Telemark and The Day Job

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Based on the low-brow nature of this column, I bet I'm not going to shock you when I say that I indeed have a day job. My penchant for a low profile and a deep ignorance of social media marketing - not to mention meager writing chops - has left me little way of monetizing my telemark content. Thus I land at a stiff and cold desk five days a week.

While I’ve enjoyed being published – and somehow lucked into having a telemark column of all things here at Powder – I can’t take much credit for being a ‘writer.’ Most of my working hours are spent elsewhere, and it probably shows. I have hopelessly submitted countless telemark pieces to multitudes of publications over the last 24 months, mostly to no avail.

But while I undoubtedly inhabit a low perch as a telemark scribe, it seems I'm not alone in my reality: desk jockey by day, free-heel writer by night. Even the few pros in the telemark writing space have been forced to lean on the 9 to 5.

Take for instance the now defunct (and sadly no longer online) Descender Magazine – a sassy newschooler free-heel rag that ran in the late 1990's and early aughts. Warning people to take it easy and not get bent out of shape if someone didn't respond to an inquiry right away, the site's submission policy stated in part: “We are three guys that unfortunately have other jobs and we devote all the time we can to Descender and putting out the best issue possible. We are busy.”

Descender’s short run was augmented by some twenty years as a wonderful little archive. But last year the site disappeared into the ether. For shame - their tone was wonderfully crass, and they had great content. Thank god for Wayback Machine - a telemark content resource that knows no equal. You can still find some of their articles here.

Eminent telemark chronicler Craig Dostie himself tells a tale of working two jobs - one for money, the other a profitless passion project based on free-heel skiing. Not only did his influential magazine Couloir struggle to stay out of the red over some 19 years, his labor of love that was the successor to the periodical - the blog EarnYourTurns - slowly became inactive as Dostie burned the candle at both ends, saying “when I moved to Colorado I had a full time job and I was just like ‘you know what, I just don’t have the gas at the end of the day to keep putting info out on this.’” That was after Dostie had spent an additional ten years grinding out telemark articles on EYT, all free to the reader.

Even Telemark Skier Magazine – the most professional of all the free-heel-specific publications – was fated to being cash-poor. Founded by Dostie as a companion to Couloir Magazine, the publication eventually came under the ownership of editor Josh Madsen – who now owns Freeheel Life, long one of the most important telemark retailers in the country.

Speaking of his attempts at making the magazine viable after purchasing it from Height of Land Publishing in 2012, Madsen said, "the biggest hamper to that whole problem was the advertising," continuing, "I acquired it under the idea that people were going to follow with the [that], and I quickly, quickly realized that was not the case." Without solid advertising partners the magazine struggled to make ends meet. Madsen thus found himself employing a myriad of tactics to try and make Telemark Skier successful in between routine hiatuses.

In 2021, when the scene seemed again ready for a free-heel publication, Madsen relaunched Telemark Skier with a reader-based, online revenue stream. But not only did subscriber numbers fall short, he came up against the time-versus-money pitfall, saying, "we tried to launch that subscription model... and I think long-form writing is a piece of it...the ROI's not there for the long-form." Subsequently the magazine was discontinued in 2023.

Beginning as the editor in 2009, Madsen – who had labored in creative ways on various platforms to get Telemark Skier moving – had spent nearly 15 years fighting to make the magazine a success. While the publication put out plenty of solid content over the years, its fate was eventually sealed by meager advertising revenue and paltry subscriber numbers. It just couldn’t make any money.

Madsen thus shifted Telemark Skier's energy toward the Freeheel Life retail front, putting the focus that may have gone to long-from toward subscription-based videos on the store's YouTube channel.

In a way, Telemark Skier's fate was to be subsumed into something that actually had the ability to make some cash (though Freeheel Life’s fate itself sadly appears in doubt at the moment). Madsen's 9 to 5 - the ski shop and associated businesses - won out over the unviable nature of telemark long-form for its own sake. Though maybe it's little wonder that Madsen has long also worked as a real estate agent. And it hasn’t always been clear which job is the side gig.

So it goes for telemark content and the telemark writer. Though this plight is not isolated to this one lonely corner of the outdoor world, it has uniquely stark consequences for a community as small as telemark.

What does it mean for the sport of free-heel skiing if there is no viable path to making a living creating written content for the sport? How then will the torch be handed to the next generation of telemark recorders?

One can't help but wonder where Descender might be now had they made enough dough to focus solely on the magazine. Similarly, it stands to wonder if Dostie might still be writing on EarnYourTurns if there was enough cash in it to justify the time expenditure. I might even be prone to honing my craft if only I wasn't busy pretending to work 40 hours a week.

A written word vacuum now exists in free-heel skiing – like what persists in our social media-heavy world at large. No matter how small the cadre of writers was before, it’s certainly even smaller now. Telemark content and its struggle for more depth and more volume fights on, but not only against a question of wider relevance, but maybe more acutely against the contrasting and possibly mutually exclusive desires of its potential writers: to both create passionate content and make a living.

In May of 2007, ski-alpinist legend Lou Dawson published a short blog post on his then independent WildSnow.com entitled "Telemark Skier Magazine Resurrection." In the piece, Dawson reported on the then imminent relaunch of the magazine, then under Height of Land ownership. 

Poignantly, Dawson asked;

"Can you base a skiing publication on a turn and type of binding? I’d say the answer is yes if enough of a unique culture comprises telemarking. But I have to wonder if that unique culture really exists other than in the minds of a few free heelers who still identify with the olden days of telemarking. I guess we’ll see."

Even seventeen years later, Dawson's comments remain front of mind for the telemark creator, and begs larger questions of what role telemark content can and should play. Is this a distinct enough subculture anymore to warrant such laser focus on one skiing technique? Does enough of a reader-base exist to sustain any telemark-specific publication, no matter how small?

As Josh Madsen summarizes: "The people that want to write about that specific topic [telemark]: I think it's very important, but you got to get the people to buy into it as well, the reader, the subscriber."

With that in mind, how do we get more people reading (and even paying for) telemark content? How do we get more people telemarking in the first place? The free-heel writer - probably always destined to the day job - is all the more so as these hurdles remain unsurmounted.

But while telemark skiing has long been poor on cash and participation, the Turn has always been full on passion. Free-heel skiing has mostly avoided the limelight and the trappings that come with it. While that has been detrimental in certain ways - namely spurring on manufacturing through demand - it also makes telemark’s purity hard to miss. There is little scene and scarcely any social capital that comes from free-heel skiing and its content; there is almost no other reason to engage in telemark skiing besides telemark skiing.

And the same goes for content creation in the subsport. Any notion of wild (read: any) success is quickly extinguished by the realities of telemark's low cash value. While lending itself to unanswered article submission emails and a Ramen-heavy diet, there is something pure in that no-frills, BS-lean silver lining.

But all is certainly not lost. Content that generates little revenue may not help pay many bills, but it can have deep value in other ways, as intangible as that might be. Just look at the telemark publications that we’ve had - Descender, EarnYourTurns, and Telemark Skier. Though they all eventually faded from view - and these entities scarcely made a fortune from their efforts - they paid the culture dividends in pure passion; the only currency that free-heel skiing has ever been able to rely on. And may that passion propel the next generation of telemark writers. If a 9 to 5 lets a few of them do that, then maybe we telemark readers will have what we need after all.