Article by Bob Berwyn
Recreation – April 2002 – Colorado Central Magazine
NON-SKIERS MAY NOT KNOW — or even care — that skiers can use different techniques to make turns down a mountain. For those outside the sport, the difference might be less significant than the difference between a one-hump camel and a two-hump camel.
But the story of the relatively recent schism between the telemark style, with its Nordic roots, and the more prevalent parallel style which developed in the Alpine region of western Europe, is a fascinating tale. The split continues to this day, with Olympic athletes, for example, competing in two separate categories of skiing events: The Nordic cross-country races and ski-jumping, and the Alpine events, consisting of high-speed races on steep hillsides.
Today’s telemark skiers are bridging that gap, using the old Nordic technique and modified Nordic gear to ski steep Alpine slopes.
But for centuries, free-heel cross-country style was the only way to go. Fixing the boot to the ski near the toe and the ball of the foot allows a natural walking motion. Classic cross-country skiing uses that motion combined with shuffling stride called kick-and-glide — a style that is eminently suitable for the rolling terrain that prevails in Scandinavia.
But some of Scandinavia is mountainous, not rolling, and that requires a different technique. Sondre Norheim is most often credited with inventing the Telemark turn in the late 1800s, perfecting the style on the mountains near his hometown of Morgedal, in the Norwegian Telemark province. The turn was more than just an æsthetic affectation.
The skis of that day were not the svelte, Coke-bottle shapes of today. It is the curved sidecut of modern skis that, when pressed into the snow, traces a curved line, easing the process of steering the skis back and forth across the fall line.
Norheim’s skis were straight and long, stiff and heavy. By leading a turn with one ski thrust forward and at a slight angle to the trailing ski, he created the effect of riding one single plank with significant sidecut, which enabled Norheim to trace wide-radius arcs down the mountainside.
Split Decision
In his book Free-heel Skiing, author and telemark guru Paul Parker explains the technical roots of the Alpine-Nordic split. While Scandinavians were striding across rolling terrain, using the occasional telemark turn to slow down or change direction, military forces in Alpine countries like Austria and Italy were deployed on skis to defend mountainous borders.
The steep rocky slopes of the Alps required a different technique. Those skiers had to make short turns and stop on a dime to avoid picking up too much speed and to keep from crashing into the rock walls of steep gullies.
Using skis shorter than the Nordic norm, Austrian Mathias Zdarsky developed the well-known snowplow stance, fundamental to the subsequent evolution of Alpine-style parallel turns. According to Parker, the evolution of Alpine-style parallel short swings was further aided by another Austrian, Rudolph Lettner, who added metal edges to his wood skis, a step that enabled sharper turns.
Incorporating the changes in equipment with an organized teaching progression fell to Hannes Schneider, a ski pedagogue from Austria’s Arlberg region. He trained a corps of instructors and presented his Arlberg teaching method to a 1912 ski congress, where it was adopted as the standard for the burgeoning sport.
Some historical accounts, compiled in E. John B. Allen’s From Skisport to Skiing, indicate that Schneider’s famed Arlberg instructors may have been over-zealous, chasing after students and hitting them in the legs with a ski pole if they dared lift a leg during a stem turn.
“Anyone caught doing a telemark was considered a criminal,” reported Appalachian Mountain Club member Wilhelmine Wright after a ski vacation in Austria.
Soon, the graceful Telemark genuflecting stance was relegated to Nordic ski jumpers looking to feather the impact of landing after a 200-foot flight, and in obscure Scandinavian touring venues.
Telemarking was dead — or was it?
Revival
“Part of it was rebellion,” says Parker, describing the renaissance of the turn in the early 1970s. Imbued with a hippie back-to-the-land ethic, some of the dope-smoking mountaineering types of the era saw cross-country and back-country skiing as a return to the roots of skiing — alternative to the homogenization of the sport that was taking place in the big resorts. “It was just the mentality of the day,” Parker says.
In any case, the renegade-outlaw image probably helped romanticize and re-popularize the turn among ’60s counter-culture types looking for a sports-related outlet for their social rebelliousness.
[Making a telemark turn]
There were similar pockets of development in other parts of the country, but free-heeling through heavy, wet Sierra cement or skidding across New England ice on skinny skis was more daunting than floating through six inches of Rocky Mountain fluff.
Colorado’s fine powder was conducive to the rebirth of the turn, according to Parker. “We have great snow for this type of skiing. It’s forgiving and easy to set an edge in. There’s plenty of powder to go looking for, and there’s a fair amount of crosscountry skiing involved in getting to it. Skiing on lightweight gear made sense,” Parker says.
Evolution
“I think our main purpose was really to make the backcountry more accessible,” said Rick Borkovec, a former Crested Butte ski patroller and early advocate of the telemark. “We wanted to be able to do everything on one pair of skis.”
Borkovec says he discovered the multi-purpose Nordic downhill technique while mending an injury in 1971.
“I broke my leg downhill racing for Western State,” Borkovec says. “It was New Year’s Day 1971. That spring, I started doing some cross-country skiing to rehab. A friend of mine said, ‘There’s a way to turn those things. It’s called a telemark turn, and I think it looks like this.’ ”
At the same time, Borkovec says he remembered seeing some old photos of the technique. Intrigued, he started experimenting with different body positions and weight shifts to make the turn work.
“I got to a point where the turns started to work. It was amazing, even on those skinny old wooden skis, I was able to link turns and get down the hill,” Borkovec says.
The key, he says, was to distribute the weight evenly between both skis, to face the upper body downhill and to keep the upper body upright — still key elements of good telemark skiing.
“All of a sudden, it felt so good, so natural,” Borkovec said. It felt like you could fly down the hill in just about any snow conditions.”
Borkovec thought to himself, “This is a real, functional ski technique, not just something out of the history books.”
The ski patrol at Crested Butte soon began to allow, and then to encourage, its patrollers to use Nordic gear to cruise to the far-flung corners of the resort. It made sense, especially when patrollers needed to ski along ridgetops for avalanche control. And by using the telemark turn on the resort’s slopes, the patrollers introduced the technique to other skiers.
The Nordic gear also came in handy during search and rescue missions, when resort skiers got lost out of bounds and ended up in the East River valley.
“We started to see the practical nature,” Borkovec says.
Eventually, Borkovec says the ski patrol started doing one day of training on the Nordic gear, helping to institutionalize the practice.
Outside of work, Parker, Borkovec and a band of like-minded acolytes including Doug Buzzell, Koli Kazarinoff and Greg Dalby, began testing the limits of the Nordic gear in rugged terrain, completing descents of still-classic backcountry routes on Red Lady Mountain and Gothic Peak, among others.
Of course, those early experiments yielded plenty of punishing, cartwheeling face plants, not to mention the frustration of broken skis and bindings. The wire bails — part of the binding used to clamp the toe of the boot to the ski — were particularly susceptible to breaking away at exactly the wrong moment, often leading to a spectacular crash.
But the skiers soon began pushing equipment-makers to build gear for them. Plastic and fiberglass layers were added to wooden skis to make them stiffer and more durable. Aluminum edges were added, and finally, the skis were built as narrow versions of alpine-style boards, with steel edges that could be sharpened. Boots became higher and stiffer to increase leverage and torque.
“We were all looking for the beefiest cross-country stuff we could find,” says Parker. “It’s always been our goal to travel around with one pair of skis, to be able to do everything, from touring, to skiing peaks, to doing anything an alpine skier can do.”
Full Circle
That evolution of free-heel equipment helps illustrate another thread in the story of modern telemarking, according to ski historian Lou Dawson, a Carbondale resident who authored Wild Snow, a comprehensive history of ski mountaineering in North America.
Dawson brings bona fide credentials to any ski discussion. He’s well-versed in the history of the sport, and has skied from the summit of each of Colorado’s 14,000-foot peaks, writing impressively accurate and useful guidebooks for mountaineers interested in repeating his adventures or exploring other climbs and descents on the state’s highest mountains.
“There was definitely a counter-culture aspect to it back in the ’70s. People in their 20s then wanted to be different,” Dawson says, explaining that telemarking certainly fit the bill at the time. Some ski areas wouldn’t permit free-heel skiers to ride their lifts, and when access was granted, reaction often came in the form of comments like, “Hey man, your binding is broken.”
But Dawson points out that the development of modern telemark skiing was partially driven by business considerations, when manufacturers of hiking and climbing gear suddenly saw an opportunity to capture a portion of the rapidly growing ski market and even to develop a new niche. Even today in a flat industry, retailers and manufacturers report that backcountry gear sales still represent a strong growth area.
Dawson also points to a purely athletic element. Tele skiing, as it’s now often called, is generally considered to be more strenuous and difficult to master, requiring well-developed balance skills, along with the ability to work the legs independently of one another.
It was a new set of rules for skiing that created a new challenge.
“It’s like taking jogging and introducing a skip every third step. You can’t lock your heels down — that’s the rule — then you try and take it to the highest level,” Dawson says, explaining that he skied on telemark gear exclusively for a period of time in the ’70s. But rather than pursuing the form as an end in itself, Dawson says he began to concentrate on function.
“As I matured in my mountaineering, I wanted to get up and down the mountain safely and efficiently,” he explains. To that end, he began using alpine touring equipment, essentially alpine skis with a binding that pivots at the toe, allowing for uphill travel. But for the descent, the heel is locked down, enabling quick direction changes and edge sets. The boots used in that arrangement are a hybrid between an alpine ski boot and a stiff, plastic-shelled mountaineering boot.
The key difference is that a telemark boot flexes not just at the ankle, but also under the ball of the foot, enabling skiers to subtly pressure different parts of the ski during various phases of a turn.
While he describes modern parallel technique as the most efficient style for pure downhill skiing, Dawson acknowledges there’s a place for telemarking. “If tours involve a lot of travel across flat or low-angle terrain, the flexible Nordic setup is useful,” he says.
In a way, Dawson’s attitude may best represent the current re-integration of the Nordic and Alpine realms, as he promotes the use of the term “glisse” (rhymes with “Chris”) to cover all snow-sliding activities.
What’s next?
Some close observers of the ski scene say telemarkers have done nothing less than reinvent Alpine skiing by using skis, boots and bindings that mimic the best qualities of Alpine equipment. Indeed, top tele skiers of today are equally comfortable making alpine-style parallel turns and even throwing tricks, including flips and spins, in the many terrain parks to be found at resorts around the country. And by the way, jokes about broken bindings are just not funny any more.
At first glance, most of today’s tele gear is indistinguishable from the alpine versions. Tele skis are as beefy as anything else out there and high-backed four-buckle plastic boots prevail. In fact, in a somewhat ironic twist, telemark boot-makers switched to building plastic boots exclusively just as some alpine boot companies re-introduced models with leather in the uppers, no doubt recognizing the advantages of leather’s natural flex.
Telemark skiers are just as often found in-bounds at resorts as they are in the backcountry, and the resorts have responded by offering telemark rentals, classes and clinics for men and women, beginners and experts.
Parker says it’s now more of an æsthetic choice than anything else. He says the turning point came with plastic boots.
“People are best off on what they are most comfortable on,” Parker says, characterizing the telemark movement as being defined by a sense of freedom.
In an interview with Descender.com, a now-defunct telemark E-zine, Parker said telemarkers were the “original freeriders.” The tele attitude helped define the all-mountain concept, with free-heelers “sneaking around in the woods and skimming above the treeline.”
The modern freeride movement is what tele skiing has always been about, Parker says. “There are fewer rules than in the alpine world. You have the freedom to make different types of turns. You can use a telemark turn or you can parallel if that works better for the conditions,” he says.
Telemark skiing has changed along with the rest of American culture, he asserts.
The technique was rooted in practicality, as a way to reach backcountry powder stashes. But at least in the early days, it was also part of the counter-culture — a means of rebelling against the ski establishment, Parker says.
Over the intervening years, it has become more mainstream, he adds, but it’s still different enough to be “cool.”
“It’s a pretty pure form of skiing,” Parker says.
When he’s not skiing, Bob Berwyn carves out a career as a free-lance writer in Summit County.
