VAIL — By 2:30 on Friday afternoon, most Vail Mountain skiers have had enough, their legs toasted by too many laps on high-speed lifts and parched throats thirsting for après ski.
But the ski day is just getting underway for 15 members of the Vail Mountain School (VMS) telemark team. They burst off the bus, race up Bridge Street and board the Vista Bahn Express lift as though they are cramming for a final exam on free-heeled freeskiing from the mountaintop.
And, in a sense, they are.
It is a mere technicality the team’s “season” officially ended last month along with the school’s second tri-mester. The team’s top teleturners are still stuffing as many ski runs in as possible. After capping off their hour and a half at Vail, they load up for a four-hour drive that night to the powder fields of Wolf Creek Ski Area. There, it’s two more days of training before returning to classes on the school’s East Vail campus early Monday morning.
By Thursday they’ll be back on the road, this time to Mount Crested Butte, where their big test — the U.S. Extreme Freeskiing Telemark Championship — awaits.
“Crested Butte is pretty much the focus for most of these kids,” head coach and VMS upper school director Mike Ioli said. “But since the beginning, our goal has always been just to have kids enjoy all aspects of skiing, whether it’s doing backcountry hut trips, skiing the frontside, bumps, trees or whatever. That’s always been our goal: to be able to ski any terrain, not limit ourselves and just focus on the turn.”
For Ioli and the like-minded tribe of telemark skiers surrounding him, “the turn” is not a topic taken lightly. Tele-mark skiers differentiate themselves from their alpine cousins through bindings that attach to skis only at the toes — thus the term “free heel” — essentially employing a cross country skiing technique on downhill skis. The turning style traced back to Sandre Norheim of Telemark, Norway, in the 1800s is identified by dropping the knee and lifting the heel on the uphill ski.
“There are a lot of things that make it contagious,” said Kayo Ogilby, a VMS graduate who heads up a similar telemark team at the Colorado Rocky Mountain School (CRMS) in Carbondale. “All of us that telemark feel that, whatever it is — the gracefulness of the turn, the ability to get into the backcountry, the legacy. Something just grabs you, and I think it grabs young people in the same way.”
Hotbed of telemark
At VMS and CRMS, the telemark teams are the most popular among all sports programs. Ioli’s VMS team began as a club with only five members six years ago. Thirty-six students signed on this winter, forcing the coach to split the group into three squads.
“The school is always connected with the mountains and we’ve got a big outdoor education program, so we started as an elective and went out and just messed around two days a week. The next year we had 10 kids and it’s really just snowballed since then,” Ioli said. “It’s definitely our biggest winter program and it’s as big as our soccer program or our volleyball program. It’s probably the biggest team at the school this year.”
Ogilby is forced to cap his CRMS team at 26 in order to fit everyone on the two buses for travel. While the VMS tele-mark program is the state’s largest, the CRMS team formed out of student interest in 1994 is the oldest. Both coaches are excited to see the popularity of telemark skiing expanding to other high school and club programs in Summit County and Steamboat Springs.
“Colorado is really the hotbed,” Ogilby said. “I’d say one of the reasons is because of student interest at CRMS. They paved the way.”
Members of Colorado’s current youth telemark movement are eager to take up the torch lit in Carbondale, with competitors such as Summit’s Drew Hauser recently earning the junior world championship along with the national title for telemark ski racing. VMS students Kjell Ellefson and Rob Wear finished first and third, respectively, among the junior men at the 2008 U.S. Extreme Freeskiing Telemark Championships and Riley Ebel finished third among junior women as a freshman.
“I think it’s really good that we’re getting people back into it because I think the tele thing is really going to come back,” said Ebel, who plans to compete Friday at Crested Butte.
Fun film to make
With no collegiate telemark teams to strive for and a minuscule pro scene to aspire to, it’s evident that all the members of the VMS telemark team are in it for the love of the turn. Senior co-captain Cole Gras-kamp has gone so far as to document the season on film for a class project in conjunction with KGB Productions of Jackson, Wyo.
“It’s really as much an exploration into the discipline of film as it is to show something that I really love doing, which is the tele team,” he said. “Our team has grown as the telemark scene in the U.S. has grown and that’s really cool because we’re sort of like the youth movement that’s really starting to build the sport of freeski telemark.”
Said VMS sophomore Jordan Goldstein: “I’d love to see it grow, and it’s definitely cool to be part of the biggest tele youth movement in the country, I’d say. But in a way I do like how our sport’s kind of kept to a select few who can love it and appreciate it.”
