Fundamental to recent telemark folklore is the notion that as alpine (and certainly alpine touring) equipment evolved over the 90s and 2000s, telemark did little to stay current. And as free-heel gear – long thought of as the main avenue to ski the backcountry – was supplanted by light AT gear, many not-so-staunch tele skiers jumped ship, forever abandoning the turn.
Thus the theory goes that - in the absence of any perceived advantage - more people would come to telemark if it could again have some sort of parity with alpine, be it weight, features, even a less Phishy cultural acceptability.
But a counterpoint was made by none other than Hans Ludwig in his cheeky (but sharp) Powder piece “Telemark Skiing is Dead.” In the oft referenced article, Ludwig made an insightful take on the parity argument. Speaking of telemark’s then waning numbers, Ludwig wrote “my favorite theory is that by trying to become equivalent in performance to alpine gear, telemarking rationalized itself out of existence."
Is The Turn in fact separate and above competition with alpine gear? Or does telemark live and die by how comparable it is to alpine skiing?
To buttress his thesis, Ludwig listed the various reasons for telemark’s then deep retrograde, including “a decade or so later, sales have dropped, growth has stalled, there is no new gear of note, fewer young tele skiers, and many of the best and staunchest free-heelers have switched to alpine or AT gear.”
Ludwig indeed neglected several important innovations in telemark that had by the article's publication in 2017 already taken place– mainly the ascendence of telemark gear that is both incredibly active (NTN), allowing for the continued evolution toward alpine-like aggressiveness; and that telemark touring gear was beginning to emerge that had weight comparable to AT options via the telemark tech system (TTS).
Though TTS was then quite under the radar (regardless of being created in 2011 by Mark Lengel), and the best paired boots were (and arguably still are) the original Scarpa F1 and F3 – bellowed AT boots from the 2000s – NTN had become a mainstay in the telemark world by then, and not only allowed strong edge control a la alpine skiing, but also allowed options to telemark skiers that were before only available to the alpine world – ski brakes, some form of releasability, step in functionality. Moreover, TTS’s beginnings would presage the ascendence of a binding norm that matches many mid-level AT options in weight and touring prowess.
Thus the argument could just as easily be made – then, and now - that by attempting to gain some sort of parity with alpine gear that telemark had in fact evolved greatly. In fact some telemark manufactures see striving for parity with similar alpine models as imperative.
“In terms of parity with the equipment I think to a certain level on the high performance, on-piste ski boots, we need to be at parity in some characteristics of performance,” says Scarpa North America CEO Kim Miller.
But interestingly Miller feels that striving for parity should only go so far.
“Many people are good alpine skiers and good telemark skiers [and] they want to have the same certain kinds of feelings. It can be like edge hold or control or torsional rigidity, comfort, whatever it is,” says Miller. “So we do need to match that at a certain point but it's only to an extent.”
But “a telemark boot does something totally different than an alpine boot does and people understand the need to address both flex and downhill skiing performance.”
Perhaps then the operative notion is not telemark living or dying by taking too much or too little from the alpine world, but from taking what it needs while it remains independent by its very nature – because there is no telemark without The Turn.
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