What is the ratio of AT to Telemark skiers?

Lowell, thanks for that post. I like your angle on the subject and have to agree, or disagree a little bit. <br><br>There may be many more AT skiers than telemark skiers because of the greater advantage that AT ski boots and bindings have over telemark in this particular time window of the sport. If you were to take a poll for Washington, you will likely find that splitboarding and snowboarding has skewed the balance because it is really getting better and more popular for backcountry travel. I'd bet that Utah has a higher number of telemark skiers, closer to the 40 or 45 percent margin. The snow conditions in Washington are seemingly much less forgiving but it may just be my perception.<br><br>I want to agree but I think the number has gone down to less than 40 percent telemark because there is probably 15 percent or possibly 20 percent splitboarders and snowshoe'd snowboarders heading out for powder and breaking the barriers that were once thought of as unbreakable. <br><br>Jerm is right on par with future technology I think.<br><br>

I learned tele from a young age. We skied adams and many of the other popular places. Muir for instance, and the tatoosh. In that time I rarely remember seeing AT, only tele, especially on the volcanoes. <br><br>So 60-40 AT-TELE makes sense these days.<br><br>And touching on the other subject, I've always thought tele was more difficult, not because of the turn, but because of the boot and ski. Back then I had flimsy boots and old wooden skis, sometime without metal edges. I remember that being a big thing...metal edges and I remember breaking my first pair after doing a bad header . Those things were antiques! It wasn't until I'd been skiing for 7 or 8 yrs until I ever went to a resort (making the learning difficult) and even then, there was only a few if any tele skiers (synonomous with BC skiing in most peoples minds of the time). Nowadays there seems to be more of both, AT and Tele off and on piste.  <br><br>On a side note, I remember one of the first snowboarders I ever saw calling us shitters. Supper highly intensified turbo tele electrified rippin skiers. Ha. I thought I'd pass that along.

I am afraid that I am one who is probably going to make the switch to AT. I have been skiing mostly lift served on AT gear for the last year (mostly out of necessity and interest to learn the new gear) and I am amazed at the efficiency of the ski experience. One problem concerning the efficiency, is that I feel that I am not getting nearly the workout (in downhill mode), and part of the reason I ski is for exercise. If I only had the time to ski more!<br><br>Lowell's historic post is very interesting. I feel that I very much lived that progression of steered to carved tele skiing. Learning to ski on the Europa 99s with low cut leather offered no other choice than to steer back then. Lots of banged hips and hematomas earned on the icy slopes of Mt. Cardigan, MA!<br><br>However, clearly that progression today SHOULD be much faster for the new tele skier. If tele lessons are taken for the novice, I would expect that while the stem initiation and steering would be an intro into the tele position, (and in themselves invaluable techniques that should be part of the skill set of any backcountry tele skier), carving a tele as soon as possible should be as important a goal for the beginner as it is for the new alpine skier.<br><br>Given the natural progression into and through the stem turn skiing phase being equal, learning to tele adds additional challenges that to me would make it harder to learn and discourage some beginners. First, if you are going to ski tele, the beginner is going to try to progress very soon into the tele position. This will require added challenges regarding balance issues (the free heel problem) and much more muscle involvement, muscle use that likely will be much more for those muscle groups than the new skier will be accustom to. Compared to the alpine/AT skier, where the stem can be very strong and the pleasure of skiing stems and hybrid stem turns can be done at an early phase, giving the new skier the pleasure of success in that early phase.<br><br>Having said that, I am pleased that I suffered the old nordic/tele gear. I believe that I learned valuable lessons of how to deal with difficult conditions with less than ideal gear. But once I realized that I would have to convert to plastic tele boots, and since I was often reverting to parallel turns in difficult conditions anyway, I felt that my old legs would appreciate a bit of a rest.<br><br>I don't think that the PNW is a bad environment for tele gear. I certainly will continue to use my tele gear for such locations as Cutthroat Pass and many others, such as many of the wonderful more moderate slopes that can be found. Just look at most of Charles' posts. That there are some radical slopes here doesn't mean that moderate slopes are not plentiful in the Cascades. Cutthroat is a perfect example. Unless you don't have nordic gear, it is a location where AT gear is less than ideal unless you hike in all that way on skis just to hit the few short steep slopes surrounding the pass.<br><br>Alan

Lowell's historic post is very interesting.  I feel that I very much lived that progression of steered to carved tele skiing.  Learning to ski on the Europa 99s with low cut leather offered no other choice than to steer back then. Lots of banged hips and hematomas earned on the icy slopes of Mt. Cardigan, MA!<br>

<br><br>Don't you mean Mt Cardigan, NH? I'm gonna be there next week! <br><br>Re:steered tele turns vs parallel, I would agree. I learned on low cut leathers and long straight skis (they all were then) and found steered tele turns could plow through uneven conditions easier than a parallel could because you could force the turn and do away with huge amounts of unweighting to get the ski to turn. In some cases, I felt the steered tele even had an advantage over fixed heel parallels...<br><br>

Here are a few points:<br><br>It would seem that this discussion is in regard to climbing with skins for the purpose of linking downhill turns. <br><br>So, I would point out AT vs Telemark for what purpose? There are a lot of folks who travel on skinny "tele" gear, with nordic cambered skis. A lot modern tele gear consists of alpine skis, cable bindings, and a free heel large plastic boot (and if one has fun on it, great, no judgement here).<br><br>Then there are those of us (or just me??) who are randonnee devotees but also continue at times to travel on and turn leather boots on nordic cambered skis. If conditions do not really allow good rando turns, or I want to cover some miles, I enjoy efficient traveling and turning on this gear. This gear is a throwback to when I stopped teleing in the bc primarily. To further confuse the issue, I like to do alpine turns on this gear about as much as telemarking. But I do enjoy a telemark turn with leather boots. I rented the plastic boots to tele one time and found it to be very strange since I started in 1976 on washrag boots.Other negatives for me are the duckbill boots for walking or climbing (!!##**) and the stiff duckbill not allowing the ski tail to drop like rando gear when stepping over a drift or log. I estimate that I can do the same ski tours (if &lt; 37 degrees and reasonable conditions) on my leather boot tele setup maybe 40% faster than randonnee if there is any approach. However, there are fewer turns and maybe fast efficient kick turns on the light tele compared to the strong turns on rando gear.<br><br>When I want to pound out turns on big terrain or steep terrain, randonnee equipment works for me very nicely. <br><br>If one considers the number of xc skiers on steel edge nordic skis, the ratio may be different.<br><br><br>

Given the natural progression into and through the stem turn skiing phase being equal, learning to tele adds additional challenges that to me would make it harder to learn and discourage some beginners.  First, if you are going to ski tele, the beginner is going to try to progress very soon into the tele position.  This will require added challenges regarding balance issues (the free heel problem) and much more muscle involvement, muscle use that likely will be much more for those muscle groups than the new skier will be accustom to.  Compared to the alpine/AT skier, where the stem can be very strong and the pleasure of skiing stems and hybrid stem turns can be done at an early phase, giving the new skier the pleasure of success in that early phase.<br>

<br><br>I don't think this is necessarily the case. In my limited experience teaching alpine this season, the stem christie seems to be one of the biggest obstacles on the way to parallel turns for beginners. The tough part for many is rotating that inside ski to match the outside ski. The geometry of a wedge turn makes it inherently difficult. With free-heal gear, the lead ski can simply be pushed forward a bit from the wedge and the skier naturally drops into a tele turn. Once there, newer-stiffer tele equipment makes the fore-aft balance issue much less evere than when we were learning on what were essentially basketball sneakers. <br><br>Since most skiers learning tele already have alpine experience, this is a tough comparison. However, I've known a few people who started on tele gear from the get go, and this stem-christie-tele turn came very early in the learning process. The hardest part is actually trasitioning between turns because they have little sense of how to stay centered  and balanced on the skis, a problem the lack of a fixed heel exacerbates. Personally, for a developing skier who has access to some instruction, I think this is a good thing for their development because it forces them to develop a well centered stance early on, whereas alpine gear allows a much larger margin for error.<br><br>I am teaching both tele and alpine this season, hopefully we'll get a few neophytes going direct to tele to add a few data points to this discussion.<br><br>

There may be many more AT skiers than telemark skiers because of the greater advantage that AT ski boots and bindings have over telemark in this particular time window of the sport. If you were to take a poll for Washington, you will likely find that splitboarding and snowboarding has skewed the balance because it is really getting better and more popular for backcountry travel. I'd bet that Utah has a higher number of telemark skiers, closer to the 40 or 45 percent margin. The snow conditions in Washington are seemingly much less forgiving but it may just be my perception.

<br> <br>Based on my experiences, I would agree. In the Wasatch and parts of Colorado, tele skiing is becoming hugely popular. Midweek at Steamboat you see tele skiers (many of them new) all over the place. Same goes for Taos, Wolf Creek, A-Basin... basically lots of places that have become known as "skier's mountains" where people live and ski and do little else. There are a number of places like this in the Rockies (and back east) where tele skiing has really exploded, and though these are in-bounds examples, these skiers ultimately add to the local population of backcounty skiers and tilt the AT/tele ratio. I would attribute this less to terrain and snow differences than I would to the history of skiing and climbing in each area. I think a strong history of mountaineering in an area lends its backcountry skiers to be more focused on ski mountaineering, so AT naturally becomes more popular. Jackson Hole is a great example. It is as much or more a skiers mountain as is Taos, or A Basin, Mad River, or Steamboat, and the conditions are just as good, but I noticed few tele skiers there relative to the others. This may have somthing to do with the fact that Jackson has a strong history of moutaineering, and mountaineers naturally choose AT equipment when they decide to venture into backcountry skiing.<br><br>Also, no slight to the skiers in the PNW, but I get the sense that the developing skier here is at a disadvantage compared to those in other snowy parts of this country. The lack of large ski resorts bears witness to that. Most skiers here seem to live in or near the cities and commute to skiing at small alpine day areas on the weekends. There are relatively few people who live, or have a second home, at a ski resort and get out nearly every day like there is in Colorado, Utah, Cali, Vermont, etc. These places tend to have lots of tele skiers because there are many very proficient alpine skiers who have a lot of ski time to devote to something new. Here, it seems to me that your average skier has less time to devote to learning a new skill, but is taunted by the vast opportunity that the Cascades backcountry presents. AT is therefore a natural choice, since it requires essentially no investment of time but opens a new world of access to the backcountry. This isnt to say that the northwest doesn't have a history of producing great skiers, it certainly does, but not in same the volume that other parts of the country do.