Head over free heels

Sun splashes out of a deep blue sky and down upon the white, nearly treeless slope called Mottolino, where Naheed Henderson pulls on her goggles and releases her edges, swerving her skis down the fall line.

Henderson, a deeply tanned 28-year-old outdoor-skills instructor from Victor, Idaho, lets her boards run straight for a few seconds, picking up speed. Just as velocity threatens her control, she launches into a turn that most skiers never make and many never even see.

While alpine skiers and snowboarders sensibly lock their heels to their boards, telemarkers keep theirs free. Their glorified lunge, with the front knee thrust forward and the rear knee dropped almost to the snow, looks goofy and unnatural, like a dog walking on its hind legs. Fans celebrate the liberated heel once a year at the globe’s biggest and most rambunctious telemark festival. La Skieda tests the liver as well as the quads, but it would be unfair to finger the free-flowing beer in all the crashes here. If your front ski lurches forward, the other wobbles back and your groin muscles nearly tear from the bone as skis windmill around your head like nunchucks, blame telemark skiing.

Tele experts maintain that their elongated turn provides better balance and bump absorption because weight splays over a greater area. Skiers of Henderson’s carving skill call it beautiful: a dance with the mountain or a genuflection to the snow gods. Intermediates deem it slightly less nutty than sliding downhill on cafeteria trays.

Of course, cafeteria tray riders don’t stage annual get-togethers in the Alps just to toast their unique mode of descent. Neither do snowboarders or alpine skiers. The fact that telemarkers do proves they’re either relentlessly social, hopelessly needy or both. In 2001, Skieda founder and organizer Luigi Martinelli tried to cancel Skieda, and 550 people from all over the world showed up anyway.

The unmoored masses

Between sampling as many Skieda events as possible in an attempt to understand the festival’s appeal during her first trip here, Henderson takes second place in the Free Heel Exhaustion endurance race. While she’s up on Mottolino pegging -- on one March day -- a leg-melting 89,000 vertical feet, a compact Vermonter named Dickie Hall knocks back an espresso, slaps on climbing skins and an avalanche transceiver and skis out of bounds with 70 other Skiedans.

“It really is skiing the way it was invented,” says Hall, who runs the coyly named North American Telemark Organization, or NATO. “Put your skis on, go wherever you want, use lifts, don’t use lifts. Go to the woodpile, go to the store, across Greenland, go to Denali, go to Aspen.”

In Colorado and Utah, skiers would fear venturing out of bounds in groups larger than eight because they need to move quickly through high-avalanche-danger zones. But with a significantly wetter, and thus safer, snowpack than in the Rockies, the gently angled slopes of Livigno’s backcountry can handle mobs.

The skiers in Hall’s guided party lather on sunscreen, unzip their turtlenecks to their sternums and laugh in several languages. A Scandinavian wears a pair of skis bearing a frequently seen bumper sticker: “Free the Heel, and the Rest Will Follow.” (Free heelers have, by definition, lost their moorings. In the Skieda parking lot sits a Beetle with this non sequitur across the rear window: “Telemark ... Releases Your Heel for Peace!”)

Forget peace. Telemarkers yammer constantly about freedom. Their gear -- lighter and more versatile than downhill skis or snowboards -- licenses all kinds of ascents. So they kick and glide and crosshatch the snow with a variety of zigzagging skin tracks.

Once they reach the bald 9,456-foot summit of Monte delle Mine, the skiers stash their skins in backpacks and enjoy another personal liberty: choosing a descent line on the vast expanse below.

Only a cynic would point out that telemarking also guarantees the freedom to humble yourself, and one does. He describes how a friend pitched onto his tips and cut an inch-long hole in his upper cheek, causing blood to pool in his orbital sockets.

A Dutchwoman trumps the American cynic. “I was skiing in Switzerland a few years ago,” she says in English, “and saw a telemarker hit some crusty snow. He fell forward and popped his eyeball out on his ski edge. I tried to put it back in for him but could not. Bad weather hit, and he had to wait a day for a helicopter rescue. He lost the eye.”

Note to the novice: Always telemark with eye protection, be it sunglasses, goggles or welder’s mask.

The Italian influence

Like its famous counterpart on the other side of the Swiss-Italian border, Livigno inhabits a broad lake- and river-cleaved valley framed by 3,000-foot escarpments.

While St. Moritz lures the international jet set, Livigno attracts bargain hunters. The whole village is a duty-free zone, and seekers of booze, perfume, cigars and electronics crowd the streets. Swiss and Italians drive a hundred miles to Livigno just to fill their Fiats with its cheap gasoline.

Still, it’s unclear why this of all places stages telemark skiing’s biggest party. Shouldn’t it occur in the birthplace of Sondre Norheim, the farmer who invented the turn in 1850 in the Norwegian county of Telemark? Or in Crested Butte, the rugged Colorado ski town where modern telemarking evolved in the early ‘70s?

At the time, nobody telemarked -- not even in Norway. But all that changed after Rick Borkovec broke his leg. An alpine racer, he was rehabbing his injury on free-heeled cross-country skis when he decided to mimic photos he’d seen in a book of skiing history. He began executing pronounced telemark turns, and before long Crested Beauticians by the score were trying the stylized technique. It suited the hippie soul. It was countercultural, for one thing. For another, the longhairs could escape to the backcountry, far from the prying eyes of the Man.

American telemarkers eventually reintroduced the sport to its native continent, and pockets of free-heeling sprouted around the Alps. Livigno isn’t necessarily the biggest or most ardent tele hot spot in Europe. But it is centrally located. And in the words of Ace Kvale, a photographer, telemarker and former expatriate who spent 20 winters skiing the Alps, “nobody parties like the Italians.”

He shouts these words one night at a mountaintop restaurant, Carosello 3000, amid a huge Skieda dinner bash. Wine bottles, lined up like battalions on a counter, vanish as quickly as the inhibitions of the 300 attendees.

On the bandstand, four Italians in Tyrolean hats blast Lynyrd Skynyrd, Creedence Clearwater Revival and Tracy Chapman -- a mix that would not seem to constitute dance music but does. A flurry of snow-white arms and sunburned faces bop along in a sweaty conga line.

“People come here for the fellowship,” says Hall. “Skieda lets them hang out with other telemarkers, so they can be a majority for once.”

Shindigs like this one, where hips from 20 nations bump on the dance floor, convince telemarkers that they’re mainstream.

Telemark may be the hottest category in the ski gear business, with sales increasing 30% annually. It may be much easier to excel at the sport with today’s telemark-specific skis and stiff plastic, alpine-style boots. But telemarkers make up less than 5% of the total skiing market.

When the 2006 Winter Olympics commence in Turin, a few valleys west of Livigno, telemark’s elite skiers will be elsewhere.

Yet telemarkers still come across like vegans and NPR listeners: They’re absolutely sure they know better than the unconverted.

Big Turn triumph

On two hours’ sleep, before the collective Carosello 3000 hangovers fade, Henderson slips into the backcountry. An accomplished extreme skier, she recently notched first descents in northern China’s remote Altai Mountains. By indulging her thirst for wild terrain, she misses the chance to triumph in the Surprise Race.

It’s a surprise anyone enters. In this event, the first racer to escape a thick forest of bamboo poles, which on the rebound smack competitors into ugly human pileups, faces a new obstacle: a swing-set-shaped metal structure. In place of swings, though, weighted pillows dangle from the crossbar.

As a racer threads through these stalactites, attendants try to pillow-whip him.

Next comes a spine-jarring, shin-high washboard of hardpack. Then an 8-foot jump. Followed by circumnavigation of a huge golf umbrella. And so on.

In America, where there is a certain pious reverence for the turn, such preconceived fun might not fly.

“Telemarking is too competitive in the States,” Henderson concludes after a few days at La Skieda. “Here, it’s not so serious.”

Perhaps better than any wingding or contest, the “Big Turn” proves her point. Held at a party awash in polenta and vino rosso, it invites 208 skiers to clamber up a hill, link arms and dip their knees in a mass synchronized turn.

Jokes Kvale, “We may as well do a group dental floss.” This feat takes two hours to achieve, and the waiting drives the Europeans to take up their requisite cellphones and cigarettes.

In the end, the Big Turn proves absolutely nothing except that telemarkers can join together and make skiing’s least stable maneuver. And for this they cheer, exchange cheek-to-cheek Euro kisses and party into the night.

Rob Story is a freelance writer based in Telluride, Colo.