Telemark Skiing Needs Its Own Media

On April 27th, 2020,in the mellow voice of a novice presenter, Josh Madsen, then emerging as the most influential thought leader and equipment retailer in the isolated world of telemark skiing, took to the digital air in just the 22nd edition of his podcast. 

There, on a platform that would become integral to the sport, he urged the free-heeling throngs long hoping for modern gear and a wider revival not to pine for larger companies to save their ski turn. Nor did he push for the insular sport to grow its ranks. Instead, Madsen opined that his chosen ski technique and career would be best served by self-sufficiency. 

Telemark, Madsen proclaimed, should build its own industry.

“We as telemarkers sort of exist in this in-between zone, because there is a ski industry, and there is a nordic industry, and there is a backcountry industry, and we kind of float in between it,” Madsen noted.

An essential force during telemark’s rise in the 2000s but also a student of the sport’s long history, Madsen saw no other path. “If you’re trying to just put telemark in the grand scheme of skiing, history has proved that that is not a sustainable model,” he declared.

When I first began covering telemark skiing—now more than four years ago—I shared a similar notion; that telemark needed something. And as a budding blogger, I at first took a slightly different tack than Madsen. I opined that if telemark was to find its inflection point, it needed not to retreat into a separate industry. It instead should become part of the wider discussion in outdoor media.

“There is such an emphasis on things telemark-specific that the sport finds itself speaking in tongues that are indiscernible to the wider ski world, about new gear most can’t quite understand,” I wrote in one of my first posts on my blog Telemark Voices. “Telemark needs a change in the discussion, toward approachability,” I declared.

Over time, the sport has seemed to do just that. Manufacturers have picked up on a long-building DIY revolution, giving free-heel skiers retail-available options in bindings, boots, and skis that borrow much from alpine and alpine touring. And a rising newschool has brought a fresh approach to The Turn, replacing telemark’s esoteric streak with modern films and social media exposure. 

And, while not pervasive, ski media has given telemark another look. Beyond this column, Barry Wicks reviews free-heel gear and muses on its culture at ski mountaineering upstart The High Route. Even SKI has run several articles on the topic, including a primer on what exactly telemark skiing is for their broader audience.

But even as ski media has reacquainted itself with telemark, Madsen’s point has been proven out. While interest in the sport has risen modestly in outdoor publications, no long-lasting space has been created in outdoor media for telemark—just like it hasn’t in mainstream ski manufacturing. 

And as long as it remains a novel interest, telemark will be left without deep and dedicated coverage; something only its own media can accomplish.

Like many skiers of the 2010s, even one who telemarked, I had little idea how much was happening behind the free-heel scenes. 

I was unaware that a revolution in gear was then taking place, and I was completely ignorant of the modest rise in participation the sport was enjoying. Most glaringly, I was blind to the fact that telemark was receiving dedicated coverage in seldom visited corners of the internet.

I was instead consumed by the ski and outdoor culture’s treatment of my chosen ski turn. Telemark was the butt of jokes; the foil against which regular, cool skiers compared themselves to. And outdoor media reflected that, perhaps instigated it. Articles by the likes of Helen Olsson and Paddy O’Connell declared telemark to be staid, unmodern, and a vehicle for jest.

And life reflected that coverage. An offhand mention about telemark to a fellow I used to bus tables with one heavy happy hour was met with head-snapping exasperation. “Oh God, not telemark!” he spat. 

A few years later, at another happy hour—this one corporately approved at a new job—a director-level employee overheard me talking about the free-heel turn with a client. “How do you know a telemark skier; they’ll tell you!” he blurted. That ire seemed pervasive, and framed my viewpoint on the apparently lowly state of telemark. 

But that perspective would soon find a counterpoint. In the market for a new touring setup, I began searching the internet. And my research brought me to a website that would forever change how I thought of the telemark world: Craig Dostie’s seminal free-heel-leaning blogEarnYourTurns.

Mostly unknown to the wider ski world compared to more mainstream ski media, EarnYourTurns was an underground oasis for the quietly surviving telemark culture. There, treatises on tech toe telemark bindings—then innovative and polarizing—ran alongside articles wondering just what it meant to ski in the free-heel manner in those retrograde days. It was revelatory in an outdoor world otherwise unconcerned with telemark skiing.

I wanted more, and began searching for telemark articles at mainstream outlets. But there the sport’s ebb was still glaringly evident. At the time, POWDER had run only one article on the topic in the previous many years—Hans Ludwig’s provocative 2017 essay and roundtable “Telemark Skiing is Dead.” And I couldn’t find a free-heel focused piece on Outside’s online database more recent than a review entitled “The 3 Best Telemark Bindings of 2013.” 

Telemark has made great strides in coverage since then, this column included, something previous POWDER gear editor Cy Whitling wasn’t pitched, but sought out. 

But it still only goes so far. Besides The High Route, no other English-language skiing publication regularly covers telemark skiing. And it’s not surprising. Amongst the decision makers at most (perhaps all) the mainstream ski outlets, there is not one who is a dedicated telemark skier. While some editors thankfully do allow for coverage of The Turn, few outlets have any decisionmaker or contributor who intimately understands telemark and how it is evolving. 

That’s hardly a surprise. Though the outdoor world’s mood has changed (as has telemark’s), the sport remains too esoteric to garner attention from the wider skiing movement. Thus it’s little wonder telemark is covered only sparingly now, even during the modest rise it is now enjoying. 

Like many niche activities, telemark is prone to ebb and flow. And it seems inevitable that this coverage may cease when the sport cycles to a lower point again. Evidence of that pattern abounds. Publications like Backcountry were once packed with telemark coverage, as was the late Couloirand even Cross-Country Skier. To echo Josh Madsen, if history is any guide, the modest attention telemark is seeing now likely won’t continue. The only antidote is dedicated telemark media—long-lived magazines, blogs, columns, and more. Covering nothing else but telemark skiing.

And it’s needed now more than it perhaps ever has been. There is no modern equivalent to EarnYourTurns, no TelemarkTips forum; telemark enjoys no bastion that is unapologetically dedicated to itself. 

On the telemark-centric forum BackcountryTalk.com, a virtuosic telemark skier once reflected on a lifetime spent free-heel skiing. “In all those years selling the tele boots, skis and bindings, and also teaching and sharing the sport with many others, the abiding motivation for people seemed to be engaging in something new,” he wrote. “Telemark carried a certain mystique, drawing the intrepid, the under-stimulated and the unconventional.”  

Telemark is inextricably linked to that path; a method of snow travel that spans generations, and whose ideals seem to frame a unique ethos. Where the role of challenging one’s self finds priority over scene and spectacle, but where treading your own path is often metacognitive and lonesome.

These are the qualities of a niche endeavor. And telemark’s media must reflect them to have any hope of continuing. 

And, as a counterweight to the mainstream ski experience or simply for its own sake, it deserves that.

“Why did I start asking myself, ‘do we need our own industry?’” Josh Madsen said on his podcast in 2020. “The first thing was, right off the bat, people were saying ‘telemark was dead.’”

And Madsen seems right after all, even about telemark media. 

Because it survives only if it’s created with that one thing in mind.