A protracted if quiet DIY gear revolution and a steadfast base has kept the flame alive in telemark for decades. Now the sport’s late-coming retail maturity has been buttressed by an evolved and growing subculture. Is the next wave of free-heel skiing upon us?
Photo Curtis Devore
A small throng of patrons descended on a little brewery in a growing ski town one late December night in 2023. The shortest of winter days had arrived, and with them the chilly Yuletide air. But the snows hadn’t quite hit yet. Only a few artificial white ribbons cut thin lines between dingy grass and leafless aspens on the otherwise snowless ski area.
But for telemark skiers there was reason to be excited that winter’s night. A free-heel film tour was making its stop at a cozy locale downtown. Years had gone by since telemark films toured the country, and the moment harkened back to a time when the Nordic downhill technique was a little less esoteric; to a time when it graced the glossy pages of magazines, enjoying the cachet that came from being the preferred method of the backcountry skier in America.
Telemark had since fallen from its perch. While the faithful had kept the flame alive, The Turn had been relegated to a new lowly standing. At times derided or outright dismissed - some even calling it an excuse to suck - modern telemark often found itself ostracized as a silly and unfashionable way to ski, approaching irrelevance as the zeitgeist turned ever away from it. Sightings of free-heel skiers thus became rare. And - to the wider outdoor world - telemark skiing seemed to disappear.
But the brewery bustled that evening, packed wall-to-wall with enthusiasts of all ages and persuasions, all there to see the new free-heel film, THIS IS TELEMARK, an independent movie by one CJ Coccia, produced by his fledgling advocacy group TELE COLO.
Salt-and-peppered Aquarians sipped red ales next to hipsters, while bearded and beplaided young locals found their way to the projector screen. It was a varied and numerous group, and an excited one. A few there weren’t even telemark skiers, adding to a crowd feeling the budding new energy growing in telemark.
Strong, even extreme telemark skiing never disappeared. Free-heelers like Art Burrows tackled many a steep couloir on three-pin bindings in the 70s and 80s, while Alaskan big walls saw hair-raising telemark turns from the likes of Nick Devore around the turn of the century. And Kasha Rigby's almost unfathomable free-heel descents of Himalayan peaks are now legend. People have always been taking the telemark to its limit.
Craig Dostie descending the 60 degree Headwall to North Palisade's U-Notch Couloir, 1991. Photo Joe McBride.
But something new seems to be afoot in this small subculture. After spending the better part of the last twenty years being teased and derided by the skiing public, telemark is enjoying a growing momentum. A quiet gear revolution over the last decade has not only dismantled the long-held belief that telemark equipment is antiquated, it has also brought a new parity - and growing assimilation - between the free-heel and alpine worlds. And with that has come a new and building free-heel scene. Telemark seems to be coming back.
But it’s been a long road for the ancient turn.
Telemark skiing as a downhill leisure activity began in the mid-1800s as skiers began jumping and racing on their free-heel Nordic equipment long used for overland travel. Sondre Norheim, a resident of the town of Morgedal in the Norwegian region of Telemark is credited widely as not only the father of telemark skiing, but of modern recreational skiing. He developed cable bindings out of birch roots, and shaped his skis with sidecut many decades before the practices became common and industrialized.
Telemark remained the standard technique for downhill skiing until the 1920s, when snow riders in the Alps developed a fixed-heel binding platform and teaching method to go with. The Arlberg - a progression from snowplow turns to parallels - was instrumental in the ascendance of alpine skiing, bringing the method to prominence, ending telemark’s reign as the chief version of downhill skiing.
But The Turn never disappeared. The Nordic technique remained the chosen path for many in Scandinavia and beyond, and as millions emigrated from Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, free-heel skiing found its way to the snowy latitudes of the young countries - and brutally colonized lands - of the Western Hemisphere.
Norwegian immigrants like John Albert Thompson - a mail carrier whose goldrush-era traverses of the Sierra in the dead of winter are legendary - brought the telemark with him to the United States. As illuminated in his seminal work 60 Centuries of Skiing, Charles M. Dudley wrote that Thompson “went from Placerville to Carson Valley, a distance of ninety miles. With the mail strapped on his back, he glided over fields of snow that were, in places, thirty to fifty feet deep.” And, as Hutchings California Magazine noted on the free-heeler's bindings in their February 8th, 1857 edition, “the only fastening is a single strap over the toe of the boot admitting the freest possible motion to the feet and ankles.”
Snowshoe Thompson wasn’t the only free-heel transplant who put roots down in the United States - Sondre Norheim himself came to America in 1884, living out the rest of his life in North Dakota.
While the telemark method lived on in many places, a special resurgence took place in the United States in the 1970s. As notions of going beyond the rigid ethos of ski areas and ski culture grew in the post-Woodstock milieu, many skiers took to the backcountry. And the most widely available equipment for moving overland on snow remained Nordic cross-country gear. Soon these skiers found that the telemark turn allowed them to descend wild snow with free heels using their long, skinny, double cambered cross-country planks mounted with three-pin bindings. Often far beyond the resort boundaries, telemark scenes sprouted in Vermont, the Eastern Sierra, Crested Butte. The halcyon days of telemark had arrived
While telemark never grew to encompass a sizable portion of skiers, its image and ethos was undeniable; it marked the countercultural moment quintessentially, the free-heeler embodying the Cold War-era ski bum at their most passionate, more legitimate. Writers like Steve Barnett encapsulated the movement in seminal instructionals like Cross-Country Downhill and Other Nordic Mountain Skiing Techniques, at once capturing the technique and the cultural zeitgeist in print. And guides like Allan Bard - whose steep skiing exploits the world over (but often based out of the Eastern Sierra) - not only took to The Turn, his essays marked the pinnacle of free-heel skiing, his evocative words found in the core publications of the day, spreading the word on the telemark. Writing in Couloir Magazine’s October 1997 edition, Bard elucidated on free-heel, backcountry guiding: “It becomes important then, in fact essential, to savor and share these places and feelings. When we travel far afield to ski, we often find not just some intoxicatingly remote landscape but the convoluted topography of our own souls.”
Even Powder, the long running magazine core to the alpine skiing movement, often ran pieces on telemark skiing, exposing its role in the growing backcountry revolution.
Telemark marked the countercultural moment quintessentially, the free-heeler embodying the Cold War-era ski bum at their most passionate, more legitimate.
By the early 1990s telemark began to leave its Nordic roots. Many a free-heeler donned alpine-oriented skis, while plastic boots finally made their way into the marketplace in the early part of the decade with Scarpa's Terminator, revolutionizing the learning curve and level of skiing possible using the telemark technique. As free-heel skiers left their leather boots behind and became more aggressive and often ski area-bound, telemark gear began to favor heavier setups tuned to resort skiing. Still, telemark’s naturally free-heel nature granted it lofty standing for turn earning. As a fresh wave of backcountry participation crested in the late 1990s, telemark saw its own boom. Large alpine companies - like K2 and Rossignol - had dedicated and robust telemark lines. And the magazines of the day brimmed with articles and advertisements focused on telemark.
But the sport would soon not only find itself without its standing as backcountry gear of choice, the turn and its practitioners would also be subject to derision amid a wave of backlash.
After spending decades under the radar, Dynafit’s two-pronged tech-toe trap finally became the backcountry binding of choice for weight-conscious tourers. And robust frame-style bindings also became widely available, creating options that could tour but also hold their own on the resort. Whether for weight savings or ease of use, these models supplanted countless free-heel bindings, and soon many half-in telemark skiers jumped ship.
But the fall was multifaceted. Just as it was beginning to lose its status as backcountry gear of choice, a wave of resentment also flowed forth for telemark gear and its skiers. Many a free-heeler was deemed too arrogant, too loud, and too self-absorbed; their self-proclaimed headier and harder way of skiing now panned instead of lauded. No one cares you tele and lock the heel, ski for real became common refrains from a skiing mainstream that now saw the turn as superfluous and its adherents annoying.
Even the launch of the new telemark norm in 2007 - a cableless upgrade designed to replace the standard but then nearly century-old 75mm Nordic platform - couldn't keep free-heel skiing top of mind in the wider skiing world. The sport slowly disappeared from the conversation while fewer and fewer took to the genuflecting turn.
But while the sport seemingly languished amidst the no-one-cares-you-tele backlash, far from the eyes of the skiing mainstream, a revolution in telemark gear was underway. In 2011, Salt Lake City resident Mark Lengel was amongst the first to spark this sea change by incorporating the two-pin tech toe with a telemark binding - an advent he christened the Telemark Tech System (TTS). “I had brainstormed for several years on how to match a tech toe to a telemark heel, having produced sixteen different design options,” says Lengel. His final design - a two-pin toe married to a classic cable/cartridge heel assembly - was a quiet quantum leap, and spurred on a wave of at-home experiments with similar specs.
The threadbare telemark world indeed took notice. Writing on his seminal telemark blog EarnYourTurns, Craig Dostie wrote in an April 27th, 2011 review that “it is evident after using the TTS binding that, going forward, the Dynafit system will eventually dominate the world of tele alpinists, just as it already rules the world of locked heel ski alpinism.” Maybe just as prescient, Dostie also foresaw the edge-pushing to come via the tech toe in telemark. “Some may pooh-pooh this as being a fringe element of telemark skiing,” he wrote. “Indeed it is. But the future is determined by those who push to redefine boundaries, not those who accept what is.”
Three years later Pierre Mouyade of the boutique French binding company The M Equipment (now known as InWild) created his own free-heel, tech-toe model with his Meidjo, brought to market in 2014. This futuristic telemark binding used the new telemark norm connection, attaching under the boot sole at the ball of the foot with a plate instead of around the heel with a cable. This new paradigm offered a modern, powerful telemark skiing option with a strong ability to tour. Eminent manufacturer 22 Designs followed suit with their two-pin NTN Lynx a few years later.
The telemark DIY crowd continued tinkering with the TTS platform, using old stock experimental alpine touring boots to pair with their own versions of telemark tech bindings. As the sport entered prolonged retrograde, many free-heel SKUs were dropped, and the only remaining retail-available boots tended to be heavy and resort-oriented. Scarpa’s original F1 and F3 - bellowed alpine touring boots developed in the aughts - granted free-heel tinkerers an apt option to pair with their light and versatile homemade bindings. And armed with CAD software and 3D printers, the DIY cohort pushed the boundaries of how light the gear could be, approaching alpine touring counterparts with similar features. But retaining the ability to make sweet telemark turns.
Their influence would eventually spread. Innovations long only available via DIY knowhow would become available at retail - and those options have leveled the playing field all the more between telemark and alpine touring. These include bindings like Voile’s TTS Transit, the first turnkey option on the TTS platform (Lengel’s TTS required a certain DIY finesse to tune-in), as well as lighter, feature-laden boots, like Scarpa’s revamped Tx Pro, released in the fall of 2024; both options that were first conceived as DIY tinkerings.
Telemark gear has approached a feature and retail parity with alpine equipment it hasn’t approached in decades - and maybe ever.
But just as importantly, a cultural detente seems at hand, with telemark’s granola stereotype being challenged by a revivalist movement that not only rides rails and takes big airs, but takes on a newschooler attitude that hasn’t been operative in telemark since its last wave of participation.
Filmmaker CJ Coccia and his advocacy outfit TELE COLO has been at the forefront of that cultural shift in telemark skiing. First beginning as a loose crew of newschool telemark skiers - and then known as Telemark Colorado - Coccia’s group initially focused on simply getting like-minded telemark skiers together. But Coccia soon realized that modern telemark lacked the cultural center it once enjoyed, especially a media lynchpin. “We started with little unofficial meetups and everything but really the TELE COLO project started as just a creative outlet. I kind of bounced around between the film at just the start of it, but truly TELE COLO started as just ‘I would like there to be something more in telemark that I have seen happen in the past that doesn't seem to be happening currently,’” Coccia says.
Cj Coccia during the film tour for THIS IS TELEMARK. Photo Gunnar Stoltenow
Coccia took inspiration from the newschool telemark pioneers of the previous generation. Movies by skiers like Josh Madsen - whose Lipstick Films captured cutting-edge telemark skiing after the turn of the century - could still be found on YouTube, and harkened to a time when telemark brimmed with a youthful, broadened energy.
Coccia thus took to focusing on free-heel filmmaking, and over the last several season’s TELE COLO’s tours have marked the height of the subculture's resurgence, bringing telemark a rekindled, modern energy. The skiers in Coccia’s films are typically younger, progressive skiers who have strong social media presences, allowing their interpretation of the telemark vibe to permeate through the internet to more and more people.
“That’s truly how you kind of - at least in my perspective – grow media outreach and grow especially younger generational interest is by offering a bunch of different interpretations and styles and perspectives into one sport so that one person may look at one and say ‘I don’t relate to this’ but then they look at another and they say ‘I could very much see myself being a part of this,’” Coccia ruminates.
Borrowing from the previous newschool, TELE COLO’s approach - and that of many of the skier’s in their films - marks a purposeful departure from telemark’s past identity. Much of TELE COLO’s website copy calls out the crew’s apprehension with free-heel skiing’s stereotype of being for an older cohort. And in a plug for the 2024 film “THIS IS TELEMARK,” team member Giorigia Menente wrote in an article for SKI that “the perception of telemark skiing remains aged—with floppy bindings, granola diets, unkept beards, and smells of patchouli. TELE COLO is here to present the ski world with the new age of telemark culture that exists beyond the stereotype.”
This sentiment had a harbinger in the old new guard, who twenty years earlier felt the same need to break free of telemark’s past. Asked in a 2002 Descender Magazine roundtable what the biggest downfall of telemark skiing was, Ben Dolenc responded, “the old telers who don’t want the sport to change, grow or evolve. People who think it’s only for the backcountry. The old image sucks too that Tele is for hippies and old people.”
The manufacturers in the space also see a changing and rising vibe in telemark. While the tiny sport lacks a trade organization, rendering any notions on telemark’s growing participation slippery, a palpable evolution in the sport seems at hand.
“Tele overall – it’s hard to tell - there’s no great numbers out there, and we have a sense of what our sales are but overall it's always tricky, but, yeah, anecdotally it seems there’s a lot more buzz around it the last year or two,” says Chris Valiante, who with Collins Pringle owns the highly regarded and long-running binding manufacturer 22 Designs, based in Driggs, Idaho. “Hopefully that sense we’ve had is true and we’ll start seeing more teler’s everywhere,” Valiante concludes.
Moreover, and similarly to how plastic boots brought more telemark skiers into an aggressive skiing fold, manufacturers are seeing continued developments as fueling telemark’s resurgence. “I think that the other thing that innovation and improvements do is they make it easier typically to learn the sport,” says Kim Miller, long-time CEO of Scarpa North America, the legendary Italian footwear company that has for decades been the most important boot manufacturer in telemark. “The innovative improvements – and this is really about boots and bindings because the skis are more or less interchangeable these days – that has really made it easier for people to pick up the technique and to progress into it pretty quickly,” Miller says.
Scarpa’s revamped Tx Pro boot - finally released in the fall of 2024 - marks a paradigm shift in telemark footwear, incorporating many features from the manufacturer's alpine touring boots to bring telemark skiers an option at retail that has never been realized before. And something that dovetails with what the DIY crowd has long looked for in Scarpa’s original F1 and F3 boots.
But as telemark enters a new day both culturally and in its equipment, this evolution unavoidably changes the scope of telemark’s ethos. It marks an assimilation with alpine skiing in terms of the gear paradigm - InWild’s Meidjo binding can even come with an alpine heel - but also a detente culturally, where the rugged individualism of the legacy telemark verve has quickly evolved into something that at times repudiates older free-heel dogma in favor of a broader appeal; an attitude that hasn’t always been endemic to telemark’s long independent nature.
Though a large subset of the sport cheers this direction on, some argue this has made today’s telemark less steadfast, less serious, and less staunch than previous iterations of the sport. Debate flows forth on the topic amongst avatars on social media.
CJ Coccia skiing in Niseko. Photo Curtis Devore
Still, telemark forges on. As time moves on the no-one-cares-you-tele backlash becomes more archaic, and the innovative DIY approach many in telemark have taken to has brought the sport into a new dawn.
And coupled with that do-it-yourself vibe has also come a more broadened, more modern version of what it means to be a telemark skier, something many of the manufacturers in the space also echo. “I’m not so much into - there’s some in the telemark community that kind of beat their chest like ‘you got to be tele all the time,’ I don’t know, I’m not so much into that,” says Dave Bombard, owner of the Edwards, Colorado-based Bishop Telemark, a binding and ski maker with a devoted following.
“That’s the vibe we go for. Do whatever you want. We’d love if you were on our stuff, but if you want to do alpine turns, too, I’m not against that, it’s not a big deal,” Bombard says laughing.
That long brewing notion of the telemark being but one arrow in the quiver of the mountain snow rider has come ever more to the surface of late. “My personal belief is the most efficient ski system – if you can telemark – is the telemark system because it allows you to do just about anything if you’re a competent skier,” says Scarpa’s Kim Miller. And while those in the free-heel realm still hold the turn highly, an expanded vision of telemark - gear, ethos, and all - has not only come to pass, but has ushered the sport toward a renewed apogee.
A new day for telemark skiing is indeed here, with not only more modern equipment options than ever before, but also a transformed subculture. As ever, telemark has moved closer to alpine skiing both in terms of gear and perspective. But while telemark’s more Aquarian vibe may be seeing its last gasps, the revived newschool promises to bring telemark into the modern fold - social media, attitude, and all.
And that may mean there will soon not only be more people making their way into little bars to watch independent telemark movies - multitudes more people may soon be skiing in the ancient, heady style than ever before.
