Tele Dribble: The Inescapable Path of a Ski Writer

Skiing and metacognition is a fraught pairing. This sport–known for its indulgence in the good times–is an escape, after all. It even has its own escape; the off-season, the time we move into now, when the snow retreats and the mind can indulge in other pursuits.

This coming-and-going marks a beautiful balance, and while it’s one some of us undoubtedly take stock in, for the most part our subculture tends to avoid introspection on the ski life. Yes, these cycles are powerfully meaningful to those of us lucky enough to make skiing part or most of our lifestyles. But that hardly means that everyone in this world spends much time wondering what it all means. Mostly for better. Perhaps a bit for the worse.

Me? I’ve instead tread that at times painfully thoughtful path. And not just by cognating on skiing broadly, but telemark skiing, for goodness sake. While I've admittedly become completely spellbound by the genuflecting turn, I would be remiss to forget that it is insulated, esoteric, and often unrelatable to its core. But perhaps skiing itself–mired in jargon and obscure ritual–broadly suffers from that a bit, too.

Still, what is eminently relatable in skiing is that escape. From smartphones (if only…), or the prospect of nuclear annihilation (why do you think the 70s was the height of ski bummery?). From the expectations of family, or the yawning chasm of borrowed time. Skiing is the escape from all else. What else would we rather be doing?

But no matter that reality, I have jumped into the proverbial deep end of not just the pursuit, but the examination of it. With a day job and a wonderful family, pumping out an article a week during ski season–a time where I also strive to actually ski–has become an exercise in inescapable bandwidth maximization. And instead of using that limited capacity to put together easily digestible material, I have often gone into the weeds, dissecting the sport of free-heel skiing in a way that I feel is at once meaningful if more than a little self indulgent.

Write what you want to read is what eminent outdoor scribe Peter Kray told budding ski writers in this very magazine in 2015. I’ve taken the opposite route, and instead written what I want to write, of course to muted fanfare.

Indeed this path of analysis and research–of looking in between the lines where few others might want to–is possibly ill-suited to something as fun and carefree as skiing. But it's hard to shake my need to approach writing as an analytical feast for the senses. My last meaningful training on the craft was more than ten years ago while in college, at CU Boulder’s history department, where no paper was complete without an arguable thesis, ample evidence, and a conclusion based on such that often ran many, many pages. Needless to say I’m not well-versed in stoke or excitement. Nor escapism, for that matter. More so, my mind leans toward analysis and even counterpoint. But perhaps skiing could use that every so often.

Either way I’ve pressed that penchant for critical investigation into the service of my telemark column, where I’ve not only read more articles and books on skiing than I ever planned to; I’ve interviewed dozens of figures–from legendary skiers to young up-and-comers–for hours on end, transcribing their quotes for inclusion in my many thought-pieces on free-heel skiing.

That has been a journey unto itself, especially so when I reflect on my experiences with other writers who I have interviewed and interacted with. There, the lonely minds of two scribes meet, whose works represent only a shred of the mighty, often neurotic intellection they have undertaken that often comes forth better as the written word than the spoken one. We are writers, afterall, stuck on our muse, often until the itch is scratched raw.

Perhaps it’s all part of the process–but I digress; there I go again, over-indulging, not letting the escape be an escape.

Another wonderful elemental piece of this little thing of mine is that as the season’s come and go so, too, does the cadence of my column, retreating to every-other-week. That seems to allow my mind to back off just enough to take stock of things, like many skiers naturally do each spring, and indulge in how lucky I am to have this skiing life, and a side-gig that lets me engage in the minutia of it.

This is just writing about skiing, right? And not just skiing broadly–a small subset of a pretty inconsequential part of it.

But as inconsequential as it might seem to the wider world, to the six inches in between my ears, metacognition on skiing knows no end. I imagine that’s how the Telemark Tinkerers and other sorts passionate about The Turn feel. Even as the sun creeps higher in the sky and I take to mountain biking and bringing my kids to the river, telemark skiing is never far from my mind. I think about it daily.

In the warmer months between equinoxes I still constantly plan and draft articles to run next winter, scheduled for press when it’s not just a lonely writer’s mind that wants to wallow in the details about sliding on snow. Then, as the snow falls anew, perhaps a person or two might want to join me taking things a little too close to the sun.

That’s what it’s all about. I’d simply escape to a personal diary if I just wanted to write. Making the process important–or at least meaningful–to someone outside yourself is the true calling of a writer, whether we start out on that path or not.

And I, like many other writers, know only one way in which to take to that endeavor: dive in, inescapably headlong, even all summer.