Telemarking Grows Up: An old way of turning downhill sees an upturn in popularity

Ski patroller Dylan Meshew lifts his heel both on and off the job.

[appeared in the Durango Telegraph, March 5, 2020]

It appears the reports of telemarking’s death have been greatly exaggerated.

Announced in a May 2017 feature in Powder magazine titled “Telemark Skiing Is Dead” (and, perhaps to drive the stake deeper into its heart, subtitled, “The last story about telemark skiing, ever”), the article cited crashing interest in gear sales in the 2010s as a sign of the sport's imminent demise.

It attributed the passing of the 19th-century way to turn skis down a mountain, which had experienced a booming rebirth in the 1980s and ‘90s, to the sports’ “scruffy underground cool” going out of fashion. Noting that in 2017 there were no tele-focused ski makers and few boot manufacturers, the article concluded, “There are still a few thousand telemarkers in America, but that number probably won’t ever increase.”

Here in 2020, though, Matt Chmielarczyk sees it differently.

Radio Free Durango

DJ G has no idea who I am. But he changed my life.

That's what can happen to you if, say, like I was, you were up in the wee hours of a late night, drinking your x-teenth cup of coffee, scribbling bleary wisdom upon each page in a interminable stack of term papers, while listening to KDUR through a pair of those enormous deejay-style headphones that blot out all of existence outside the sound force-fed into your head. And on that night, the sound being force-fed into my head was DJ G's "Beats & Rhymes, Etc." show.

Counting blessings

I am truly blessed this holiday season: I’ll be passing it in a cabin in the woods.

Lava Lessons

I started worrying about Lava three years ago. That's when the Park Service reshuffled its Grand Canyon river permit system, and we were able to move our launch date from "someday maybe" to Summer 2011. A good time: my son would be graduating from Durango High School a month before we put on, and head off to college a month after we took off. A perfect rite of family passage for a family raised in large part on the river.