TV Blog: Could a Mainstream Manufacturer Come Back to Telemark?

Long ago, telemark teamed with gear.  Speaking of it is to almost invoke dinosaurs and Bronze Age civilizations.  It happened on this earth but is so detached from the current time as to seem fantastical.

Brands that would later seem far from the free-heel world were then integral to its rise.  The late Canadian backcountry firm G3 and their Targa binding – a model now often reviled in retrospect, usually unfairly – may be the best-selling telemark trap of all time.  And Black Diamond, the legacy climbing brand, then not only carried a line of both bindings and boots, their relationship with Scarpa made them an integral force in the creation of the first plastic telemark boot.  Even a plethora of skis, from Rossignol’s Sickbird line to Mike Hattrup’s definitive K2 models, gave telemarkers specific options for their entire rig; boot, binding, ski and all. And all these SKUs could be found in the mainstream skiing publications, their advertisements gracing the glossy pages of magazines for the skiing masses to see.

The ski paradigm has changed, and most now regard the notion of a telemark-specific ski as unnecessary – though Bishop Telemark’s free-heel only planks with their mounting plate under only the toe before giving way to a tapered sidewall in the rear of the ski offer an interesting counterpoint.

Still, the cadre of mainstream outfits that then manufactured telemark gear was impressive.  And it’s a reality that seems not only twenty years removed, but light years from our current gear landscape.

But it’s a dream that has long danced in the telemark hivemind. And this notion is closely related to the grow-telemark-and-gear-will-come mantra. If enough people came back to telemark, this thinking surmises, maybe we wouldn’t just get new gear from our own makers, maybe the titans of the fixed heel world would jump in with their gigantic manufacturing capabilities, injecting lowly telemark with a massive does of R&D.

But could a bigger manufacturer come back to telemark?  And what would it take?

Jason Quintana – engineering graduate of both Dartmouth and Stanford – was the chief designer of Scarpa’s T2eco.  And to this day he designs and 3D prints his own releasable telemark bindings.

Invoking the hypothetical example of K2 rehiring the legendary extreme skier Mike Hattrup – whose aforementioned work at K2 was a lynchpin of the previous rise of telemark –  Quintana lays out a vision of a big alpine player going for it in the telemark boot space.

“It would have to be something like that, where somebody that's the ski boot line manager just loves telemarking and sees an opportunity for a minimal investment,” says Quintana.  “Because they’re doing this full line of alpine molds anyway and the boot happens to be well set-up that we could do an insert in the mold to put a bellows in and then just use the more expensive Pebax material for the telemark version.”

But Quintana sees this possibility as fraught with the dearth of telemark skiers not just in general, but in design and decision-making roles at the larger manufacturers.

“If it's an alpine-based company that doesn't have any history of telemark, it doesn't have any passion like in the engineers and the managers there, it's just not going to happen,” Quintana says. “Because it's still not going to make any business sense to come out with a dedicated telemark boot, it would have to be something that they leveraged other investments to enable. I could see it happening, but it has to be the right personalities at the right time.”

Perhaps before a big player gets back into the telemark game then, free-heelers need to get on the inside. Step one may be to infiltrate the mainstream companies with more telemark skiing engineers, designers, and managers. Then a big player may take the step again.