When Telemark Was Revolutionary

But telemark unavoidably borrowed much from alpine skiing. A decade before Parker’s Free-Heel Skiing, a Harvard math major named Steve Barnett released the preeminent dissertation on the original telemark revolution in North America, 1979’s Cross-Country Downhill and Other Nordic Mountain Skiing Techniques. 

On the surface, the work was unashamedly telemark. With poles held high, and beard grown long, the cover was graced with the classic exemplar of free-heeling; what remains the image of the telemark skier incarnate. In the fashion of telemark’s more Aquarian days, the book even contained a thank-you to one Bill Nicolai for Grateful Dead tickets. But Barnett was quick to point out that the telemark revolution, while undoubtedly a countercultural rejection of mainstream skiing, owed much to a confluence between the fixed-heel world and the free. 

“A number of different threads have come together to catalyze the emergence of cross-country downhill,” Barnett wrote in the book’s introduction. “There is a great modern surge of expert alpine skiers who have fallen under the spell of wilderness touring, and they are reluctant to give up the rewards of downhill skiing, even while escaping its problems.” 

Telemark’s trajectory was then proving transformative; it was the ski method to enter the backcountry, perhaps the most meaningful venue in all of skiing. And before Barnett, Rick Borkovec embodied the very conception of the telemark revolution in North America. A college ski racer turned Nordic-skiing ski patroller, he and a devoted cadre of free-heel adventurers looked out at the Elk Mountains and dreamed of skiing their steep faces and pristine snow. It was the early 1970s, a time before alpine touring equipment was widely known and available, and, like Barnett would attest years later, the best avenue for venturing into the backcountry was on cross-country gear; then double-cambered Nordic skis mounted with three-pin bindings. 

While that equipment helped them travel overland, a downhill technique was at first elusive. Legend has it that one in the group found an old photograph of Stein Eriksen’s father practicing a telemark turn. Using that free-heel, downhill technique, this corps is often credited with instigating not only the modern American telemark skiing movement, but the backcountry skiing one, too.  

As simple as it may seem now, the idea that one could access the backcountry inhibited only by their own decisions was then revelatory. Skiing was then almost always sequestered to lifts and groomed piste; the allure of untouched, wild snow was yet a nascent inspiration to most skiers. It was something Borkovec modestly spoke of with Bob Berwyn in the December, 2001 issue of the eminent Couloir. “I think our main purpose was really to make the backcountry more accessible,” Borkovec said. “We wanted to be able to do everything on one pair of skis.” 

Doing everything–including skiing the backcountry–on one pair of skis was integral to this movement. But telemark would get to know a new self as its revolution evolved and borrowed all the more from its foil in alpine skiing. Plastic boots supplanted leather, alpine-spec’d skis became the norm, and stouter bindings eschewed pins for cables and springs. And skiers soon were taking the telemark to new heights on the evolved equipment paradigm.

Perhaps the quintessential moment of this reframed revolution came in 1993, just a year after the first plastic telemark boots had arrived, and amidst the extreme skiing movement then rising in the alpine world. That year, Kasha Rigby, a young skier out of Stowe, Vermont, took third place in the nascent US Extremes. And she did so on telemark gear. Rigby returned to the event the next year, a certain amount of controversy swirling. As David Rothman chronicled in his 1994 POWDER article “Kasha Rigby: A Creative Way To Live,” later retold in his collection of essays Living the Life, “the judges, responding to last year’s criticism, told [Kasha] that they would judge the telemarker’s particularity strictly." 

Rigby still took forth, reflecting to Rothman that “I wanted to ski well, to be technically clean, not only for myself, but for the sport, to show that telemarking has a place in this event.” Far from the eyes of the skiing mainstream, Rigby would continue taking telemark to the limit, including the first free-heel descent of Cho Oyu from its 8188 meter summit only a few years later, just one of the many accomplishments of the legendarily amiable skier and humanitarian.

In that melange of stouter gear and shifting culture, telemark would rise in the 90s, a time where an aggressive style not dissimilar to alpine skiing proliferated, the pendulum ever swinging. The old guard who had sown the movement decades earlier, many now in their 40s and beyond, poignantly stood by. “In the big picture I'm glad to see freeheel–and skiing in general–get some attention. Skiing is cool again,” Paul Parker told Descender, the lighthearted if cocksure free-heel magazine then showcasing the rising telemark newschool and its brash cohort, near the turn of the century. Those skiers–including free-heel luminaries like Ben Dolenc, Josh Madsen, and Dave Bouchard–took to air, steeps and competition. To Bouchard, a skier who won core free-heel contests like the legendary telemark Triple Crown at Mad River Glen, the modern telemark movement was epitomized not in its differences with alpine skiing, but more so in its ability to attack the mountain just as well, only with heels free.

“People noticed, you know, and they were like, ‘Oh, I thought that gear was just for backcountry skiing or three pins or whatever,” Bouchard remembers. “‘You guys really rip on that stuff. You're doing the same things we're doing on alpine gear.’”

Moreover, borrowing from Rigby and the wider freeride movement, big mountain contests became a hallmark of the telemark new school. “Then the competition part kind of started and I said ‘where can I showcase that I'm getting much better on this stuff?’ I wanted people to see that it's not just skinny skis and backcountry tours, we can rip terrain, we can jump off stuff; we can slam down the hardest terrain.” 

But elder figures like Parker were still unashamedly students of the modest telemark revolution of the 70s. “Unfortunately along with that attention–always–goes hype. Personally I don't care for that part; too much hype can obscure the soul of it,” he continued in Descender. Legendarily even-keeled, Parker still gave the strong-skiing if old school-repudiating newschoolers their due. “Peel that hype away and I think that there is a lot of good energy today in freeheel, a lot of skiers following tele as an alternative, a challenge, many of the reasons that we've been doing it for years.” 

Just a few years before, and not long before his untimely death, mountain guide and free-heel philosopher Allan Bard was also reflecting on a now decades-old free-heel skiing revolution, penning what may still be the quintessential treatise on the backcountry telemark ethos, “The Backside of Beyond,” which ran in Couloir magazine’s October 1997 issue. Bard himself was a free-heel pioneer of the highest order, taking to expeditions in the 70s and 80s on Denali, Ellesmere Island, and his classic Redline Traverse; a take on the Sierra High Route that sought to mainline steeps while moving overland some 200 miles from California’s Mt. Whitney to Mammoth, an endeavor that to this day has seldom been repeated.

This time, Bard took to musing on what skiing meant. “As a ski guide I have the pleasure of bringing people and mountains together to the greater benefit of both. I notice that, when people have been touched by the wild lands, they are forever changed, forever more aware,” Bard noted. “They will never again see snow and mountain peaks and wind-sculpted tree trunks without being affected inside differently than before they knew of such things, and they will return time and again to get in touch and be touched.”

But those ideals would come to seem quaint as telemark entered a prolonged retrograde in the 2000s. While telemark was still regarded as the chief way to ski the backcountry after its revolution in plastic boots, soon newer equipment rendered the free-heel method in its entirety as backwater. 

A backlash to the telemark in craft and culture would even rise, lampooning the free-heel skier, their supposedly arrogant ways, and even their revolution. “The psychological implications of this deranged state, called tele, are extremely sad and should be quietly tucked away into a cushy, not-too-steep, ski hill asylum somewhere in Vermont that serves vegan organic granola-on-a-stick and has daily support groups for incompetence,” the 2010 Unofficial Networks article “Still Telemarking, huh?” read. “Yet, these horrible douchenuggets continue to slam their problems directly into our faces at our local ski resorts every day while flaccidly trying to convince us that telemarking is all about ‘soul’.” 

With their heady ideals and subversive approach now a liability, many left telemark in the past, following the skiing zeitgeist toward more trendy iterations. But the words of Bard captured a certain hopefulness endemic to telemark’s rise–and perhaps its fall.

Further pondering the value of skiing, invoking the idealism endemic of both the original telemark revolution and of a decidedly less jaded time, Bard waxed on in “The Backside of Beyond” if the world could be kinder, gentler, more thoughtful if more took to wild places, especially on a pair of downhill nordic skis.

“Maybe world peace is just a few telemark turns away?” Bard wondered. “Maybe it’s worthy of being a movement? With bumper stickers! Telemarking is peace—ski the backside of beyond. Why not?” 

Alas Bard, Parker, and Rigby have left via the portal we all will exit through one day, their collective impact–ever quiet yet eminently influential–living on as the foundation of all that would come after. 

Indeed telemark's heady, subversive roots have mostly been left to memory, the lunging turn’s revolutionary streak now feeling as vanquished as ever. But telemark remains, no matter how quiet, modest, even subdued. Because the desire to ski wild places–the need to challenge one’s self outside of the standard route–lives on. Not only in a telemark newschool that continues the free-heel tradition, but in a wider skiing zeitgeist unavoidably molded by a group of free-thinking, often countercultural skiers who sought not accolades nor wide acceptance, but ultimate freedom. To this day their movement marks a beautiful subversion to a skiing mainstream itself now so often concerned with more ancillary considerations.

But, perhaps that aura could be rekindled anew for a ski world and wider culture now woefully starved for counterculture. Interest seems to be rising again for the genuflecting turn’s aggressive form, long prone to ebbs and flows. But a nascent movement toward the approach and vibe of the original telemark revolution also seems to be building anew.

Speaking to Dave Bouchard, once a trick-throwing, extreme-skiing telemark skier of the original newschool of the late 90s and early 00s, one gets the impression of patterns and balance; of circles in revolution. He now often takes to the mellow method of the free-heel innovators of the 70s as much as the alpine-borrowing, resort-downhill variety it evolved into.

“I probably spend almost equal amount of time on lighter gear, you know, three pin gear on a waxless base,” he says, still a pin-head after all.

In a cycle spanning generations–even centuries–that culminated in a heady, countercultural revolution the ski world unknowingly never looked back on, the simplest tenets live on.

“You're still challenging yourself,” Bouchard says, echoing the likes of Rigby, Borkovec, Bard and Parker. “You're still adventuring.”