I <3 Telemarking

That's Telemarking, not Telemarketing.

Some friends were in town this weekend and wanted to go snowboarding. I took them out to Afton, but since I'm not a doofy snowboarder that sits in the middle of the piste and goes in terrain parks, and coupled with the fact that I just spent 3 days killing it in Utah, I wanted to try something different.

So I rented Telemark Skis.

This is something I've never done, but have always wanted to try. Whenever I'm ripping it in the steep & deep on a powder day, I'll always notice that I'm surrounded by telemark skiiers, and it's just something I had to try.

Anyways, I took about 5 minutes getting my boots into the bindings, awkwardly reaching around to my heels, looking around to see what I was doing. I saw the nearest lift was the bunny lift. Since I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, I took it up. I took 2 turns, quickly learning where my weight has to be distributed. I fell on my 3rd turn, and the binding popped. It was easy to click back in. I got up and headed towards a normal lift. Later I found that a little bit of speed & gravity makes skiing easier.

I figured things out pretty quickly, and I was having a lot of fun despite how slow I was going. I finally found my friends and we took some a run together. They were going pretty fast and I decided to speed things up a bit. I fell really hard onto my hip. I slowly got up, and skiied down.

I progressively got better, still skiing greens & blues, (which are actually greens & super greens anywhere else) getting m0re excited on each run. This is fun.

I took one more hard fall onto the same hip. I've got a pretty nice bruise there this morning.

By the end of the day, I was comfortable going down the steepest stuff at Afton, including some of the very narrow "steep" pistes. During my last runs, I was taking long, sweeping turns on the big "blacks." If you're an attention whore, this will get you some attention. People will definitely notice you (at least if you're far from concentrations of telemarkers)

I'm not comfortable with speeds that I'm used to on my alpine skis, but it was really entertaining. The snow was chewed up from all the skiiers that day, but since it was cold all day, it was a 2" sheet of dusty powder, so I was blasting a big white cloud behind my ski on each turn. This felt awesome--it had an organic feel that I've never experienced on other downhill skies.

I'll definitely telemark again.