Is skimo the new tele?
This question was recently asked on one of the “backcountry” ski forums. I don’t like abbreviations so I would ask “is ski mountaineering the new telemark?”
I don’t want to start posting on forums as they become too personal. But to answer the above question you need to put it into some kind of personal context. To answer that question you need to ask yourself “why did I start telemarking in the first place?”
So right away it’s personal. I started telemarking in the mid 80’s ONLY because it was the way to get into the big mountains in winter. I had downhill skied for years when I made the switch and I made the switch because I wanted to go up. You telemarked because this was the gear you could get at the time to do this kind of stuff. That’s all.
Once you got good at telemark it really was fun. It was fun because when conditions were on and you were able to access steep and deep skiing you could find a sweet spot with the shitty (for going down) gear. Once the slope was steep enough you could almost allow your upper body to free-fall as your legs were doing crazy slinging arcs beneath the powder. You didn’t have a lot of control over the skis and I could always feel them going snaky deep in the snow.
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The only reason that you didn’t crash is that 1) you were riding your skis (and actually striding down the mountain —one of the reasons why telemarking is fast) and 2) when the slope is very steep it actually takes a long time for your face to hit the snow in the type of down-hill falls that come from skiing fast down steep and deep slopes. Think about it; you are skiing down a low-angle slope in bad light and your skis experience some resistance. You start to go over the bars (down-hill) and the slope hits you pretty fast if you’re not attentive. The steeper the slope the farther away the ground is in a fall. Plenty of time to get your legs back under you in time to scrub speed in the next turn.
This is what telemark was all about. With skinny skis you could get “into” the snow and a lot of my deep powder turns were executed by simply plunging my knee into the powder and dragging my thigh through the snow. This was just one way to “scrub speed” and just one of many essential techniques needed to keep in control when skiing steep complex slopes on old school telemark gear.
And this is the thing. When I was taught how to telemark only a degenerate would push the leg back. “Stride forward only” was the rule.
OK, is ski mountaineering the new telemark? For me in many ways this is true. And it’s true because we used telemark equipment for ski mountaineering. And now that we have advanced and specific “alpine touring” gear I naturally chose this gear for ski mountaineering. Going up is certainly better and while going down is not the same it’s just as good. Anyone that tries to sell you that one is more soulful than the other doesn’t know a lot about soul.
