Telemark and the Day Job

Many a telemark contributor - and even publication owner - has written on tele as a side gig. What does this mean for the sport if almost no one can make telemark content pay the bills?

Based on the low-brow nature of this website, I bet I'm not going to shock you when I say that I indeed have a day job. Low traffic and Instagram ignorance - not to mention meager writing chops - has left me little way of monetizing my telemark content, thus I land at a stiff and cold desk five days a week. While I have been sheepish to charge anyone to access my blog, I have added a sad 'Donate' PayPal link to the footer of my site. Don't feel obligated - I don't know if I would pay for this myself.

While my site isn't the most polished thing your eyes have ever gazed upon, I have managed to get published in a few places of a more professional bent (cue shameless plug). Somehow Ski Magazine ran my piece that pokes at tele-haters. And WildSnow posted my article - and blatantly self-aggrandizing photos - about the role that gear does or does not play in the popularity of free-heel skiing. While I’ve enjoyed being published, these efforts account for only a fraction of the pieces that I have hopelessly submitted to multitudes of publications over the last 12 months.

While I wasn't paid for all my published articles (surprise, surprise), I have made a little scratch from my writing. But these total earnings roughly equal the value of a single binding purchased at retail. This lowly sum could mean a lot of things: perhaps few want to pay for content in our internet age, no matter how well (or poorly) written. Maybe telemark continues to be too esoteric (or too in the weeds) for broader consumption in more mainstream outdoor publications.

But regardless of my low perch as telemark scribe, it seems I'm not alone in my reality as worker by day, free-heel writer by night. Even the few pros in the telemark writing space have seemed to succumb to the 9 to 5.

On the now defunct (and sadly no longer online) Descender Magazine – a sassy newschooler free-heel rag that ran in the late 1990's and early aughts – the contact page warned people to take it easy and not get bent out of shape if someone didn't respond to an inquiry right away; the publishers had day jobs after all. I wish I could still link it, their tone was wonderfully crass, and they had great content.

Eminent telemark writer Craig Dostie told me a similar story. Not only did his influential magazine Couloir struggle to make a profit over some 19 years, his labor of love that was the blog EarnYourTurns came to a halt as Dostie burned the candle at both ends, telling me “when I moved to Colorado I had a full time job and I was just like ‘you know what, I just don’t have the gas at the end of the day to keep putting info out on this.’” That was after Craig had spent ten years grinding out telemark articles on EYT, all free to the reader.

Even the fate of Telemark Skier Magazine – the most professional of all the free-heel publications – is in the same vein. Josh Madsen – owner of Freeheel Life, arguably the most important telemark retailer in the country – recently chatted with me about his purchase of the magazine in 2012. Speaking of his attempts at making it a success thereafter, Madsen said, "the biggest hamper to that whole problem was the advertising." He continued, "I acquired it under the idea that people were going to follow with the advertising, and I quickly, quickly realized that was not the case." Without solid advertising partners the magazine struggled to make ends meet, with Madsen adding, "there were not enough subscriptions at that point to make it viable."

In 2021, when the scene seemed again ready for a free-heel publication, Madsen made an attempt to relaunch Telemark Skier with a subscriber-based, online revenue stream. But he came up against the time-versus-money pitfall, saying, "we tried to launch that subscription model... and I think long-form writing is a piece of it...the ROI's not there for the long-form." Subsequently the magazine was discontinued in 2023. Beginning as the editor in 2009, Madsen – who had pushed to get Telemark Skier moving in creative ways on various platforms – had spent nearly 15 years fighting to make the magazine a success.

Madsen thus shifted Telemark Skier's energy toward the Freeheel Life retail front, putting the focus that may have gone to long-from toward subscription-based videos on the store's YouTube channel, saying "I've moved all of our content to video." In a way, Telemark Skier's fate was to be subsumed into something that actually had the ability to make some cash. Madsen's 9 to 5 - the ski shop and associated businesses - won out over the unviable nature of telemark long-form for its own sake. Though maybe it's little wonder that Madsen has long busted ass as a real estate agent.

So it goes for telemark content and the telemark writer. Though this plight is not isolated to one segment of the outdoor world, it has uniquely stark consequences for a community as small as telemark. What does it mean for the sport of free-heel skiing if there is no viable path to making any sort of living creating written content for the sport? How then will the torch be handed to the next generation of telemark recorders? One can't help but ponder where Descender might be now had they made enough dough to focus just on the magazine. Similarly, it stands to wonder if Dostie might still be writing on EarnYourTurns if there was enough cash in it to justify the time expenditure. I might even be prone to honing my craft if only I wasn't busy pretending to work 40 hours a week.

A written word vacuum now exists in free-heel skiing – like persists in our social media-heavy world at large. No matter how small the cadre of writers was before, it’s certainly even smaller now. Telemark content and its struggle for more depth and more volume fights against not only a question of wider relevance, but maybe more acutely against the contrasting and possibly mutually exclusive desires of its potential writers: to both create passionate content and make a living.

But while telemark skiing has always been low on just about everything, the Turn has always been full on passion. From cash to cachet, free-heel skiing has mostly avoided the limelight and the trappings that come with it, making its purity hard to miss - there is little scene and scarcely any social capital that comes from free-heel skiing and its content; there is almost no other reason to engage in telemark skiing besides telemark skiing.

And the same goes for content creation in the subsport. Any notion of wild (read: any) success is quickly extinguished by the realities of telemark's low cash value. To engage in the free-heel subculture is to do so based on passion, and very often passion alone. While lending itself to unanswered article submission emails and a Ramen-heavy diet, there is something pure in that no-frills, BS-lean silver lining.

In May of 2007, ski-alpinist legend Lou Dawson published a short blog post on the then independent WildSnow.com entitled "Telemark Skier Magazine Resurrection." In the piece, Dawson reported on the imminent relaunch of the magazine, then under Height of Land ownership. Poignantly, Dawson asked;

"Can you base a skiing publication on a turn and type of binding? I’d say the answer is yes if enough of a unique culture comprises telemarking. But I have to wonder if that unique culture really exists other than in the minds of a few free heelers who still identify with the olden days of telemarking. I guess we’ll see."

Dawson's comments remain front of mind to the telemark content creator - I myself, faced with knee troubles and several deep trapses into the weeds on myriad free-heel topics, can't help but wonder what kind of legs my telemark-only blog can have, no matter the depth of my own personal obsession (and hopefully yours). But I just love it, and I can't help but write about it.

Still, maybe a bigger tent needs to be a goal - maybe telemark needs to become part of the larger conversation and reemerge into the mainstream outdoor content machine for any sort of free-heel writing to be viable. Maybe telemark can indeed become more relevant someday. But for now, the topic remains weird, core, and poor. And there's something to like about that.

As Josh Madsen told me in our conversation, "the people that want to write about that specific topic (telemark): I think it's very important. But you got to get the people to buy into it as well, the reader, the subscriber." This age-old obstacle has stood in front of every writer, especially the scribe of the esoteric. The writer who pushes their content into the void sans paycheck instead of onto commissioned pages runs a particular risk of burnout and unrealized dreams. With that in mind, how do we get more people reading (and even paying for) telemark content? How do we get more people telemarking in the first place? The free-heel writer is probably destined to the desk job as long as these hurdles are left unsurmounted.

But all is certainly not lost. That which comes from a voice that makes little from its toils is borne on passion. Just look at those that came before and paved the way - Descender, EarnYourTurns, and Telemark Skier. Though they all eventually faded from view - and these entities scarcely made a fortune from their efforts - they paid the culture dividends in pure passion; the only currency that free-heel skiing has ever been able to rely on. If a 9 to 5 lets a few people do that, then maybe we have what we need after all.