Education

To learn is to stay young. Always learn to keep the mind of a child within.

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I drifted into Colorado in 1991, chasing winter and postponing whatever respectable life was supposed to come next under the noble pretense of taking a transitional year before pursuing graduate studies. Which is to say I had no plan whatsoever and a healthy distrust of anyone who did, yet what unfolded was less a delay than an initiation into a different mode of engagement. That’s what we all say before the thing grabs us. 

 

Landed in a ski shop in Frisco, a retail circus of wax fumes and half-baked mountain prophets, surrounded by gear and talk. But what caught my eye was one man’s refusal to conform. I didn’t “discover” telemark skiing so much as it detonated in my brain like a feedback loop I couldn’t turn off. I encountered telemark skiing not as equipment, but as gesture—an improvisational act inscribed upon terrain. 

 

His setup looked like junkyard poetry—leather boots, cables, salvaged skis—but the way he moved? Total groove. This was some kind of back-alley mechanical heresy. Leather boots with Frankenstein cuffs, cables flapping around like improvised restraints, and skis that looked like they’d been liberated from a pawn shop.

 

It looked strange, like rebellion, yet the skier moved with an authority that transcended the materials. Smooth. Clean. He could go anywhere.  It was not technique alone, but a form of expression. He skied like water flowing downhill. Flowing like he’d made a private deal with gravity. Like watching someone who understood rhythm at a molecular level. I didn’t try it right away. Big mistake.

 

My own initiation came a year later in Breckenridge, lousy snow year, morale questionable. A friend drags me out after a dusting, a couple inches of fresh over something hard and honest, just enough texture to feel something.  I drop into this awkward, lunging stance and suddenly; boom, there’s this connection, felt the mountain breathe.

 

The snow gives, responds, talks back, the yielding surface, the tactile dialogue between body and mountain. I feel the snow collapse like a bad political system, and suddenly the whole thing makes perfect, deranged sense. In that moment, telemark ceased to be an alternative and became a necessity. That was it. Hooked.  Abandoning alpine gear was less a decision than an inevitability. I ditched the fixed-heel orthodoxy within weeks. Burned the ships.  

Later that season I watched the Telemark Nationals, proof that this lunacy had a method. I saw the truth of it, discipline inside freedom. Not the lazy sprawl of the backcountry pose, but something coiled and deliberate. I recognized a crucial evolution: the transformation of an ostensibly free form into a disciplined practice. It’s like hearing a band you thought was sloppy suddenly lock into something impossibly tight. Compact stance. Power. Control. I saw how it could be done on hard snow. Tight stance, brutal weighting. Strong on the back ski, control where there should have been chaos. Not loose like we had been doing. I was all in. 

 

The compact stance, the weighted rear ski, these were not constraints but refinements, evidence that freedom acquires meaning through structure. This wasn’t just style, it was discipline disguised as freedom. Telemark became not just a way to ski but a way to stand in the world—unlocked, adaptable, suspicious of rigidity. Telemark isn’t just skiing. It’s a permanent state of controlled instability.

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I came for winters. Stayed for summers. Over time, telemark skiing became one axis among many. It has been a good life.
But life here isn’t one note.  Always trying something new, badly at first, obsessively after.
The mountains gave me everything and took some back. Friends lost. Days gained. Lessons paid for in both directions.
I find the pattern persists. figuring things out the hard way. Same as telemark, really. One engages, adjusts, perseveres.
These days I’m learning how to live with less and fix what breaks. Tried to keep my hands busy and my mind unowned.
Which feels, frankly, like the only sane response left.