Scarpa’s New Boots and Telemark’s Obsession With Death

Some are declaring that The Turn’s modern boots are the latest harbinger of free-heel’s end. But how did telemark skiing become so drawn to its own demise in the first place?

The gray-haired fellow approached the gondola car I had just entered and heaved his skis onto the rack. He came aboard, clad in a ragged black beanie and an old red jacket. But I was immediately drawn to his boots; their boxy toes and bellowed forefoot were the same style as mine. Telemark boots.

The gent had an easy smile and mellow air, a far cry from the constant tele jokes and ire I often endured at random in ski town bars and lift lines. We spoke mostly of equipment, and I mentioned that I had found an early favorite binding and boot choice. I also noted that a few of my telemarking friends had made a puzzling suggestion; that the equipment was far from guaranteed, and that I should start hoarding my favorite pieces of gear in case their makers thought better of manufacturing them.

“I would if I was you,” the fellow skier said.

From there I began taking part in several age-old telemark rites of passage.

I began hoarding gear.

And I wondered endlessly about when telemark might at last die.

Craig Dostie, the pony-tailed founder of the late Couloir magazine and now one of telemark’s leading elder voices, enters my home wearing heavy work clothes and circular glasses. He tiptoes around my two young children playing on the floor, and I offer him a beer. He seems frazzled by a long day—he has worked as an electrician for years now—but declines; he has a long drive ahead of him. And he doesn’t require a social lubricant to speak his mind in a stranger’s home.

“I don’t care about the TX Comps!” he says with a dismissive grin as I show him a demo pair of the telemark boots that will be released next season. I mention that the model is rigid, like its line-mate the TX Pro that came out last year, but it does ski well.

“Because it’s better balanced,” he says intuitively.

Dostie, nearly 70 years old, has always been a proponent of soft boots, even those made of leather. And that predilection has become louder with the release of Scarpa’s new, aggressive TX Pro and TX Comp boots, the first new footwear telemark has seen in a half generation.

“One thing I am certain of is that if the soft teleboot sensation becomes unavailable through the new generation of equipment interest in the turn will die,” he emailed me more than a year later.

Telemark has long been fascinated with its own demise. The specialized skiing technique was always on the margins. In its original form—a countercultural if byzantine approach to backcountry skiing using cross-country gear—it was far from the minds of most skiers, let alone the larger outdoor world.

But a mystique began to build in the late 1970s and 1980s. In an article written for the Mountain Gazette anthology Print Ain’t Dead, legendary outdoor writer Tim Cahill listed some of the writers that had appeared in the publication, ending with the famed Yosemite climber, outdoorsman, and writer Doug Robinson, whose work appeared in the magazine in its post-Watergate heyday. “Indeed, it was Doug who taught me to telemark,” Cahill remembered.

Throughout the 1980s, the free-heel ski technique became the choice method for descending wild slopes outside the confines of resorts, with a chorus of evangelists spreading the word. “There was a fairly concerted effort promoting telemark that began with people like Steve Barnett, Rick Borkovec, Tom Carter and Allan Bard,” Dostie says over email. “That gave it an underground appeal.”

By the 90s, telemark would be catapulted into a new, mainstream-adjacent standing by a single innovation; the plastic telemark boot. Collaborating with a then fledgling Black Diamond Equipment and several telemark leaders, Italian bootmaker Scarpa came to market with the Terminator in 1992, the first hardboot option for the otherwise leather-bound turn. And it proved revolutionary. Soon stouter bindings were available that were better suited to the burlier footwear, like the Rainey Designs SuperLoop and G3 Targa, instigating a performance ceiling that telemark hadn’t enjoyed before. And a small stable of other manufacturers—Black Diamond, Garmont, Crispi—soon joined in making boots, creating a moment of innovation and competition telemark equipment hasn’t seen since.

Thousands of people picked up the now well-regarded sport that finally had modern equipment. “Plastic boots were THE watershed event that propelled telemark into the limelight,” Dostie noted on the BackcountryTalk forum in 2020. “But the leather foundation prevented alpine skiers from taking their prognostications seriously. When Terminator arrived, all that changed.”

Telemark’s high times lasted for the better part of twenty years, instigating new binding norms, telemark-specific skis and shops, and a slew of magazines and movie houses.

Even in those golden years, the idea that telemark might die was still being discussed in mountain town pubs, lift lines, and mainstream ski magazines. “The ballyhooed telemark revolution? It never happened. Men with shaggy beards, knickers and knee-length navy blue parkas did not become the poster children of the ski world,” David Goodman wrote in his 1999 SKI piece “Is Telemark Dead?”

Goodman was a telemark skier and used the phrase as a cheeky entrance to proclaim that the free-heel method was doing just fine. “Please don’t send flowers,” the piece concluded. “Telemark is alive and well, thank you. And will be for as long as it holds out the quixotic promise that when you free your heel, you free your mind.”

But telemark’s moment in the limelight wouldn’t last, and its fall would forever change how the subculture looked at itself. As resorts like Alta, Snowbird, and, most famously, Jackson Hole started opening their boundaries, sidecountry and backcountry skiing became more accessible and trendy. Equipment like modern frame-style AT bindings became the new must-have ski gear, dismantling the notion that skiing in the backcountry necessitated a free heel. Then Dynafit bindings and their novel pin design—by then decades old—finally became commonplace.

As the alpine touring craze rose, telemark participation cratered. Available gear was discontinued. And the free-heel turn was soon the butt of jokes; no one cares you tele, lock the heel, ski for real, and, perhaps most cutting of all, telemark is dead, a trope then uttered as refrain by retailers and gear reps who couldn’t move free-heel equipment at the same clip they had just years prior.

Decades on, the theme of telemark’s death is deeply rooted in the sport; whether as a call-to-arms or even as a joke. “Just wanted to clear something up,” Tim Connolly, who with the late Mitch Weber ran the legendary telemark forum and e-zine TelemarkTips, posted in jest to Facebook in 2024. “Telemark is/was/and always will be DEAD.” He then referenced a slew of articles that had explored the idea over the decades.

To some, the new boots have marked such a departure that they are now declaring that telemark’s future may be at stake if there isn’t a strong course correction. “If telemark for the sake of the turn is to last for the long haul, soft flexing boots must remain an option. If they go away, so does the turn,” Dostie says.

The idea that telemark may die has birthed a related sentiment; what could save telemark? As alpine touring equipment innovated rapidly, some declared that modern telemark gear, especially boots, was the answer. “Scarpa has shown in the past that they not only have the ca-hones to lead where others follow, but they also have good instincts on what needs to be done,” Craig Dostie wrote of the bootmaker on his free-heel blog EarnYourTurns in February of 2014. “So I’m both pleading and provoking Scarpa to stop waiting for the tele market to grow and provide a reason for it to grow.”

By then, telemark boots hadn’t seen a meaningful update in some ten years. And others began to echo Dostie. “Where the whole system today completely fails, though, is in the boots.” Aspen Valley Ski Club telemark coach Nick Cherney wrote in WildSnow in 2019. “God bless Scarpa and the T2/T1 monopoly, but why on earth can’t we get a light tele boot that performs?”

Telemark’s underground DIY scene thought so, too. A USGS hydrologist and telemark tinkerer named Robert Tusso spec’d a 3D printed component from his garage in Flagstaff, Arizona that could be attached to Scarpa’s old bellowed AT boots, the F1 and F3, to make them compatible with the newest telemark norm. He christened it the Michael Bolt-on.

By the 2020s, Scarpa had been at work on a new boot for years. And each year, as ski season approached, the free-heel world nervously hoped to hear the news they had been waiting for. In the spring of 2024, news leaked that the new boot would finally be released in the fall. The telemark world swooned. Telemark even became relevant again amongst reps and shops—the TX Pro for a time was Scarpa’s best-selling preseason model of all their winter gear.

Telemark wasn’t going to die after all.

But a familiar figure soon voiced his dissent. “My skepticism on the new boot from Scarpa has been consistent regarding the flex of the boot,” Craig Dostie noted of his experience testing the early versions of the boot on his forum BackcountryTalk. “As I said earlier, it will probably break in and be okay, but my experience with the prototypes was it never broke in.”

The TX Pro was released to fanfare, and multitudes had lined up to preorder the boot from their local shops, even at $900 a pair. And chatter on the model reverberated not just in telemark, but even in mainstream skiing circles. Groomer-and-après focused SKI was the first publication in the States to break news on the new boot with the article “Why Scarpa’s New Telemark Boot Is a Very Big Deal.”

And many skied forth without a second thought. But the discussion started by Dostie began to stir. A forum thread discussing the TX Pro on BackcountryTalk.com attracted 207 posts and nearly 15,000 views. And a common theme arose; stiff boots, a struggle to find balance, and a difficult adaptation process.

To some, the new boots have not saved telemark as much as they have further endangered it. “If telemark for the sake of the turn is to last for the long haul, soft flexing boots must remain an option. If they go away, so does the turn,” Dostie says.

Telemark DIYer John Brody, a backcountry-focused skier who prefers tech-toe bindings and supple boots, and who has done much to influence the discussion on modern bindings and boots, echoes Dostie.

“The telemark turn is inherently different and challenging. The same qualities that limit its mainstream appeal make it endlessly fascinating to those who do it,” he says over email. “My concern with the new boots is that, by feeling a bit more like alpine boots, and by encouraging its skiers into a more upright stance, they might detract from the reasons new converts are interested in tele to begin with. Old timers will adapt, or die, or both. But if potential converts are able to demo these boots, and they feel kind of like alpine boots, and they push the skier into an upright stance, and maybe the skier does more fake-a-mark or parallel turns, there's going to be less of a reason for them to switch.”

The subjective nature of the telemark sensation was a challenge for Scarpa as they developed the new boots. “A telemark boot has the one very unique thing is that it has to flex and be stiff at the same time,” Scarpa North America CEO Kim Miller, who announced this summer he would be retiring after two decades in the role, told me in 2024. “It has to have this forward-aft bellows flex, but it has to retain torsional rigidity, and the flex is tricky to dial in, and everybody has different opinion on that because there’s so many different ways, styles to telemark ski.”

“These are the things that are really hard to quantify, we just want to put it out there and see what people think. And that proves out in testing, too, because the biggest thing we adjusted was the flexation, the durometer, the stiffness of the plastic in the bellows, the rest we pretty much nailed it in the first try.”

Many have enjoyed the new boots, proclaiming as much in countless telemark forums and gear reviews, with others saying the new models aren’t a paradigm shift as much as a normal evolution. “It took me a few runs to get used to the new boots but that’s no different than any of the other boot or binding switches I’ve made in the past,” telemark legend Adam Ü noted in the summer of 2025. “While they have the same bellows imbalance as the previous generation…the vastly improved tour mode and lighter weight make them my new favorite boot.”

On a dark February morning I’m driving to the ski area. Past the river shrouded in fog, through the traffic lights blinking yellow. Wearing an old pair of ski boots.

On a whim I had passed over my preferred footwear, the newest model available from Scarpa, and instead grabbed a soft, well-worn pair of boots that once were my favorite.

I park at the base, shoulder my skis, and at about 5:00am I start my chilly ski tour on the shuttered resort. On ascent, I find the boots don’t have nearly the functionality of the newest model; my steps uphill are short and inefficient. But soon I’m standing on the summit, looking out over the lights of the still sleepy valley, two-thousand feet below.

I turn my headlamp on to its brightest setting and push off onto the freshly groomed slope. After I reach a certain speed, I lunge into a turn. Then another, speeding down the deserted run. The boots are soft, forgiving, sensorial. I’m reacquainted with that old feeling. Two years later, I haven’t skied those new boots since.

At home, getting ready for work, I wipe the steam from the mirror after showering. I glare at the growing patch of gray on my chin, and pluck as many of them out of my once black beard as I can.

“I think the graying of telemark is a bigger risk than any single product or corporate strategy,” John Brody says over email. “It’s rare to see someone getting rad on teles these days. Younger converts can drive interest in social media and on the mountain and eventually lead to product decisions.”

From the first utterance of telemark is dead to the fitful release of modern gear, telemark’s death has often been declared, and its salvation always tied to products.

But the sport’s death may come from something far more ordinary; old age.

Still, tinkerers and thinkers like John Brody worry about telemark’s newest footwear.

“In the meantime, I’m still looking for ways to 3D print a boot,” he says.