Destitute, Save For A Ski Turn

On New Year's Day, 1971, a ski racer from the chilly steppes of Gunnison, Colorado's Western State University, had a stroke of bad luck, the kind that might send most young men toward the saloon. Especially in a ski town in those wild Western days. He broke his leg in a downhill ski race, but while convalescing, that young man found something more than fast times and malted beverages.



The fellow's name was Rick Borkovec, and in getting back in shape that spring, he took to a pair of skinny cross-country skis mounted with clunky old rat trap bindings, skiing cross-country under the towering, crumbling spires of Colorado's Elk Range. Borkovec was striving for bodily redemption, but he was also chewing on deeper, psychic questions about self-discovery and deliverance.



"I started looking into the spiritual aspects of my life, reading the bible and going to church," he told Bob Berwyn in a December 2001 Couloir article. "It was a search for something more meaningful. By that time, I was 23, and it seemed like there had to be more to life than sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll."

A friend of Borkovec's had caught wind that descents were possible on those free-heel rigs they were skiing. Soon, they possessed a grainy old photo of Stein Eriksen's father using a genuflecting technique, showing the young skiers how free-heel equipment made for overland travel could be pressed into service for earning turns.



Borkovec and a cadre of Crested Butte skiers had rediscovered telemark skiing, just as other enclaves would do so independently in the Eastern Sierra, Vermont, and beyond. It was simple, really. And also revelatory. Using cross-country skis and three-pin bindings, they accessed the snowbound wilds. And with the lunging downhill technique, they could ski them, too. But the funky form of skiing Borkovec and his contemporaries stumbled upon would become something more. It would help start a movement; a rediscovery of an ancient form of skiing used in a new and exciting way, sowing the seeds of the modern backcountry craze. Multitudes took to telemark as the pious do scripture, framing their entire lifestyle while influencing movements to come.



Until each movement had come. And gone.

The generation now barreling into middle age–my generation–was one of the first to come about after the fall of discovery; of easier, if often falsely-defined firsts. By the time I made my way into this world via the cesarean method, not long after Black Monday, every book, rock & roll song, spiritual text, and even the math class-passed note had already been written, or was close to it. And every peak, slot canyon, far-flung mountain oasis, and revolutionary outdoor movement had been discovered, ogled, risen, and fallen.



My generation–the one that came up just after the fall but before the internet; amongst the pungent aroma of aging vinyl but before the scentless vapidity of social media–isn't named the Greatest nor for any boom. We exist in a nether region of relevance; a waypoint between meaning and entropy. We're amongst the first cohorts groping for purpose when all else seems to have been found before we ever had the chance to look.



So instead of definitive firsts, we search for meaning in fastest known times and the irony of the first marathon run in ski boots. We tread over the same ground, but in a slightly different, sometimes sarcastic way. Because that's what's left.



But from the outdoors and beyond, we still do occasionally stumble upon something more. It's in the icy, but steadfast method of the departed alpinist Marc-André Leclerc, who often told of his ascents–like soloing Cerro Torre or his Homeric climb of the megalithic Mount Robson–after he had quietly achieved them. It's in the essence–no matter how antiquated–of buying a record player. It's not just irony, but discovery. And like Leclerc, its meaning found in the style in which one takes to something.



And I found something new, something old, something all my own in the long, flailing, but strong sweet spot of a ski turn first made by Norwegian farmers in the dewy 19th century; the same turn that was rediscovered by a splinted college student who then ushered in a movement from an isolated mountain oasis. I found it in the telemark turn.



Anachronistic as it may be, and certainly discovered well before my time, there's something eminently personal, soulful, improvisational in the free-wheeling free-heel turn.



Where an alpine ski turn is marked by strength and precision, the telemark turn is something different. While using the same edged skis and sliding on the same snowy medium, the two-footed lunging turn is rhythmic in its lead change; a vulnerable moment in transition that gives telemark its bouncy cadence. It's an exposed moment where neither edge is engaged; a brief, intoxicating spell where only gravity is felt.



The problem? You've already heard it all before. You dabbled in the free-heel turn when it could only be made on rugged cowhide boots and was only taken to by the most steadfast; when the mystique was building around something countercultural, off-center, weird. You were there when the first plastic boots instigated a craze. You felt the boom; when backcountry skiing was synonymous with telemark, when anyone with an iota of might, ability, or even pride donned free-heel bindings, because that's what true skiers did then. And you saw the bust; the ascendence of alpine touring gear that dealt free-heel a mortal blow, when the anti-telemark jokes became ski town canon. You were there when Telemark came and went; I don't have to tell you.



Like so much else, it seems it's all already happened. Not just in climbing, or mountaineering, or moving West. Even in the quiet realm of a ski turn most don't understand, one that had fallen into obscurity. Every rock, so it seems, had already been overturned.

But something was left. It didn't come from the post-ironic moment we now live in, where everything seems an opportunity for a joke; where the kernel of genuineness is buried impossibly deep. And it came not from nostalgically escaping into the past, where many heroes live, but whose influence and movements are now irrelevant save for misty-eyed recollection. It came from within, and it was the rediscovery of what we lose when the world seems without opportunity, driving many to jaded irony in the first place.



What was waiting to be rediscovered was earnestness.



In Telemark, I found a continuity with what seemed like the idealistic before times, but more so, something all my own. And it pressed me toward seeing discovery in a new light. Highly personal? Yes. But able to penetrate through the jaded veil of irony and cynicism? Absolutely. And, perhaps more than anything, it showed that the past is no better or worse than our own moment.



For those prone to thinking (perhaps in my case, over-thinking, even criticizing), especially in this modern outdoor world we inhabit, that isn't always an easy feat. Perhaps make that double for an aspiring writer such as myself. In this world, one isn't just navigating their own prose but a tangled outdoor world ever subject to the muddying effects of the digital age.



Every webpage, affiliate link, and post can seem like a fallen wasteland of idealism, but somewhere the soul lives on; many a brave individual eschews the standard route we are presented in favor of something else.



And a free-flexing, lunging turn–especially its vulnerable changing of leads, taken to at speed and with a prayer–showed me that. Dancing with gravity, lonely and free, telemark grants that discovery–at least in microcosm–in every turn, one that ever looks the same but is somehow different from the last. Siddhartha's river, flowing on.

Destitute, save for a telemark turn? No, not quite, it turns out. More so shaken from a negative haze by a trivial, yet immensely meaningful action, perhaps not unlike one Rick Borkovec was; perhaps not unlike the many who came before us in what seem like more idealistic times.



What if our own era could tap more into optimism, reminded in body and soul that discovery lies in wait for each generation? Like many things, it's not what the act itself is, but more so what it shows the actor. That in a world where so much appears off or gone or already discovered, meaning remains, just waiting to be found.

About The Brave New World of Skiing Column

This article was written by POWDER writer Jack O'Brien for his bi-weekly ‘Brave New World of Skiing' column. Click below to read the previous column, ‘The Tangled Dance of Skiing's Happy Hour Heroes‘.

Related: The Tangled Dance of Skiing's Happy Hour Heroes

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This story was originally published May 27, 2026 at 9:03 AM.