“I don’t know if it’s the oxygen deprivation from the altitude, the endorphins buzz from the hiking or the great tunes playing in my ears (today Truckin’ from Europe 72) but I rarely feel as simply joyous as I do when climbing up those hills. I’m not a big John Denver fan, but when I stand on top of Berthoud Pass after a hike, I’ve certainly got that Rocky Mountain High…”

Berthoud Pass = good clean fun

Looking for love at 11,300′

Berthoud Pass has long been a favorite of front range backcountry skiers and for good reason. Steep, deep, easily accessible terrain with the added bonus of extra vertical if you don’t mind hitchhiking back up the pass. Site of the first ski area in Colorado (1937), the pass has a long and storied history of providing fabulous turns to its’ followers. You can count me as one of them as when the area reopened in the late 90’s after being closed for 6 years I spent many a powder filled day exploring the four quadrants of Berthoud Pass that have been created by the intersection of Highway 40 and the Continental Divide. After the latest in a series of financial problems closed the ski area for good in 2002 (the lifts stopped running at the end of the 2000-2001 season – there was cat skiing for a season or two) – Forest Service requirements forced the removal of the lifts in 2003. This was both a good and bad thing – it was one hell of a ski area, but the fantastic skiing didn’t go away, it just now requires more effort to experience it. (For more info on it’s fascinating and troubled history check out this article on Berthoud Pass skiing in Cyberwest magazine).

Doesn’t this look inviting – Floral Park trees

Skiing Berthoud Pass is what motivated me to get my backcountry act together. While every cat and heli trip I’d done required avalanche rescue and beacon training, and in the course of producing two videos for the CAIC on those same subjects I’d picked up a few pointers, it wasn’t until I started skiing Berthoud regularly that I got my own beacon, shovel and probe. I also started paying more attention to the avalanche reports produced by the CAIC on a daily basis. Skiing the backcountry is a ton of fun but there’s no one bombing those slopes to keep them slide free and if you screw up, you’re pretty much on your own.

Frank meditating before some Floral Park fun

On Friday’s visit, we decided to start with the Southeast quadrant better known as Floral Park. (For a good map of the area check out this pdf of the avalanche paths of Berthoud Pass). Floral Park has in my estimation the best tree skiing on Berthoud Pass but because it is south facing it gets baked by the sun so is best visited as early as possible. We hiked out as far as we could  without post holing and then started down (the farther you go the steeper it gets and of course the less tracks there are). The snow was pure sugar and as such had no base which made for some tricky skiing. However once we got a little lower and into the trees we found some beautiful stretches and ripped it up down to the road.

Notice the long and winding road – looking west from atop Hell’s Half Acre

Now one of the fun and sometimes challenging aspects of skiing Berthoud is the hitchhiking required if you don’t run your own car shuttle. I have generally found it fairly easy to get a ride (and surprisingly even easier when I had my golden retriever with me although on this trip due to age issues he was consigned to guarding the car) but after the fourth empty pickup truck has passed you by you can start to take it a little personally. The people who do pick you up tend to be ski enthusiasts or those curious as to what exactly you’re doing standing by the side of the highway with your snowboard and dog. Either way, it’s a great way to make new friends and scout the terrain you want to do next.

Hell’s Half Acre as seen from the pickup spot

The next stop on our tour was my personal Berthoud favorite, Hell’s Half Acre in the northeast quadrant. This area is a great combination of  avalanche chutes, steep glades and sweet trees not to mention the incredibly scenic hike involved in getting there. I find these to be the most consistently powder filled runs and because it requires quite a bit of work to get there, rarely tracked out. We headed out to my favorite chute, got some great turns above it, but played it conservatively at the bottom as the snow pack was definitely touchy and the reason you often see a beautiful untracked chute is because it’s an avalanche waiting to happen. Still a great run and well worth the effort as always.

Ye Olde Ditch Trail

If the Gods are with you and things are going smoothly on the tour you can often luck out and convince your ride to drop you off across from a ditch trail on the way back up the road. We’re now talking about the northwest quadrant which has the most skiable terrain and widest variety of options. To access all that, you need to hike up to where the old lift terminated, but you can save a lot of legs by limiting your options and giving up some vertical and taking a shortcut to the runs known as the 90’s and Rock Garden. This is the route we choose to take and because it is easier to get to found the most tracks we had seen all day. I was however, able to wander into some nearby trees lower down and was rewarded with a very nice untracked run to the bottom which I had to pay for with some post holing back to the highway but definitely a worthwhile trade off.

Sure is pretty up here – looking SW from the top of Hell’s Half Acre – Berthoud Pass

After that run we decided to call it a day as we had responsibilities awaiting us back in the real world. Now for a lot of folks that would sound like a lot of time and effort for only three runs but for those of us who do this regularly, we know that one of the best parts is often the getting there. I don’t know if it’s the oxygen deprivation from the altitude, the endorphins buzz from the hiking or the great tunes playing in my ears (today Truckin’ from Europe 72) but I rarely feel as simply joyous as I do when climbing up those hills. I’m not a big John Denver fan, but when I stand on top of Berthoud Pass after a hike, I’ve certainly got that Rocky Mountain High…

A ski and snowboarding tour of Berthoud Pass, Colorado.

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!

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.