The AT binding revolution is also eliminating the fakeamarker, a wide-scale, generational phenomenon of people who got into backcountry before AT bindings were any good. Now these people—and I’m not belittling, my dad is totally one of these people—don’t have to fight it anymore. If you’ve spent the past 10 years making unstable alpine turns on tele skis then yes, AT will give you the freedom to finally get you weight forward, but if you really want to exercise your downhill free will, telemark.
Heather Hansman is an editor at SKI and Skiing. heatherhansman.com
Freedom Locks
Freedom, my friends, is a wonderful thing. It’s given us the opportunity to choose among hundreds of microbrews, the Tea Party a political concept to rant on about, and the ability to decide to head into the mountains with modern equipment that functions well or lesser designs that lead to faceplants, slide-for-life falls down icy couliors and crazy twisting crashes with skis flapping about one’s face like a $10 slicing, dicing kitchen gadget that can only be ordered on TV.
Of course, those who telemark don’t like to discuss the tips to the face, the inability to attack manky snow conditions with confidence or the fact that it’s really, really sketchy to land big (or small) airs on bindings that really don’t work so well. But that’s OK, they have the freedom to choose equipment that sucks. And that’s fine by me, because I have the freedom to choose equipment that allows me to ski faster, make more kinds of turns, have more fun and go just as many places.
The old worn-out justification of telemark skiing was that it made it easier to go into the backcountry. And that might have been true. But, as anyone who understands Darwin’s theory of Evolution knows, things do, well, evolve. That’s the case not only for animals but also for computers and for outdoor gear. And when it comes to backcountry skiing this evolution has been a good thing. Hell, even most telemarkers have switched from leather boots to high performance plastic designs that allow them to actually use the edges that come with their skis (skis which, by the way are often designed for alpine skiing, with evolved features such as rocker). But somehow the evolutionary thought process of telemark skiers stopped when it came to choosing their bindings, despite the fact that Austrian innovator Mathias Zdarsky showed us the future of skiing way back in 1896, when he developed the Lilienfeld ski binding, and people started skiing down mountains rather than touring beneath them.
