As ever, telemark skiing seems to be changing. The new gear, new guard, and a new energy together appear to be not only breaking from the past, but bringing the turn to a renewed apogee. Telemark skiing seems to be coming back.
What a good thing; to be moving forward, to get things along. Though there’s work yet to be done, the free-heel umbrella has never been wider, and it grows all the time while our gear – long in extended if quiet renaissance – continues to evolve and expand. Telemark again seems to be waxing, even attaining a mini vogue status amongst a younger, trendy corps.
But amidst this progression we seem to be missing someone, or perhaps we are just losing them slowly.
The hippies, the crusty bums, the spiritual free-heel sages. Telemark is losing its weirdos.
The bota bags have long ago found their graves deep in the recesses of closets and crawl spaces. Knee pads now find themselves only occasionally on higher-lunging knees, and always under ski pants. And any sort of adherence to the Grateful Dead – or Phish and Panic for that matter – is now woefully out of style not only in the wider youth culture, but even in a place where it once seemed endemic – telemark skiing.
This group’s exit is natural – time marches on, the spotlight of the zeitgeist never staying in one place long. It is its nature to shine on new and different trends as they rise.
But may we always remember the funky, heady, stoney telemark skiers.
Because while they may be remembered for being overly arrogant about their supposedly spiritual way of skiing, there was so much more to the telemark skier of the past than that. In a time before social media and it’s cool-or-die mandates, this skier – and their K2 Work Stinx planks and G3 Targa bindings – wasn’t in it for the dopamine hits of Instagram’s like counter; they weren’t in it to be micro influencers. Their attention spanned far beyond a thirty second reel.
Sure, maybe they had to tell you about it at the bar (or that’s how people perceived it), but these folks were in it to ski. And to take après too far. And to pass a doobie around. Perhaps that delves a bit far into the realm of legend, but the telemark skier of old embodied a certain zeal for the moment, a certain focus on the one thing that they were that taken by. Their myth is easy to elevate in a world of 24 hour news cycles and social media doom scrolls.
Still, the telemark scene now has a certain self-loathing for this type – casting them as the bane of the industry’s existence for not buying a pair of boots since the T2 first came out, for not doing their part to make the sport cool.
Their time has indeed past. But lest we forget who was making all those good turns decades ago. And who the youth of the 90s saw from a chairlift, skiing in the old-school genuflecting style – and who could crush a beer and spend a mean few days at Red Rocks – that made us think “I want to do that.”
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