Noah & Jonah Howell of Powderwhore from Telemark Skier Magazine on Vimeo.

We’re definitely of two minds here. We love the idea of enormous avalanches plundering down steep mountainsides like a horde of bloodthirsty white dragons unchecked and wild with blood lust. But that scares us a little bit too.

Telemark skiing. To many downhill enthusiasts, the words conjure pictures of knee-dipping, granola-munching hippies who drive old VW buses or Subarus with bumper stickers like “Earn Your Turns” and “Free your heel, free your mind.” Yet telemark skiing has become the trendiest topic on the mountain lately, and may finally be shaking off its hippie roots.

Three-time national telemark champion Leslie Ross, shown skiing in Japan, says slick new gear is the main reason for the sport’s surge in popularity. Photo courtesy Leslie Ross

“I saw this guy with a Peruvian hat, ski poles way over his head, making funky turns through bumps on Chair 1 at Loveland in 1991. That was the first time I saw a tele skier,” Shan Sethna says. An athletic guy with curly dark hair and a Berthoud Pass hoodie, Sethna is executive director of Friends of Berthoud Pass, a nonprofit group that teaches backcountry skiing and safety. “I thought, ‘That guy on cross-country skis is way out of his league.’ He was super crunchy, with a dreaded-out beard. That kind of describes the culture back then.”

But telemarking ballooned 166 percent between 1999 and 2006, according to the ski-film company Tough Guy Productions, which compiles market data. The national trade association Snowsports Industries America estimates that 1.5 million skiers participate, most of them between the ages of 16 and 34. From the chairlift you can see a growing minority of freeheelers lunging down steeps at Arapahoe Basin and slicing ribbons through Vail’s back bowls. The bent knee and shuffling motion that have flabbergasted onlookers for the last 20 years now seem fairly familiar.

Skins & Sticks

Telemarking was born as backcountry recreation in the late 1800s in Telemark, a southern region of Norway. Bindings have free heels, like their cross-country cousins, making it easier to hike uphill with a pair of skins, the strips that adhere to the underside of the ski to give you grip. (Originally made of sealskin, then of mohair, skins now are nylon or polypropylene.) The sport migrated to America around the 1970s—when backcountry skiing and alpine touring took off—landing first in Crested Butte.

Photo by Joey Wallis

“Back in the day, it was this small tribe,” Sethna says of the early ’90s, when he learned the technique. “Then in ’97, ’99, everybody and their brother was out there. It was definitely cool to be walking around with bindings flapping in your ear.” But the fad mainly attracted expert skiers and anti-establishment backpackers who opted for skins instead of a lift ticket. “Even the apparel we wore was cheaper—old wool pants from army surplus stores, stuff like that,” says Ray McAnelly, who started telemarking in the early 1980s. “More of a backcountry mountain-man ratty look, compared to the glamour today.”

Telemarking’s recent surge envelops all types of skiers: kids, teens, women, Patagonia-clad mountaineers and baggy-panted jibbers with fat twin-tips. “You don’t have to be a crunchy-granola person now. It’s all levels of personalities, social and economic brackets and ages,” says Leslie Ross, three-time National Telemark Free Skiing champion and founder and director of Babes in the Backcountry, a skiing and outdoor-adventure program for women.

Gear Drives Growth

What’s fueling the tele trend, when snowboarding and alpine skiing remain flat? No. 1 is gear, Ross says. Freeheelers’ equipment has advanced by leaps and bounds in the past 10 years. Early tele skiers rode long, skinny, often wooden sticks and wore short leather boots with a duckbill toe and three pins that clicked into bindings (earning telemarking the still-used nickname “three-pinning”). Today’s plastic boots and heavier cable bindings permit greater control but slower hiking. Modern telemark skis have more flex and power and are also more responsive, making it easier to initiate a turn.

Like Ross, who discovered telemark skis in 1991 but couldn’t find boots that fit until three years later, Sethna learned on old-school gear. “I ended up with leather lace-up boots, Dumpster-dived some skis, bought some sidethrow cable bindings,” he recalls. “They say, ‘Free your heel, set your mind free.’ The reality was ‘Free your heel and you break your goggles.’ I went ass over teakettle so many times learning how to telemark.”

Shan Sethna at Berthoud Pass. Photo by Armen Malikian

You can’t blame tele skiers who learned the hard way for feeling territorial about their sport. “Having paid my dues and learned the technique, I’d be watching these novices … they were fake-marking,” Sethna says in good humor. But that kind of pride seems trumped by excitement to promote telemarking by groups like Friends of Berthoud and Babes in the Backcountry. Today, access to gear has blown open, and most Colorado resorts offer telemark rentals, demos and lessons.

Telemarking also promises the Colorado lifeblood: adventure. “With telemarking there are no rules,” Ross says. “You can do whatever you want—backwards, forwards, you can go in the air or take it super mellow.” With a pair of skins, and proper knowledge, there is no limit to where you can ski. The uphill hiking feature and lunge motion of telemarking also make it more vigorous than alpine skiing—a killer quad, glute and core workout. “The rise of triathlons in the Front Range has brought the fitness level up, so skiing is now part of cross training,” she observes.

One more thing: “Anyone that tells you why they telemark and leaves out the fact that it’s damn sexy is lying,” Sethna says.

Rhythm of the Tele Dance

Few athletic plays are as graceful and fluid as a string of silky tele turns. To Ross, “it’s like walking”—though you’re on your toes the entire time, a major component of the form. You slide your downhill foot forward and your uphill foot back and crouch into a half-kneel. You’re perched on your toes with weight evenly distributed on both skis. To turn, you drive your back knee forward and your front knee back in a scissor motion. “You’re more connected to the elements,” Ross says. “You work with the pitch; you work with the snow. You have to commit more to the fall line. There’s no wrong or right way to tele, just different ways are more efficient.”

Back in the day, Peter Mueller skis Whetstone Mountain, above Crested Butte.
Photo by Gary Sprung

Telemarking is a slower sport. “I get to smell the pine trees, look at the clouds,” Sethna says. “It takes time to appreciate the subtler, finer things in life.” But because alpine touring (or AT) gear is faster and lighter, more backcountry skiers use AT instead of tele bindings, which accounts for the heightened presence of telemarking in the “front country” as well.

To join the freeheel movement, take a lesson. “You might as well get started off on the right foot instead of taking years to learn,” Ross advises. If your destination is the backcountry, education is as important as proper gear. “It’s not enough to go down to the gear shop, buy teles, skins, a probe, beacon and shovel. That doesn’t make you a backcountry skier,” says Sethna. His group teaches you how to use the gear, test for avalanches and pick safe lines.

The future looks bright for the fastest-growing snowsport. “There are always going to be people that reach the peak of their alpine abilities and are looking for something different,” Sethna says. The lines between snowsports are already blurring. As telemarking grows among youth, freeheelers with trick skis are mixing in the terrain park with snowboarders and alpine skiers. “It used to be a snowboarder couldn’t go where a tele skier could go,” he says. “Now a snowboarder on a split board can [hike] just as fast as a tele skier.”

That may be the most telling thing about telemarking: Skiers don’t need it to access the backcountry anymore, but they’re learning in droves anyway. Freeheelers aren’t crunchy hippies anymore, but most of them—like Sethna—are freeing their heels in search of a little powder Zen.

Molly Rettig recently graduated from CU with a master’s degree in environmental journalism. She’ll be spending this season practicing her tele turn and looking for a job!

Sledding at Berthoud Pass is punishable by a $5,000 fine because there have been multiple accidents including serious spinal cord injuries requiring Flight For Life evacuation. It just ain’t a safe place to sled, folks.

By Jason Blevins

After emergency crews spent several seasons responding to horrible sledding injuries atop Berthoud Pass, the Forest Service in 2005 smartly nixed the zero-control sliding on the pass. It was a good move. Many veteran pass users can recount bloody tales of sledders munching tailgates with their chins and airborne tubers bouncing off bumpers. The Forest Service, in its 2005 announcement, promised strict enforcement, with fines reaching $5,000 for violators.

Despite more than a dozen signs proclaiming the illegality of sledding and tubing, dozens of the silly sliders continue to rally atop Berthoud, sending their children hurtling into the parking lot. On the Friday after Thanksgiving, there were only a few bloody accidents despite the sledding hordes.

Let’s just hope these halfwits don’t ruin the pass for skiers and snowboarders. If you must sled, there are tubing hills down the road in Fraser and Winter Park.

One of the great mysteries of Colorado skiing is how a ski area that racked up more snow than anywhere else in the state, was an hour and 15 minutes from downtown Denver and which had some of the steepest terrain in the country managed to go out of business.

Same as usual– big bender at the Oriental Theater to celebrate the latest Powderwhore big-budget, action-packed, star-studded, stunt show thriller.

Raffle, silent auction, drink specials, live tigers.

Advance tickets $10 at the box office or online: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/80094

Day of show $12.

Doors 7:00 Show 8:00

Free parking. Live tigers. Tell your friends.

Late night alligator feeding with purchase of 10 or more beers.

In April of 2008 I drove from Lake Tahoe to Haines, Alaska up the Al-Can highway through British Columbia and the Yukon with an enclosed 4-snowmobile trailer and a ton of gear. I told myself the year before after a few years of getting “shut out” with heli time, that I wouldn’t come back up without snowmobiles….instead of sitting around drinking myself into oblivion on a “down day.”

Well thank God we did that because we definitely had down days again right from the get-go. The sledding up at Haines Pass is out of control good. Even staying closer to town like below Old Faithful is great. Can’t say enough about how much fun it is to ride snowmobiles up there with no trees.

So the first legit day after that main snow storm cycle, we still went out snowmobiling one more time wanting to let the snow set up a bit more….while another part of our group went up in the bird. Actually two groups went up in the bird, and the first group did all the normal day-after-storm-cycle snow pit and snow quality tests.

The first group decided that while the dangers remained elevated, that it was good to go. They all made some of the sickest pow turns in their lives I was told. The next group then – a couple hundred meters or so over – set up for their descent.

The guy in the video was the first one to drop from their group and while not a guide, he had a lot of Utah and AK backcountry experience. He had a Black Diamond Avalung on, but as you can tell from the video while he’s talking as he’s dropping in, it wasn’t in his mouth to start. He tried to shove it in the instant of starting to get sucked down, but it didn’t stay in fully during his ragdoll descent. It was just off to the corner of his mouth he said, and he definitely got some snow / ice in his mouth still.

So as he drops in you can also see the sluff to the skier’s right immediately start building….and that’s actually the chute that was the intended route down. For whatever reason – well pure, unadulterated powder will do it to you – he didn’t go make some strong “skier cuts” into the upper pack to do one final snow check as instructed by the main guide who was doing the “tail gunner” work.

Instead he just sent it. And it didn’t take more than a few turns out on this big shoulder above this cliff band to break loose.

This was a decent sized avalanche. 1,500 feet the dude fell in a little over 20 seconds. The crown was about 1 – 1.5m. The chute that he got sucked through to the skier’s right was flanked on either side by cliff bands that were about 30m tall. He luckily didn’t break any bones and obviously didn’t hit anything on the run out.

He was only buried for 4 and a half minutes which is incredibly short. I cannot stress these next sentences enough; that in and of itself to be unburied in ONLY 4:28 is miraculous if you have any understanding of being caught in an avalanche and what it takes to be found. It could literally be some kind of “world record” just on how good the guide and supporting cast of other skiers was in getting to him. It also shows why you should ALWAYS be going with people trained in avalanche rescue / first aid….as well as why you’d want to be going with a guided heli operation. Sure this was terrifying for him, but he would’ve probably been dead if not for going with a guide.

He also got very lucky to be honest. In the time that he’s buried, you can hear his breathing already accelerate. The ruffling noise back and forth is his chest rising and falling and the noise that his jacket makes. The intermittent whimpering noise you hear is him trying to swallow and get some air since the avalung wasn’t fully in his mouth and instead just to the corner of his mouth. Still sends chills up the back of my neck. Oh…the luck? They located him so fast because his right glove came off just before he came completley to rest and there was an excellent visual of course.

And then the digging out is utterly amazing. I don’t think that you could’ve paid a Hollywood crew to stage something better. The fact that he could’ve been facing any 360 direction and yet he’s looking right up into the sun-filled blue sky with that first full scoop away of the shovel is borderline spiritual.

This is simply a very sobering and unbelievable video. However, you should take away from this video all the positive things that you can learn from it. Yes there are risks to the backcountry – but with proper gear, training, and guide(s) with avalanche and EMT training – you can greatly lower your chances of getting caught in an avalanche in the first place…..and coming back alive if you ever were to get caught in a slide.

Respect Mother Nature for sure. Learn from this. But just like a Craig Kelly in the snowboard world or a Shane McConkey in the ski world who died out in the backcountry (Craig via avalanche and Shane via ski B.A.S.E. jumping), they left this earth while doing the things that they were truly passionate about. And while they would stress the need for the proper gear and training….neither one would want backcountry enthusiasts to curtail their adventures because of their accidents….or this video.

Please check with your local resort for classes on backcountry training, or try starting with a place like AIARE – the American Institute for Avalanche Research and Training. Their website is avtraining.org.