Telemark Design Innovator Paul Parker Dies at 71

Skiing, as a whole, tends to do a poor job of being historically conscious. Instead, much of the subculture forgoes metacognition for a simple enjoyment of the moment. Rather than indulging in deeper notions of aging and history, ski films usually opt for a not-so-subtle objectification of the sport’s flashier side, while Instagram reels– homogeneous in their blower pow content–populate social media feeds. Skiing’s vibe and content tends to glorify youth while leaving the past behind, a conviction that permeates much of the subculture.

It has always been this way. Much of skiing’s pulse comes from its constantly-rising fresh corps, each new generation’s mark being left by young skiers whose nature it is to innovate beyond what their predecessors did. It’s a gift to the sport, no matter how little it may give due to the giant’s shoulders it stands upon.

But those figures–skiing’s historical scions–are core to not only their time and place, they have indelibly influenced the modern sport, often in ways so pervasive as to seem like their contributions were always with us.

Telemark skiing is no different, and the sport–always small, and long in retrograde, though seeming again to be in revival–has at once been ushered on by fresh thinking while ever relying on the passion and inventiveness of those who came before.

And no other individual in telemark skiing embodied both the notions of looking back and forward quite like Paul Parker, who died on October 28th at the age of 71.

Parker’s impact on free-heel skiing is hard to overstate. His three decades laboring on ski design at legendary companies like Chouinard Equipment, Tua, and G3 changed the scope of telemark skis and the thinking surrounding them, pushing the gear away from its skinny, Nordic roots and permanently toward a modern, aggressive ideal, eventually becoming mostly indistinguishable from alpine counterparts. He is credited with conceptualizing the first all-plastic telemark boot, an innovation now ubiquitous, but was then, in a leather-bound telemark world, groundbreaking.

“We got a lot done on that gear,” Parker told Descender in 2000 when discussing the telemark equipment paradigm of before. But he had a foresight–influenced by his experience teaching and skiing in the alpine discipline–that informed a free-heel ethos that would prove revolutionary. “There were those of us who occasionally–against the tele dogma–went out on Alpine gear,” Parker continued, “I wanted to feel that precision and control and then try to apply it to tele. That's what I've looked for in my gear development through the years, and today.”

Parker was unconditionally a telemark skier, but his eschewing of an overly doctrinaire lunge-or-bust conviction allowed his thinking to look outside the bounds of what was, and envision what could be for the sport he loved–in gear and craft. That philosophy came to full fruition in his seminal book Free-Heel Skiing: Telemark and Parallel Techniques, first published in 1988. Updated in 1995 and 2001, it remains a definitive resource for telemark skiers. And, as the title implies, the work delves into telemark as well as alpine techniques.

“I love parallel turns. Some of my buddies say I’m cheating,” Parker began the chapter entitled ‘Basic Parallel Turns’ in Free-Heel Skiing. “There is no such thing as cheating,” he declared. “Anyway, if they could do them, they’d probably cheat, too.”

While incorporating a more expansive vision on technique, Free-Heel Skiing nonetheless was quintessentially telemark, its pointers and drawings interspersed with gear discussion, fitness, and introspective essays on what it meant to be a free-heel skier.

Parker’s crossing of the aisle while keeping to the tenets of telemark was integral to his approach in design, production, and ethos. His progression against often rigid principles was not only instrumental in bridging the performance gap between telemark and alpine gear, it was crucial to the establishment of a broadened ethos in telemark, something that unavoidably marks the sport’s current vibe. “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 North America CEO Kim Miller, a contemporary of Parker’s whose influence on telemark’s modern equipment has been in the same vein.

Parker’s philosophy was crucial to pushing telemark toward a more performance-oriented paradigm, and encompassed an expanded view of what the telemark meant: an ever evolving framing of what could be done skiing with a free heel. The current revival of telemark’s newschool–sliding rails, hitting big airs, and themselves eschewing a telemark dogma they see as stifling–has picked up directly from where a forward-thinking, driving cap-wearing Nordic instructor left off.

But Parker was no alpine apologist, nor was he making a statement or trying to attract followers. “His impact was huge,” longtime friend and eminent ski photographer Ace Kvale remembers. “But he also kept a low profile, he was not a self promoter. He was quiet, and he was this technician behind the scenes, designing skis and boots quietly.” In that way Parker embodied the classic telemark ethos of working for a harder turn often out of the spotlight, something core to an unconventional style of skiing prone to passionate pursuit but only occasionally finding itself popular or trendy.