The first turn I ever made on skis was one I had learned, more or less, out of a book that must have been produced before World War I. I found the book in the Denver Public Library, just as the next war was ending.
I had never skied and owned no skis. But when I saw the sleek arcs the skiers made with telemark turns on the powdery Swiss slopes in the old pictures, I decided I would learn how to do those turns. I had no idea that telemarks were as out of date as raccoon coats.
My parents bought me my first skis from a Denver pawnshop as a Christmas present in 1945, when I was 16. On my first outing, I climbed a prairie hill. Coming down, I fell to avoid the barbed-wire fence strung across the bottom of the slope. End of outing.
The next time out, on a hard crust higher in the foothills, I did pull off one turn, so quick and surprising a flip-around telemark that I stood unsure of what had happened. I couldn’t make it work again.
The telemark was supposedly invented by Sondre Norheim, a carpenter from Telemark, Norway, who won the first national ski competition with it in 1868 at Christiania, now Oslo. It works well in deep powder, since the skier makes a linear incision instead of having to shove snow aside with the tails of the skis, as alpine skiers do.
That’s the technique, essentially: Push one ski forward and slightly inside until its binding is at the tip of the other ski. With the young and flexible, the inside, or back, knee drops all the way to its ski. Very graceful, like getting knighted over and over, all down the slope. It takes a free heel, of course. That was easily achieved with the cable bindings we used when I started skiing.
I worked as a copy boy at The Denver Post back then, and though the toe plates of my secondhand bindings kept slipping when I turned or fell, I managed to stop some of the play by inserting slugs – lines of metal type – that I picked up off the floor of the composing room. When I took the YMCA bus on weekends and rode the long rope tow at Berthoud Pass, I concentrated on the alpine turns that the real skiers were doing, and the slugs helped enough that I survived that first winter.
I don’t remember trying to do a telemark again during my next two decades of off-and-on skiing. But I remember seeing a Warren Miller film in the 1950s that showed, for comic relief, a skier dipping a knee and sweeping around in a telemark. Miller’s voice-over comment was “I yust come over the old coun-tree.” Har, har.
That was the usual tone of references to telemarking in those days, but it wasn’t because of the unfashionableness that I quit trying it. It was just that nearly all my skiing was on developed slopes, mainly in Southern California, Washington state and finally Colorado again. Getting off into the powder was an impossible dream to me, a middling intermediate at best.
In my mid-30s, a transient newspaper writer and editor, I left Denver for the third time and thereafter lived mostly in Texas, Mississippi, Arkansas and Kansas. I didn’t ski again for nearly 30 years.
In the mid-’90s, telemarkers were still pretty much the vegans of skiing society, looked upon as interesting zealots and not widely emulated. That has changed. I see numbers of them dipping and rising down the runs every time I ski. Some of them head down the vertical cattle chutes off the ridge at Taos. Not I.
For me, the telemark has been a way not to timberline ridges but to gentle trails in the woods. The first time I tried it with what serves now as the right equipment, meaning broad, shaped skis, plastic boots, and cable bindings that free the heel, was on the hiking trail to Williams Lake, above the Taos Ski Valley. There was a foot of new powder.
It was midafternoon. I had no climbing skins, but just to get the feel of the snow, I half-sidestepped a few hundred feet up the trail, then turned downhill and, during a short, slow glide, tried stiffly to make the lunge that I had read about in that library book so long ago. It worked! My skis, true, ended in an embarrassingly intimate relationship with each other. So what? I had wanted to make that turn for 55 years. I was delighted.
The next day, now with skins, I set out early and climbed for an hour and a half. Coming down, I found that even when the narrow trail took off at right angles in the deep snow, the new turn worked perfectly. Almost perfectly. Once, I ended up on my side, half buried. But that was fun too and nobody was around to see me struggle to my feet and brush off snow.
In the Texas Panhandle town where I live there aren’t any telemarkers my age; any telemarkers, period. So I go off to the Rockies alone, stick to easy trails or unused forest roads, and leave word to send out the troops if I’m not back by a certain time.
Sometimes, too, I still ride the lifts and ski the packed slopes alpine style. If I’m lucky on the way down a nice green run, I find a slope of unused powder to do telemarks in.
At the bottom I look back and shake my head at the sloppy tracks. But OK. I turned, didn’t I? And I never figured on being in a book.
Donald Mace Williams, the author of “Timberline, U.S.A.” and the novel “Black Tuesday’s Child,” lives in Canyon, Texas.
