What's the route forward for free-heel skiing? A misty , aborted morning on Klickitat
Another fall is upon the Northern Hemisphere, and for those lucky enough to partake comes the growing anticipation of the coming ski season. With this change arrives cool nights, shelves in shops stocked with the new season’s equipment, and the allocation of our precious dollars towards gear checklists. The building excitement is reinforced by the return of ski culture and its films, magazines, and gear guides. Multitudes look to the mountains, awaiting the first dusting of snow.
But things are a little different in the mind of the telemark skier. Precious few free-heelers will appear on screen in the autumn’s ski movie tours, and – like most years – there is but little new telemark gear to speak of (though the new Voile TTS Transit binding coming out this fall bucks that trend somewhat). Still, Scarpa’s long promised new boots remain unreleased, and the prophesied 3rd Great Wave of American Telemark Skiing – complete with its predicted bevvy of boots and bindings – still seems but a fantasy. So while the mainstream ski culture feeds on a strong fall vibe and a widespread, building anticipation for winter – buttressed by new gear and ski porn – tele falls back on its usual, esoteric strengths: a strong-skiing and devoted following with a purposeful and solitary commitment to the moment that is the turn. With few other outlets, that’s about all the threadbare telemark culture has to lean on, no matter the season.
Telemark is a beautiful thing in its own right – anyone who knows the mysterious sensation that a free-heel turn brings is keenly aware. Still, the rarified nature of free-heel, downhill skiing has left it isolated, struggling with the side effects of an approachability chasm. But telemark’s isolation – while leading to little R&D attention from the big players and a paltry subculture – has insulated it from much of the muddier effects of the ski business world.
And we all know the outdoor world is big business. The breadth of gear availability is immense, something we outdoorsy types all benefit from as consumers, business owners, and employees. Oft marketed aspirationally via collateral of blower pow, handsome hipster imagery, and in myriad other fashionable ways, off-the-shelf equipment is shown by manufacturers in a most radical and stylish way, and we the consumers eat it up. We strive to emulate as best we can by purchasing the product and the image. Regardless of how the gear is presented and supposed to be used, it is being sold in huge numbers. Two-pin ski bindings, a backcountry tool, adorn many a starry-eyed resort skier's planks, just like e-bikes the price of cars now help riders churn up trails that were recently only used by the unmotorized. The degree of purchasing options is staggering, built on a foundation of willing consumers who are stimulated by both a remarkably powerful marketing mechanism and a more diverse set of motivations than ever – motivations mirrored by a dynamic and not always outdoors-first business apparatus.
Frankly, the robustness of this outdoor apparatus comes with side effects. A culture originally built on simple escapism and transcendence seeking is now rife with the pressures of consumerism. An emphasis on coolness - often spurred from the marketing campaigns of the manufacturers engaged in a compete-or-die architype - has seeped into almost every nook in the outdoor world, where individuals' thirst for social media likes and shares has propelled the message of the marketers onward like a nuclear reaction.
Businesses have taken advantage; manufacturers constantly bring innovative gear to market behind strong go-to-market strategies while content creators now often echo the marketing propelling these products. With billions of dollars at stake, shareholder-beholden, monied interests have bought in, brought with them their genius for monetization, and have wrought a sea change in the culture. From manufacturing to content, conglomoratization and consolidation has found the outdoor world, where the lines have blurred between over-consumption and visions of sustainability; between advertising and independent content. Creators and manufacturers are now juiced in together, finding ways to use online influence to monetize each other, all the while taking the attention of those that once sought out independent, irreverent voices in the outdoor world. Holistic growth, maybe always a myth, feels more removed than ever in this modern, scale-or-die business world; an ethos now engrained not in every entity, but in much of the outdoor industry.
Telemark has found itself both within and without the modern outdoor business apparatus. The commerce machine has mostly avoided cachet-poor (and cash-poor) free-heel skiing, but the sport unavoidably is impacted by the gravity of big business; telemark isn't totally separate from outdoor culture and feels the stresses of the new order. Its ranks are the readers of the now financed and mutated WildSnow and Powder and many may mourn their fates - though the conglomerates that own them just hope we won't notice the change, that we'll keep visiting, clicking-through, and creating commissions from affiliate-link purchases. Regardless, a telemark skier consumes most of the same gear – goggles, helmets, craft beers – as the rest of the outdoor world. Though the dirtbag free-heeler may still exist, many of us lamenting the lack of boot and binding options still do our part to feed the beast, purchasing the other 80% of our setups that don’t require specialized boots and bindings.
And like the rest of the culture at large, telemark skiers are amongst those clamoring with the hoards at the Instagramed and hence over-crowded trailheads; they're waiting in longer and longer lines at the shareholder beholden ski resorts. While not quite a part of the new outdoor business order, telemark skiers don’t exist wholly separate from it either.
But there is a silver lining: telemark-specific business and culture has been mostly insulated from the predatory business models now infecting the industry. 22 Designs hasn't seen a hostile takeover from a private equity firm, Telemark Skier Magazine hasn't come under conglomerate control and been morphed into a faux-content, click-farm of affiliate links (though it appears to have folded). While telemark suffers from a dearth of gear that would be mended if there were more participants, more partakers would bring the outside business interest, vultures and all.
The way forward may become clear when we take stock in what we value most as telemark skiers - if we want new gear above all else, then perhaps what comes with it is worth it. Hell, the robustness of a cool subculture that piggybacks a well-funded, well-functioning commerce apparatus would be a positive secondary outcome. But that can look less than rosy for those of us who can't help but wonder what the ramifications of progress bring.
Perhaps we should be mindful of our envy as we look across the aisle at other outdoor sports and their seemingly endless gear options. Those pursuits haven’t achieved that without sacrifice. There do remain manufacturers, retailers, and brands that are core to the outdoors; who are independent, and strive for the betterment of our culture as much as their individual profit. Companies like Voile - whose skis are handmade in Salt Lake City and cost less than many other brands - and Scarpa (still family owned by the Parisotto's) come to mind.
But it remains the reality that most of our dollars spent on the outdoor industry find their way into the coffers of mechanisms that are conglomerate owned, subservient to shareholders, and financed by big money. Their principles are in stark contrast to notions of an independent, egalitarian outdoors. They just happen to feed our need for gear.
While not unaffected by it, telemark stands beautifully outside of this paradigm. The sport's retrograde acts as a defense against the foggy motives of the modern business world that have changed much in the outdoor culture. It stands to mention that - even in heady, hippie, Marxist telemark - business is necessary. Jokes aside, it doesn’t have to be the money-at-all-costs, shareholders-above-all brand of business that has infected the outdoor world. Luckily, telemark’s businesses remain independent and focused on free-heel skiing.
Telemark should absolutely grow, but its exile has given it the opportunity to do so in a more holistic way. Instead of growing the sport en masse, through lowest-common-denominator marketing, the sport can grow in other ways – like including disparate voices who may have not had the opportunity to free-heel ski in the past, or via grassroots, itinerant propagation of the turn – the method that has long spread the free-heel message, one love-struck convert at a time. It can grow through passion instead of strictly through consumption.
To those who know, the telemark is the essence – that dynamic, harmonic weightlessness that is the free-heel turn . The thirst for this action often inhabits a place deep in the psyche of the practitioner. And the telemark skier takes the path less traveled; by its nature, free-heel skiing is an amazing endeavor only known to those who do. It is to tread outside of the standard route, and there is a purity in that. Telemark skiers above all love the turn, but to take part in something that hasn’t been fully subsumed into the muddy tides of the modern world is wonderfully serendipitous.
The free-heel ethos stands in stark contrast to the zero-sum game that is the equity firm, affiliate-link, money-over-all-else business model. Long may it be that way.
Comments