Josh Madsen, The Leader of Telemark, Steps Away. Then Returns.

Josh Madsen – the most visible modern figure in the hardscrabble, esoteric world of telemark skiing – was busting ass.  From my phone spat not just Madsen’s voice, but a cacophony of invisible action taking place hundreds of miles away.  As he spoke about telemark skiing, a sink ran in the background, then, the repeated chime of an open car door sounded.  He was moving all around.

“How’s the week been?” I asked him.  “Oh crazy,” Madsen laughed, “no, it’s been nuts man, we’re full throttle just building skis, building leashes and levers and mounting skis, it’s been pretty wild.”

“You’re kind of just a busy guy, I feel,” I baited. “Yeah, I’m a full-time realtor, too, so I got two businesses running at the same time,” he responded, still laughing, sounding almost incredulous of his own industriousness.

After chatting on the realities of balancing making a living and working in telemark, often mutually exclusive endeavors, I pivoted; “because I’m a little short on time, do you mind if we dive into the questions?” To that Madsen responded, “Yeah, yeah, give me two seconds, I’m just saying bye to a guy real quick in my shop.”

That was but a short time ago. Just a year later, Madsen would be faced with a coalescing fallout, his long arc as telemark’s leader seeming to come to an abrupt and fraught crossroads.

But well before, over the course of decades, Madsen had indefatigably risen to become telemark’s chief proprietor and cultural scion.  Through dogged hustle, his flagship entity Freeheel Life – the Salt Lake City-based, telemark-boutique ski shop – became the most influential retailer in the sport. And his zeal for content creation and marketing gave Freeheel Life not only a wide breadth of social media material with growing viewership, it had granted telemark at large a new modern visibility, something it would have had in no other way.  All this acted to spread Madsen’s views on the sport and its direction.  While that pulpit granted Madsen a platform no other telemark figure enjoyed, below the surface, a building resentment toward his approach would explode into open combat on social media, forever changing his role in the sport, and bringing into question how telemark would move forward - and who would lead it.

“I always promised myself that I would never deviate from telemark,” Madsen said presciently last fall.  “If I’m going to quit, I’ll quit.  But I’m going down with the ship.”

While much of that later fervor blossomed from seeds sown behind the scenes, outwardly Madsen espoused a narrative of being telemark’s protector, often eliciting existential appeals for free-heel skiers to support their own industry. Seeing telemark’s route forward as bound to expanded participation and increased dollars spent at telemark-specific entities, Madsen created a philosophy built on keeping resources in the industry without leakage. And his passionate outlook never diverged from that - standing his ground became integral to his approach.

“I always promised myself that I would never deviate from telemark,” Madsen said presciently last fall.  “If I’m going to quit, I’ll quit.  But I’m going down with the ship.”

Regardless of his enthusiasm - and the wide support that came with it - Madsen’s journey was subject to blowback, both from the legacy telemark core – an at times nostalgic and new-gear-averse cohort – and a new vanguard with their own vision of moving telemark forward. A group Madsen seemed to grapple with.  

Still, Madsen stayed his course, long as a media entity, publishing magazines and ski films, then eventually supplanting his robust retail operation with one focused on his own products.  “I’ve stuck it out man,” said Madsen. “I’m to the point where I’m making my own product because that’s really where I saw – after many, many years of going down the media rabbit hole – I was like, ‘you know what, there’s one way that I can really do this and do it based on the mission that we have, and that’s make the stuff myself and then promote it, you know?”

Madsen continued: “So we create our own media and photos and Instagram and YouTube and all that stuff.  Then we can give our own flavor of it, people can disagree and say, ‘that’s not telemark’ or whatever they want to say but, whatever; they’ve been saying that the whole time I’ve been doing stuff.”

The whole time in Madsen’s free-heel odyssey goes far back, to a different era in telemark, one where plastic boots were only just becoming a reality, where the sport still enjoyed a certain level of countercultural cachet it doesn’t quite today, and when the outdoor economy and its marketing apparatus was a mere fraction of the social media juggernaut that it is now.

In 1993, a 14-year-old Madsen was then a new transplant to Salt Lake City, and he had begun noticing skiers on free-heel gear in the mountains that surrounded his new hometown.  Intrigued, Madsen, as he later recalled on his first Freeheel Life Podcast in 2019, went to the local library, “and found this book with this hippy looking dude on the front with his arms raised up, and making a telemark turn.” The young Madsen had discovered Steve Barnett’s pivotal 1978 work Cross-Country Downhill and Other Nordic Mountain Skiing Techniques, a seminal treatise from the original revolution of American telemark skiing.

Borrowing his father’s classic free-heel setup – 210cm long Fischer Europa 99s and leather Asolo Snowfield boots – Madsen made his way to Brighton Ski Area. Reading the book as he rode the chairlift, he made his first flailing attempts at making telemark turns. “But I remember that I was hooked from the beginning,” Madsen recalled. “I think it was the difficulty of the turn and it just seemed so cool.”

Madsen had become a telemark skier, but his path to telemark entrepreneur was anything but guaranteed. “I had actually got my real estate license when I was like 21 years old, and I was living in this little town in northern Utah, and I was teaching telemark skiing at the local mountain,” Madsen remembers.

In an inauspicious beginning to his telemark career, Madsen would become a sponsored athlete. A friend he had made on the telemark racing circuit was heading to a shooting date with a photographer and invited him along.

“I showed up and she was shooting photos for a clothing company, had some clothes for me to wear, and I put them on and took a couple photos and she was like, ‘hey, you’re a good telemark skier, you should try to get sponsored,’ and I was like ‘I don’t even know what that is,’” Madsen remembers laughing.  “She was connected with Karhu which was a really well-known telemark brand throughout the years.” 

Madsen thus became a sponsored athlete with the legacy free-heel company after receiving two pairs of skis. His path to a telemark career had begun.

Madsen quickly became a fixture in the sport’s media.  Skiing steep lines, riding rails and sending big airs, he embodied the newschooler telemark vibe that came with the sport’s ascension around the turn of the century, exemplified in media like Descender Magazine and Madsen’s own production company Lipstick Films. Madsen would tour the country showcasing his works representing the new movement in telemark.  A profession of sorts had begun, though Madsen says, “I use the word livelihood pretty lightly.” 

“Even at my heyday in 2005…I think I was in every telemark movie that was out that year and I was in Warren Miller, and that was still not enough to live on, not even close.  So I was waiting tables and helping renovate houses in the summer.  And I really waited tables during the winter, too,” says Madsen, remembering that life as a sponsored telemark athlete was “like you’re a glorified ski bum.”

Madsen also found little opportunity to break into a career in the telemark industry, finding few positions available. “It was sad because a lot of us that had done all this athlete work, I thought for sure there was like a marketing position, or someone would want to use us for something, right? And there was nothing,” he says.

I thought TelemarkTips was lame because it was all these old guys that yelled at each other on the internet.” Madsen says laughing; “Anyways, I respect Mitch Weber and what he accomplished with that thing, but I was young, and I was like, ‘screw this, let’s do something cool.’”

But a seed had been sown for what would later become his Freeheel Life branding. “FreeheelLife.com actually was a web magazine that I started when I was an athlete,” Madsen says.  The site’s genesis coincided with the height of the well-remembered forum TelemarkTips, founded by the late Mitch Weber in 1998. TelemarkTips in many ways represented the heartbeat of telemark at its late-90s, early-2000s peak; a place where the rising telemark scene found a space to be discussed, often in hilarious if thick-skin-requiring ways endemic of the fledgling internet.

But Madsen wanted something else out of telemark, remembering playfully, “it was kind of the same time as TelemarkTips, and I thought TelemarkTips was lame because it was all these old guys that yelled at each other on the internet.” Madsen says laughing; “Anyways, I respect Mitch Weber and what he accomplished with that thing, but I was young, and I was like, ‘screw this, let’s do something cool.’”

Soon, the telemark world would find itself with low cachet and low market value.  Not only was free-heel skiing subject to a new level of no-one-cares-you-tele derision, Dynafit alpine touring bindings had finally begun seeing widespread use.  Telemark’s status as backcountry tool of choice had come and gone. “That was kind of also around the time where Rossignol telemark went away, and Atomic went away, Fischer went away, all the big companies that were doing telemark stopped going down that path, it all got cut,” Madsen remembers. “So that took a lot of opportunity away as well.  So I was actually going to get out and that’s when the Telemark Skier call came.”

Couloir, the first magazine devoted solely to backcountry skiing, was founded by Craig Dostie in 1988 as a Southern California-based, Sierra Club-affiliated ski touring newsletter.  By the late 90s it had evolved into a magazine, enjoying solid distribution and a core following.  In 2003, Dostie added to Couloir’s offerings, spinning-off the free-heel specific magazine Telemark Skier.  The niche publication enjoyed some initial success, but after years of fighting for purchase the magazine became mostly dormant.  In 2006, Height of Land Publishing, owner of Backcountry Magazine, brought Couloir under their umbrella.  Couloir was folded into the Backcountry name, essentially ending its run, while Height of Land resurrected Telemark Skier in 2008.  A year later, they approached Madsen to run the magazine as editor.

“I’m like ‘well, I’ve gotten published like once, I don’t know if I’d call myself an editor’ and they were like ‘no, we’ll walk you through it, you’ve made a good name for yourself, these movies and being an athlete,’” says Madsen.

“So that took up the next three years of my life,” Madsen recalls.  “And I wouldn’t even call that full time…I was able to build it into a full-time job and that was the goal, but I kind of thought it would have a little more legs to it.”

In 2012, Madsen purchased Telemark Skier from Height of Land (he would hold onto the magazine for a decade, attempting various angles to make the publication viable before shuttering it in 2023). In the midst of this transition, Madsen took a position as a marketing director at a small Utah ski area as a means to help finance the magazine.  And a few years later, Madsen saw the opportunity to create the entity that would become not only the center of his business domain but would also rise to be the face of the entire sport’s retail.

“When I got done at the resort job I was like, ‘well, I really want to open the space where I can start my own Freeheel Life brand’ and I have the URL and I had the unity tracks logo. I was like,’ well, let’s do it,’” says Madsen.

Madsen took inspiration from the snowboard shops he gravitated to as a young man during the scene’s brash rise in the 1990s. “When I was growing up, I’d hang out at snowboard shops because I thought it was so cool that snowboarding had this culture and they also had a place to go,” Madsen remembers.  “It was like you had brands you only saw in there.  So originally that was the idea, why don’t I create this signature shop?”

What followed was Madsen’s creation of Freeheel Life Industries, which grew to become one of the leading retailers of telemark gear in North America. Not only was the shop amongst the top dealers of Scarpa’s eminent line of telemark boots the country over, if not the world, its many associated videos and podcasts posted online spread Madsen’s vision for telemark and its industry. Long a place where bountiful options in telemark gear could be found - often carrying parts and items available nowhere else - the shop later pivoted toward a focus on Freeheel Life products, including skis and accessories.  

Regardless, Freeheel Life became the source for more gear than could be found nearly anywhere, and the shop’s associated media arms - from podcasts to shop news videos and beyond - were arguably the most influential – if not most consumed – source in all of telemark skiing.  

That content encapsulated two notions: that telemark must grow to survive, and that a self-sufficient, free-heel industry – where dollars spent on telemark gear stay in the telemark cycle – must be implemented. Where many in the scene have long framed the notion of growing telemark as a way to see new gear, Madsen always saw it in a different light. 

"We have to grow telemark so we can bring on the next generation," Madsen says, steering the discussion toward a more existential frame where the survival of telemark – and thus Freeheel Life – are at stake.

“People need to understand that if telemark is to thrive – it doesn’t have to be massive businesses – but if you aren’t supporting these types of people in their various aspects of it – quote-unquote industry – there’s a shelf life of those people, because they can’t put food on the table,” Madsen says, continuing, “my parameter was I want to make sure that 100% of someone’s dollars are going back into telemark.  Again, I was trying to solve this persistent problem, that is telemark is not going to grow if we don’t have some sort of cash flow going through the people that are making the product.”

These views became mainstays in Madsen’s philosophy and refrains in his media.  His hashtags #spreadtelemark and #protectorsoftheturn adorned nearly every one of Freeheel Life’s social media posts and acted as the sign-off ending his podcasts.  And his boutique Freeheel Life skis were christened with a familiar name: the Protector.

Buttressing his notions of entrepreneurism and stewardship for the free-heel ethos was an emphasis on telemark’s history, a topic Madsen long felt deserved wider deference from the free-heel throngs. “I don’t want to see us go through cycles of just repeating ourselves,” Madsen declares. “If there was a standard set at one point we should carry it forward, regardless if you liked what that person did.”

Steadfast and firm, Madsen’s ideals and approach haven’t been without detractors, going back to his film-tour days.  “You’d show a movie and people would be like ‘well that’s not telemark,’” Madsen remembers. 

And while Madsen has undoubtedly done much for telemark, his unwavering approach has at times taken on a polarizing bent.  

In a November 2023 edition of his weekly podcast, Madsen vaguely criticized several telemark entities. Though he stopped short of naming them outright, that denouncement included several prominent manufacturers he had once partnered with, and a SKI Magazine article that plugged for the film “THIS IS TELEMARK” by newschooler outfit TELE COLO. 

Madsen took issue with the article’s satirical portrayal of the status quo in free-heel skiing. The piece – written by TELE COLO team member and SKI social media coordinator Giorgia Menetre –  stated in part that “the perception of telemark skiing remains aged—with floppy bindings, granola diets, unkept beards, and smells of patchouli. TELE COLO is here to present the ski world with the new age of telemark culture that exists beyond the stereotype.” 

Madsen took the line in particular to heart and took issue with the piece as a whole, openly airing his disagreement in raw terms.

“Floppy bindings? Granola diets? I’m like, ‘have you looked at equipment in 2023?”’ Madsen said on The Freeheel Life Podcast, continuing, “the way that this is worded is so uneducated that it doesn’t make any sense.”  

Madsen continued: “part of what irks me about this article is, one, the article sucks, it doesn’t even make any sense, but it shows that nobody’s really understanding the fundamentals and I think in this case historical fundamentals.”  

Feeling the piece had overlooked the many important figures in the sport’s past - including himself - Madsen continued criticizing the article, saying “this has complete disregard for so much that has happened and so many things that have happened,” before listing a series of individuals who had advocated for the sport, including an accounting of his own past telemark endeavors, many, he felt, not dissimilar to TELE COLO in vibe and execution.

Reactions to Madsen’s takes were spirited. While some comments on social media praised his directness, many took his opinions as self-serving and dismissive. A storm of reactions ensued on Instagram and elsewhere, culminating in Madsen deleting comments, blocking social media accounts he deemed adversarial, even openly grappling with others on Instagram, adding to the fervor.  Some even uttered that’s not telemark all over again. “That was actually a phrase I saw quite a bit over the last couple days,” Madsen recalled a week after the podcast aired.

Madsen elaborated: “It’s maybe this time around a little more a stab at the cultural aspect of it, like what I’m doing is not representative of telemark.  I feel like maybe before it was more the act of telemarking. And I feel like now it’s a little more maybe what I’ve said is ruffling feathers in a way where people are like ‘that’s not telemark’ as in ‘you’re no longer part of the culture’ type-of-thing.”

It’s an ironic twist for a man who has taken to proclaiming that protecting and growing telemark are paramount. While Madsen’s zeal and work ethic are difficult to overstate, his views on the direction the sport should take have been marked with a quality some find divisive, even censuring. 

One such individual took to targeting Madsen on social media in response to his criticism of Menetre’s piece. Using a shadowy, public Instagram handle since deleted known as freeheelwaifu they actively trolled the shop owner.  

Speaking anonymously to protect their relationships with the brands they partner with, the creator of the freeheelwaifu account - themselves an active member in the newschool telemark scene - noted how they and others felt moved to action following not only Madsen’s podcast, but what they felt were years of negative interactions with him.

“There has been a dramatic shift in the last two to three years of him being really open and supportive of the community. And then the community got its legs under it and seemingly there is this steam coming back into the machine of telemark. And then for some reason he saw that as all just direct competition to him and kind of changed course it would seem. I don’t know, that’s kind of an outsider looking in, but a little more privy to information,” they opine.

In the midst of the fallout from the podcast the freeheelwaifu account began posting negative memes aimed at Madsen, the creator of the account noting that “pretty much all of those were submitted by members of the community. Once there was a platform out there.”

Others supported freeheelwaifu’s angle in different ways. The posts, many of which had a bullying bent - one likened Madsen to Alex Jones while another used suicidal ideation as a vehicle to jeer him - were liked by central figures in the modern telemark movement, including well-known influencers and sponsored athletes. The episode begged questions not only of Madsen’s conduct, but also that of the many individuals in telemark skiing that reacted in often questionable ways of their own, often extolling social media mob mentality. The creator of the account themselves remained uncontrite after deleting the profile.

Screenshots of the since deleted freeheelwaifu posts

While the criticism for Madsen has been loud and often unwavering from a certain segment in the telemark community, many have stood by him and his takes. That includes Craig Dostie, long a central figure in the free-heel world, and a friend and collaborator of Madsen’s. 

Part of Dostie’s defense of Madsen is an opposition to the anonymous nature of the ire against him.  “Josh said what he said as Josh Madsen,” Dostie says.  “Josh had the integrity to say what he said as himself.”

Taking his defense a step further, Dostie maintains that those opposed to Madsen neglect to see how deep his influence runs. “They may not like Josh’s video persona, that doesn’t mean that unknowingly they don’t like his influence, because they do like his influence,” Dostie claims, further stating that Madsen’s impact has been instrumental to telemark’s rise. “Without his influence Scarpa would not be coming out with a new telemark boot. Because telemark would have died. I mean he’s that big,”

It’s all something Madsen seems to struggle with. “I think people sometimes maybe look at some of the things that I say and think I don’t want to progress forward or something, I don’t know,” he says. 

In the wake of the fallout, Madsen at first remained visible, battling openly on social media with several antagonistic posters.  But he eventually faded from view.  His podcast became inactive, while his subscription-only content on YouTube sputtered.  And he remained silent as Scarpa announced the release of their new Tx Pro boot, arguably the most important gear release in telemark retail in over a decade.  Amidst chatter of Freeheel Life’s fate, Madsen quietly listed the property for lease.  Though the shuttering of his business may not have been singularly caused by the controversy, it nonetheless marked a two-part silencing, both of pundit and proprietor. Neither Madsen nor any former Freeheel Life employees wished to comment on the store’s apparent closing.  

Madsen long remained silent - even some close confidants in the telemark world had little contact with him for months.  But roughly a year later the store’s Instagram eventually came to life with occasional posts, and the Freeheel Life website, before almost completely gutted, sputtered with a few used bindings for sale.  Then the site’s spare parts page was resurrected. As rumors swirled that he would continue his YouTube channel, Madsen posted to Instagram with what seemed like a reprise.

“I know a lot of you were wondering where I disappeared to—I went silent for a while. I was off-grid, unplugged, and fully immersed in the wild,” the post read in part.

“Eventually, I stumbled upon a yurt, perched high up in the mountains. That’s where I’ve been these past months, diving into every book on Telemark skiing, exploring the art of the perfect powder turn, and finding my rhythm in the purity of the mountain’s silence.

But now I’m back.

So let’s fucking go.”

Madsen then posted a blog entry to his Freeheel Life website, saying in part that, “I made the decision last spring to close the brick-and-mortar shop in Salt Lake City to focus more on my real estate business, which I started in 2020….the dream of running a true Telemark shop—the kind of place I’d want to walk into myself—was fulfilled. I proved many concepts, learned a lot from both successes and setbacks, and have zero regrets. Mission accomplished.”

Madsen also hinted at deeper reasons why he had closed the shop. “Along with these personal changes, there were also shifts in the Telemark retail landscape that I wasn’t entirely on board with,” he wrote. “So I chose to step back from certain aspects to stay true to my core mission: preserving, protecting, and promoting Telemark skiing. This has always been my passion and priority.”

Though the posts had the tone of a defiant, thoughtful return, they were unavoidably marked by an attempt to control the narrative. He had done much to cleanse his social media following of dissent in the aftermath of his controversial podcast last year (Madsen did not return requests for comment on his return). And his posts did little to acknowledge much that had happened over the preceding year; six-thousand followers lost, the blanket blocking of accounts deemed adversarial on social media, a mostly shuttered business enterprise, a divided telemark subculture.  Madsen’s role sits at best significantly diminished, at worst irreparably damaged, leaving endless questions of what character his return will take; just as the sport seems to be building momentum. 

While long a bastion of at least some countercultural disassociation, telemark is now adjacent to a modern zeitgeist.   On the back of a modern social media wave, it moves forward with contemporary gear, and with a contemporary ethos, positioned as a valid form of skiing, a wider view that the sport has not enjoyed in years. Telemark seems to have found its modern footing.  And the small telemark industry - from brands to ski shops - can now stand on the shoulders of a growing and more robust scene. All unavoidably influenced by Josh Madsen.

His fall and that of Freeheel Life seems to be an inflection point in telemark; a changing of the guard from a prevailing vision of where telemark should go to a new view, led by a new corps. Long an outlier in the outdoor culture, telemark has been thrust into a modern age of relevance and marketability, and for decades, Madsen led that charge, championing his views from on-high and by all means necessary, occasionally taking divisive, even adversarial views.

But as telemark forges on, as ever it does, this episode marks a hard look in the mirror. A new future is at hand for the ancient turn, due to the work of many, including Madsen. And while many will miss his way of anchoring the telemark scene, many others will not blink at his diminished influence.  

Still, Madsen’s messy departure and awkward reentry illustrates telemark’s fitful moves into modernity. On all sides, the sport has unavoidably tripped into the pitfalls of factionalism and competitiveness - no matter how heady, organic, and weird telemark may seem to be. Both looking back and forward appears a telemark world rife with the ever competing notions of what the sport means, with as many opinions and divisive ways to catapult them into the ether as there are different ways a person can turn on snow. 

“If getting rid of freeheelwaifu would somehow help to eliminate the beef as it were, that would be a constructive action, probably,” said the creator of the account before deleting it.  “But I think it’s just weird now; it’s going to kind of just remain weird now because there’s been this weird separation of two quite prominent groups.”

That separation - and now much of Madsen’s legacy - seems to be defined by not only a building disillusionment with his approach, but a single moment and the reaction to it.  On the other side of that method has been an indelible influence on telemark, granting it visibility and viability during one of its most fraught times.

But even as Madsen has resurfaced, in a markedly diminished role, it undoubtedly comes amidst a polarized free-heel landscape.

Where he and the entire sport goes next is anybody’s guess.