'It's Got To Get A Lot Cheaper.' Leading Telemark DIYer Jason Quintana Has A Few Thoughts On The Future Of Free-Heel

In a matter-of-fact but almost philosophical manner, Jason Quintana, perhaps telemark skiing’s most talented home innovator, is making sweeping points; not just about the state of telemark equipment, something he has shaped greatly over decades. But of the current milieu the telemark world finds itself in.

“You haven’t even done anything and you’re in $1300 already,” he says of how expensive telemark equipment has become before comparing it to alpine counterparts. “I bought bindings: a hundred bucks. Brand new. Three to eleven DIN, with ski brakes, step-in, 800g. It’s like they’re a dream telemark binding for a hundred bucks. Granted they were on sale but the regular price was $160,” he notes.

“Compare that binding to a telemark binding and you’re like, ‘why does a telemark binding cost three times as much, this alpine one is way more complicated?’” he posits.

But just as much as Quintana points to the broad challenges endemic to the niche, esoteric world of telemark skiing, the Ivy League and Stanford-trained engineer–one who had a long, fruitful stint consulting with Black Diamond equipment–brings pragmatism both to the discussion and his designs.

“I know its volume,” Quintana notes. 

“But the point is, until you can buy a resort telemark binding that you want to learn on for two hundred bucks–and a pair of boots for under four hundred bucks new–it’s probably never really going to happen again for telemarking,” declares the eminent telemark DIYer.

While many telemark skiers undoubtedly make small modifications to their gear, most get by with the equipment as it is presented. The boots, bindings, and skis offered for the free-heeler–while perhaps expensive and encompassing only a small slew of offerings–are nonetheless solid, tested, and eminently skiable.

But unlike the alpine and snowboard worlds, rife with large, often conglomerate-owned companies and broader user bases, the telemark industry-in-miniature doesn’t enjoy deep R&D budgets. Thus a large portion of the sport’s gear innovation comes not from established companies, but the garage laboratories and 3D printers of home tinkerers. Folks like Robert Tusso, who modeled and 3D printed an add-on connection to make legacy, bellowed Scarpa F1 and F3 alpine touring boots compatible with new age telemark bindings, or John Brody, a Tahoe-based software engineer who has experimented with 3D-printed components to add to his two-pin frankenbindings, have done much of the heavy lifting to move telemark’s equipment into a modern paradigm. Even the sport’s most recently retail-available bindings, Voile’s take on the telemark tech system, the Transit TTS, was first cobbled together in 2011 by a Salt Lake City-based gear importer named Mark Lengel.

But one tinkerer may take the prize as the pinnacle of free-heel garage science: Jason Quintana. Few other tinkerers have been as ground-breaking–both inside the telemark industry and the DIY community. And his more recent projects may be closing in on telemark’s holy grail of hard-skiing, releasable bindings.

Quintana’s journey from telemark tinkerer to official gear designer and back to tinkerer runs a long arc, all the way back to his undergrad studies at Dartmouth College in the late 1980s. “Me and another guy at school, we were both teaching telemark at the local ski area, and sort of got  into somewhat of a little bit of a competition on modifying our gear,” Quintana remembers. In a then leatherbound telemark world, plastic boots were the realm of fantasy. But Quintana and his classmate were undeterred. “He made some pseudo SuperComps (a legacy telemark boot with a plastic cuff) out of a plastic pickle barrel kind of thing by bolting on cuffs onto his boots. And I kind of did a similar thing. Although I bought a pair of cheap Size 12 Alpina alpine boots, and cut the toe and heel off and basically stuffed my Asolo Extreme’s inside of the plastic shell. So it was kind of like this weird liner.” 

Quintana would ski those boots for years, while his friend would also continue on the telemark path, himself choosing the teaching route. That young man was one Scott McGee, long a leading PSIA nordic teacher and former guide for Exum Mountain Guides out of Jackson, Wyoming.

Quintana would incorporate telemark skiing into his studies, notably an honors thesis on the releasability of telemark bindings, a concept forward thinking for the time, and something he would revisit decades later. “I’ve been at it for a while,” Quintana says with a smile.

Quintana would move to the other coast for his graduate studies, enrolling at Stanford University in 1991 for his masters in mechanical engineering. There, Quintana was tasked with using sensors and data loggers to measure forces sustained by the lower body while working part-time as a biomechanics researcher for NASA.

“So I had this portable data logger that I was using at NASA, and I was taking a class at Stanford that wanted a project for measuring something in use essentially,” Quintana remembers. “So I decided that I would put strain gauges on skis and use that data logger from NASA to essentially record the stress on the top sheet of skis while skiing.” 

“And my professor was like, ‘this sounds like a really cool project, try to get some free skis out of it maybe,” he remembers.

Quintana thus placed a call to the nascent Black Diamond Equipment, which just years prior had coalesced out of the ashes of Chouinard Equipment, and asked for a pair of skis. There he was put in contact with Jordy Margid, the ski line manager at the manufacturer, who would come to be influential in the release of the first plastic telemark boot–then a joint venture between Black Diamond and a then solely European-bound Scarpa. Margid sent Quintana a pair of factory seconds, but years later admitted that “he figured I just scammed him out of a pair of skis,” Quintana says laughing.

But the data the graduate engineering student brought forth was anything but a racket. “Later I sent him the report back on it which was really thick and really detailed and had three-dimensional graphs, because I was measuring the stress at like five points on the ski,” Quintana remembers. “So I had these three-dimensional graphs of the stress as you ski, and you could see from the shovel to the tail, you know, at the beginning and end of turn and things like that.”

Margid was impressed, and contacted Quintana to invite him to headquarters in Salt Lake City to discuss further collaborations. Quintana packed a backpack for the short trip, including an early iteration of an invention he had conceived of that is still a core Black Diamond offering. “One of the things I threw in the backpack was a pair of my prototype Flicklock poles,” he remembers. 

Quintana left Black Diamond with not only connections for future collaboration, but also one of the first pairs of Scarpa’s Terminators, what would be telemark’s revolutionary entrance into the plastic boot realm. Black Diamond would soon buy the FlickLock design from Quintana, bringing him on to finish the project with designer Steve MacDonald, a creative director at Nike who was also working on the industrial design for the Terminator boots. “Because of that, I started also collaborating on some of the early Terminator boots. Mostly the T2 and T3,” says Quintana. Quintana wanted to incorporate the lowcut T3’s asymmetrical bellows–a design that would come to be a classic Scarpa component–with a taller, more aggressive T1-class boot. He cobbled together a T1 tongue with a T3 scafo to create the T2x.

From there Quintana spent years skiing on classic 75mm duckbill gear. But around the new millennium, he found that the ever-evolving leading edge of retail-available telemark bindings had become too stiff for his liking. “I was using just three pins on Karhu XCD guides and I was using my T2xs at the time, and I realized ‘you know what, I like this better than the cable binding I’m using at the resort,” he says. 

But Quintana was not destined to remain on the elder crosscountry-downhill norm. A few years later, as telemark’s modern platform, the new telemark norm (NTN), came to the fold, and boots like Scarpa’s TX incorporated AT tech hardware, telemark bindings utilizing Dynafit bindings came to life, first and foremost Mark Lengel’s telemark tech system–the TTS.

At first Quintana was skeptical of the new interface that combined that tech toe with a cable/cartridge heel assembly typical of 75mm telemark bindings. But out of boredom, he installed a harvested set of tech toe fittings onto his T3s, and, paired with an old set of Riva cables, put together a rig to home-test. “And I flexed it and I was like ‘hey, I kind of like this,’” Quintana says.

The new telemark tech system solved many of the problems Quintana found with the first round of NTN bindings, which he felt were more optimized for free-heel parallel turns than actual telemark ones. Moreover, Quintana notes that the new guard in telemark boots had flat soles instead of the subtle rocker he preferred.

“Using the tech toe allowed essentially to do the same thing even when you didn’t have any rocker in the boot because you could weight the ball of your foot,” Quintana notes.

But Quintana’s DIY path would take him away from the TTS system, largely because of a crash and injury. “Thirty-five years of telemarking and I had my first really bad turn,” Quintana says. On a homemade TTS binding, a novel design with springs under the toe, Quintana took a catastrophic fall. “Taking a nice sled ride off the mountain I thought, ‘you know what, it might be time to return to the concept of releasable bindings,’” he remembers.

“So I spent most of my rehab time thinking about what the binding I was going to ski on the next year was going to be.”

After recovering, Quintana initially took to the Meidjo, the first NTN binding that incorporated a tech toe, which also touted releasability. But, testing the binding at home, Quintana found its release characteristics could not work for the DIN setting he required to release. “So I started looking at other options,” says Quintana. After conceptualizing then scrapping a release plate that would jettison the entire binding in a fall, he decided to start with a Trab TR2 toe piece, an existing alpine touring option with lateral release. “I bought some used Trab bindings and was pleasantly surprised,” says Quintana. “That toe piece is actually really sturdy, much more sturdy than you would think it would be and it’s worked pretty well. So then I just had to design the rest of the binding around that toe piece.”

From there Quintana has designed NTN tech bindings using both the norm’s standard, beveled connection–the point on the boot colloquially known as the duckbutt, while the binding’s interface is known as the claw–and his own connection point that he has designed and 3D-printed. “The alternate duckbutt is sort of cupped in the opposite direction. So it puts the effective center of rotation farther behind, like more underneath the heel,” he says of his bolt-on duckbutt. 

Jason Quintana’s homemade WTDuck binding and it’s custom connection on boot and binding.

Quintana designed and built the binding–affectionately christened the WTDuck (for “what the duck” TTN binding)–with releasability front of mind. Holding an old TX Pro boot up, Quintana details how the standard NTN connection is well tuned to the older, original, and at one time solitary paradigm of cage style bindings on the platform, showing that with its flatter duckbutt, standard NTN boots have a center of rotation–essential for lateral release–closer to the toe of the boot, “Which makes complete sense for how those original NTN bindings worked,” Quintana says. “They were releasable and they pivoted around the toe cage.”

That releaseability has been complicated by the ascension of tech toe telemark bindings, as well as the rising use of the binding in hard-skiing situations, both in the free-heel and alpine disciplines. “Those two pin toes and the original Dynafit design with the pivoting heel were really not that good for hard-charging skiing, but it was never really made for that,” Quintana says. “It was made for backcountry skiing, not like skiing bumps at a ski area or hucking cliffs.”

Moreover, Quintana notes how the mainstream alpine makers have themselves struggled to incorporate the two pin touring binding into a hard-skiing, freeride paradigm.

“Fritchi’s done that in one way, Trab’s done it in another, Dynafit’s done in another. But they all have to work around that toe piece and not letting the toe pins eject too early,” he says.

“Salomon and Marker have gone a totally different way, where they essentially have a different toe piece when you’re in tour versus ski mode,” he notes of the hybrid Shift and Duke PT bindings, respectively.

While alpine equipment has seen a slew of bindings come to market that attempt to bring the best of both the touring and descending worlds to their platforms, it’s a challenge that has quietly entered the telemark realm, with its own nuances. Not least of all, releaseability. 

Quintana points to natural challenges for creating a releasable tech toe telemark binding, especially on the TTS platform. Coupled with a cable heel assembly, releasability is determined solely by the toe. Furthermore, a cable heel connection, offering no releasability characteristic, can create an unreleasable binding with enough cable tension, leading to a fraught balance between lateral releasability and prereleasing via the two pin toe. Thus, prioritizing keeping the skier from ejecting, many two pin toes require high energy for release. Therefore, most releasability in alpine bindings occurs via lateral displacement at the toe and heel, something fraught in a TTS binding, but achievable using the NTN connection.

With his WTDuck boot/binding interface, Quintana has created a system using the two pin connection with stronger release characteristics. And he sees the two pin telemark binding as not only a strong choice for earning turns, but also for making them, noting that the pin arms grant an energy transmission that cage style bindings can’t quite replicate, allowing for a neutral yet responsive binding without relying on cable tension. “They’re just really positive snappy bindings when it comes to transitions,” Quintana says of two pin telemark bindings as a class. “With the toe cage binding or a 75mm binding, there’s a lot more energy that gets wasted in essentially bending. Bending the whole toe of the boot, deflecting the whole toe of the boot,” he says.

Similar to other telemark DIY leaders, like Robert Tusso and John Brody, Quintana prefers skiing in the telemark technique on more neutral, less resistive bindings, and would like to see a return to that paradigm, one that has over time seemed to become an afterthought in a telemark world focused on performance equivalence with alpine and hard-charging resort skiing. It’s something that Quintana feels has diminished the more graceful, fluid telemark turn in favor of more parallel turns and less committed telemark skiing.

“I would like to see the world go back to more neutral bindings and I kind of lament that it went to super active being kind of like the norm for a while there, but that was all due to trying to achieve parity with alpine” he notes.

“I would hope that we’re returning to a bit more of a graceful end instead of the power end of the spectrum, but we’ll see.”

Quintana plans to continue innovating, but he doesn’t plan to bring his releasable NTN connection to market himself, or even put it on some sort of open source format due to liability

Asked if we would ever consider working with a manufacturer again to see his ideas come to retail fruition, Quintana demurs. “I worked for thirty years as an engineer and I know all the crap that can go wrong. I wouldn’t say I’ve seen it all, but I’ve seen it all in manufacturing and design and all that kind of stuff, and I really don’t have the burning need to see it again,” he notes smiling.

But more than that, Quintana sees little need to once again turn his passion for telemark into toil. “When I stopped doing anything with Black Diamond consulting-wise, it was partly because I realized at some point it’s a bad thing when you turn your hobby into a job, It’s no longer a hobby anymore,” he says. “Now, it’s a job, and jobs are different.”

What Quintana sees as crucial to telemark’s future isn’t related so much to gear innovation as it is accessibility. “My personal feeling on it is that gear’s got to get radically cheaper,” he says, noting that skiing at resorts–no matter the discipline–is exorbitantly expensive for most people, stunting growth.

Interestingly, the forward-thinking DIYer also notes that the current paradigm that telemark equipment has evolved into has itself created barriers to entry. 

“The problem is, in the past when it was all 75mm bindings and boots and nothing had really changed in a long time, it was so easy to buy cheap boots and bindings and you can put them on any skis,” Quintana notes. “And so for a couple hundred bucks, somebody could give telemarking a whirl.”

“Now, you can still buy used stuff but since the popularity has declined, all the used stuff is either really old 75mm stuff that’s pretty beaten to hell at this point. Or it’s pretty new NTN stuff that’s not terribly cheap even used and isn’t that available,” he says.

In something as small and esoteric as telemark skiing, those moving the sport along wear many hats. And in Jason Quintana’s case, he isn’t just an important home innovator who has pushed the cutting edge of telemark equipment onward; with a breadth of experience few others in the scene could boast, he’s also apt to wonder where the sport–in practice and in industry–might go next.

When distilling the discussion down to what telemark’s future might look like, Quintana sticks to a specific theme. “To me, it all goes to that it needs to get a lot cheaper,” he says.