backcountry skiers. Before Couloir Magazine had glossy print and immense cachet, it was the Sierra Club-affiliated newsletter le Chronicle de Couloir. First printed by Dostie in 1988, It grew from a Xeroxed piece encouraging more people to join ski tours in Southern California to becoming a force in the backcountry skiing scene the country over. Dostie remembers “I wanted to ski couloirs, so the newsletter became le Chronicle de Couloir, and that was the genesis of Couloir Magazine. Basically it got out of control. And people were actually psyched to pick it up and read it. So that went on for 19 years.” As the backcountry skiing scene came of age in the 90s – often on the back of telemark equipment – Couloir was recording the scene and guiding the modern movement forward.
Becoming a print magazine in 1993, Couloir oriented itself as a haven for gear dissection, counting eminent ski alpinist Lou Dawson as a staffer. He provided reviews on alpine touring equipment while Dostie lead on telemark gear. The magazine charted the rise of backcountry skiing and its predominantly telemark equipment in a time before alpine touring bindings were seen by the public as the best tool to access the backcountry. Coupled with the release of the Scarpa Terminator in 1993 – the late-coming, first plastic telemark boot – the free-heel scene enjoyed a boom through the 90s to the early 2000s, enjoying healthy participation and solid media coverage.
Dostie getting the goods up North - Thompson Pass, AK - photo credit Matt Kinney
Changes were fast approaching though. For one, the nascent internet eventually caught up to Couloir. Free content abounded; forums sprang to life, including the influential site TelemarkTips. Dostie remembers Couloir was “the leading voice...for backcountry skiing and telemark until TelemarkTips took off,” continuing, “there's no denying that the audience for TelemarkTips was huge.”
TelemarkTips, the rowdy and often irreverent online forum dedicated to telemark skiing, was the creation of the late Mitch Weber. The much missed and infamously remembered TelemarkTips was where Weber and friends used the newly born internet to its fullest early potential, posting videos and messages on culture and gear. The forum also became known as a spectator sport in its own regard; though full of information, personalities often clashed while lurkers looked on, entertained, enlightened, and sometimes forced to grow thicker skin. All the while soaking up the latest on the growing and now somewhat trendy telemark scene.
“That was kind of the beginning of the end for Couloir not so much because of TelemarkTips, but TelemarkTips was the tip of the spear in terms of what the internet was about to provide,” Dostie recalls. “Mitch was on the cutting edge of everything we take for granted now: videos, anybody being able to get on the web and comment and have their comment seen and start an argument or debate, people posting anonymously."
While TelemarkTips wouldn’t last (the site folded shortly before Weber’s untimely death in 2016), its heyday – along with Couloir’s – marked the peak of the telemark experience in the late 90s and early 2000s, where a robust scene existed; discussion on the turn and its claimed superiority abounded. And it was a time when telemark movies, mini-celebrities, and two dedicated magazines – Descender and Dostie’s own Telemark Skier – made for a true culture. Soon, though, much of it would be gone.
"EarnYourTurns was just an opportunity for me to have editorial license to say whatever I felt like saying, that I thought needed to be said" - Craig Dostie
Though telemark was enjoying exciting times, the sport would find itself leveled by a steep decline in perception and cratering participation. All thanks to the long overdue acceptance of the two-pin, Dynafit alpine touring binding. The pioneering and slender platform was invented by Fritz Barthel in the late 1980s and was later licensed to Dynafit in 1990. But the original tech binding was slow to gain momentum. Telemark, with its naturally free heel, was seen as all the backcountry skier needed for mobility, and seemed better suited to what the elements might throw at a skier over tech bindings’ perceived meagerness. A sea change in opinion was coming, and the mid-2000s marked a turning point for Dynafit bindings. Telemark would never be the same.
"There was a huge exodus from telemark around 2005, 2006 because that's when Dynafit was finally being endorsed by some big athletes, and so everyone woke up," Dostie recalled. “The Dynafit platform was finally fully accepted in the alpine touring world. And once it was, there was no longer this debate about whether AT was lighter and more efficient for backcountry skiing. It was; hands down.”
With the awakening of the skiing world to Dynafit came the grand questioning of telemark’s necessity. Many a backcountry skier jumped ship, with Dostie remembering “a lot of people took up telemark skiing because they were interested in backcountry skiing, and they were following the wave of enthusiasm that came with the development of the first plastic telemark boot, and so they all became telemark skiers because they wanted to go backcountry skiing.” “They knew they needed a free heel to go up hill,” Dostie points out, “but if there’s a lighter system available, and I’m not that good of a telemark skier, I’m much better as alpine, why am I still telemarking?’”
But telemark’s decline was twofold: its status as the gear best suited to the backcountry was certainly challenged, but with that came a unique backlash against the culture and the equipment, ostracizing the turn. Renowned outdoor writer and former telemark World Freeskiing champion Megan Michelson summarized it succinctly in Hans Ludwig’s infamous 2017 Powder article “Telemark Skiing is Dead:”
“Tele skiing was no longer an original, counter-culture thing to do,” Michelsen observed, “that sticker ‘nobody cares that you tele’ sums it up to me. There was a weird ‘I’m better than you because I’m different’ attitude that went along with the sport, and that definitely turned me off.” Michelson wasn’t alone. Telemark was now viewed as anachronistic and arrogant by the masses, and tele skiers became the target of scorn and jokes from detractors and haters. Though this feeling has ebbed, telemark fights this sentiment to this day.
It was during the mid-2000s that Dostie saw the end of the road for Couloir, saying "I [had] decided 19 years was plenty of time to be able to make a profit. And I never really did. So Backcountry and Couloir merged, and that was the end of Couloir." Dostie remained on Backcountry’s staff as a senior editor and occasional contributor.
But he wasn’t finished advocating for backcountry – and telemark – skiing. Dostie finally launched EarnYourTurns in 2010, saying “I started that really because I felt there was a lot of things that were still not being spoken of.” “I was used to being the final say. So EarnYourTurns was just an opportunity for me to have editorial license to say whatever I felt like saying, that I thought needed to be said,” Dostie remembers. In the throes of its most retrograde moment, telemark skiing was thrown a fresh lifeline with EarnYourTurns.
Dostie dropping knees high on Colorado's Mt. Evans. Photo credit Brian Litz
EarnYourTurns inception in 2010 was indeed a uniquely fraught time for telemark. Usurped from its position as chosen tool of the backcountry skier by two-pin alpine bindings, telemark now found itself marooned, without cachet, and subject to derision. A more technical and physically demanding turn was no longer necessary for accessing the backcountry, a space now en vogue as never before.
Though the subsequent years would be quiet ones in the telemark culture with only a few voices pushing the sport onward, the time would prove to be momentous in gear progression, and EarnYourTurns was the chief recorder of the movement toward lighter, stronger, more modern equipment. As Dostie remembers it, “telemark was finally growing up. And part of that process was the new telemark norm was developed, NTN.”
NTN, introduced by Rottefella in 2007, did away with the cable/cartridge heel throw and replaced it with a free-heel, underfoot platform connection. That innovation promised more powerful and solid skiing via immediate engagement and edge transmission. The norm also gave the ability to incorporate attributes long yearned for by telemark skiers – things like ski brakes, and releasability.
But the system was launched during telemark’s nadir, and it still had bugs to work out. “NTN promised a lot, and when it was first introduced, it did not meet the goals that it had set out for itself,” says Dostie. Dostie himself was a late adopter of the new norm, with pieces on EYT defending the old paradigm of 75mm boots and bindings, like his February 2014 article “In Defense of the Duckbill.” That didn’t detract Dostie from covering the progression of the new platform – NTN boots and bindings found their way into his gear guides, and Dostie routinely covered the newest advents in NTN, like his December 2014 article, “22 Designs announces Outlaw beta program,” one of the first pieces on the Outlaw binding, which would eventually become the industry standard on the norm.
Dostie eventually became an advocate for the modern gear – the equipment continued to improve, and he was on the front lines testing new bindings and writing uncompromising reviews on their development. By September of 2015 he was writing that “The Case for NTN Grows.” In that article, Dostie elaborated on the then seven available NTN bindings. Included in that article was the growing stable of modern telemark bindings – both NTN and not – that incorporated the very piece of equipment that drove telemark into the shadows – a Dynafit-style tech toe.
Tele's fallout shelter incarnate - Craig Dostie's EarnYourTurns.com
The first telemark binding to have that technology was the Telemark Tech System (TTS), developed by Mark Lengel. Dostie was one of the first to test the beta version of the binding, writing in a February 2011 article on EYT of the inauspicious start to a revolution in the sport’s gear: “as soon as I opened the door I was faced with an unexpected decision. Continue forth with the plan … or open the box in front of me that surely contained Mark Lengel’s Telemark Tech System binding and give it a quick test run.” The unassuming Frankenstein-of-a-binding was certainly a head-turner. And it was instrumental in telemark’s progression.
Dostie knew immediately that telemark was on a new course. “The key was when Mark Lengel developed the telemark tech system,” he remembers. “I took one run and I went ‘oh my gosh,’ yes, this needs work, but this is the future.” Dostie went on to meticulously cover Lengel’s advent, and soon was covering other new-age telemark traps that incorporated the tech toe, like The M Equipment’s (now InWild) Meidjo, the first NTN-compatible low-tech binding, and then 22 Design’s Lynx. Dostie’s reporting shed light on a new reality where telemark bindings had the features and weight of alpine counterparts. “I believe through bindings like the Meidjo and the Lynx, NTN is now fulfilling the promise that was its goal when it started,” Dostie says. Telemark gear had come full circle while the subculture was exiled from the greater ski world.
What Dostie accomplished wasn’t just keeping a finger on telemark’s pulse; he gave The Turn visibility when it was fighting for any acknowledgement at all. Save for EYT and a few other remaining pro-tele outlets – like René-Martin Trudel’s lesson-based Absolute Telemark and Josh Madsen’s influential stable of telemark-specific companies under the Freeheel Life banner – occasional pieces declaring the sport dead or using it as fodder for jokes became the norm. What EarnYourTurns gave free-heel skiing was thoughtful, long-form dissection of the gear and the scene. The telemark DIY crowd would have tinkered on without any spotlight on their innovations if not for Dostie and EarnYourTurns; the new vanguard in telemark gear would have been launched without the same thoughtful discussion had it not been for EYT. This coverage was instrumental in exposing the telemark world to a new dawn in their gear.
Dostie further helped turn the volume up on the cutting edge by creating the EYT affiliated forum BackcountryTalk, a successor to TelemarkTips where gear was discussed at a new depth by a sharp and devoted cadre, albeit at much lower numbers than Weber’s old stomping grounds. Regardless, the new gear and the new progression had the visibility it did because of EarnYourTurns.
The Turn remains the same. Dostie trades snow for sand at Great Sand Dunes National Park in 2019. Photo credit Kari Teraslinna
EarnYourTurns role in maintaining telemark’s momentum through the depths of the sport’s retrograde is possibly its greatest contribution to the sport. Alas, the site is currently inactive. Asked about the EYT’s future, Dostie replied, “I don’t know – when I moved to Colorado I had a full time job and I was just like ‘you know what, I just don’t have the gas at the end of the day to keep putting info out on this.’ And the idea was I was going to take a sabbatical for a year, well, it’s turned into five or six.” He continued, “Am I going to get back to it? I have hopes of it, but I don’t know if that’s actually going to happen.”
Dostie has done much to preserve the sport, though he doesn’t see telemark’s future as guaranteed. “I don’t think tele is ever going to die,” Dostie says, “although it could.” Pointing to the dearth of available modern telemark boots - and Scarpa’s long-promised but as yet undelivered new line – telemark sits in a position of having new-age bindings without the footwear to go with. Despite that, Dostie sees a path forward. “The near term for telemark is kind of tenuous, but the long term I think it’s going to survive because it’s an awesome turn,” Dostie says, laughing with an infectious enthusiasm.
Dostie’s focus has moved slightly elsewhere after so many years writing on telemark. Part of that is an aspiration for a wider audience and writing on more pressing topics. “I am extremely concerned about the state of America and the world, and the chaos that is going on,” Dostie says. “I want to be involved in the solution. But how do I make my pen big enough to have an influence? That’s still kind of nebulous. But I know that that’s the future for me.”
Still, Dostie see’s EYT’s legacy in a decidedly backcountry light, saying “the ethos of ‘earn your turns,’ I think that’s important because so much of society says it’s all about being easy, and earning your turns is about the reward being worth extra effort. And so that stands in stark contrast to our society of everything needs to be easy, just the click of a mouse and everything is okay.”
Dostie in the meat of North Palisade's U-Notch Couloir, 1991. Photo credit Joe McBride
So perhaps Craig Dostie’s duty through EarnYourTurns has been completed. The sport could hardly ask more from the man who did much to keep telemark afloat through its dark ages. Telemark may not have been relevant to the wider ski world when EarnYourTurns was launched, but Dostie gave the technique – the turn that started the backcountry craze in this country in the 70s and helped it come of age in the 90s – a space to be discussed, a place where it could be relevant on some scale. Without places like EarnYourTurns, telemark might have been relegated to also-ran status, a mere apparition and memory instead of being the small but vibrant community rife with innovation that it is today. A subculture and a technique that may be poised for a resurgence.
And while there are certainly others who have done much to usher the movement onward, Dostie’s work holds a special place in the free-heel canon. EarnYourTurns came onto the scene at a time when telemark‘s identity had drastically shifted. The sport was historically inseparable from rugged and meaningful backcountry skiing. But it had gone from being perceived as the best way to enjoy that backcountry to suddenly being viewed as the lesser choice, the fool’s option, even for the realm it pioneered. Exiled to the shadows, telemark’s future was uncertain.
But, luckily for the free-heel world, Craig Dostie and EarnYourTurns was there. Dostie captured the new zeitgeist of modern telemark gear on EarnYourTurns in long form but did so through the lens of backcountry skiing. Dostie‘s viewpoint and reporting has preserved telemark’s backcountry ethos but from a modern viewpoint. As such, Dostie has had an indelible impact on the continuation of telemark‘s long-standing tenants of self-sufficiency, independence, going out on one’s own.
While small in numbers, a new generation of telemark skiers – riding a wave first spotted long ago by Dostie – is starting to take shape, often on two-pin gear, accessing the backcountry, and skiing aggressively and adeptly. But who their voice will be is yet to be determined. No one has yet stepped from the shadows to stand alongside Dostie as the new recorder of the sport. Dostie‘s influence has surely been instrumental for telemark: from the days of leather and le Chronicle de Couloir, to the depths of telemark’s lowest points in the 2000s, to the current new dawn. The next generation owes him much. Continuing his legacy of advocacy and visibility for the sport would truly mark telemark’s resurrection complete.
Comments