Forever Intertwined: The Telemark Turn and the Jamband

On a toasty spring day I'm bounding down the slushy south-facing runs at Steamboat, lunging on pin bindings with low-cut boots through hero moguls and corn snow. It's not my usual tele gear-I'm typically found sporting aggressive boots and the newer, stiffer binding norms. But today I'm leaning into the free-flexing equipment and vibe of a time gone by. The gear is slack, lending itself to loose turns that feel like a leap of faith in a way the more rigid modern gear long left behind. It's a challenging and full-sensory experience, made complete by Phish's 1997 tour blaring from my iPhone's tiny speaker nestled in my jacket's chest pocket.

I first took to telemark–at least in part-because of this music. As a painfully nostalgic teen who gravitated more toward Crosby, Stills and Nash over the anthems of my day; as someone who later discovered Phish, Panic and Cheese, the heady, ganja-perfumed free-heeler who also seemed to like that music always held a certain allure for me. Even as a young alpiner, I looked on at them with awe, at once enamored with their graceful skiing and their absolute command of three days at Red Rocks.

But most-within and outside of telemark-would prefer to not be defined by that anymore. From newschool to old-including those who never liked the jambands in the first place-the stereotypically heady music of the telemark skier is as dismissed as ever. And it's not for no reason. For many, a desire lives for those ideals to evolve into something more mainline, marketable, and, yes, modern.

But while the telemark turn's sweet spot remains the main draw, free-heel's mellow, long-mandateless subculture itself has a certain allure. And the soundtrack to that was long the wandering basslines and driving guitars of the jamband.

That music has long been a quiet focal point for a free-heel world forgoing on into modernity–one quote I can't shake comes from CJ Coccia, perhaps the leading modern figure in all of telemark. Coccia once elevated a newschool edit because it illustrated telemark's bleeding edge instead of "allowing people from the outside to kind of assume that it's an older collective of people, or people that have turned into dads or moms and they want to be interested on greens while they teach their kids again, or people that are on a granola diet and listen to Grateful Dead."

But telemark has long evolved fitfully, often at the confluence of its more stoney iteration and something more mainstream. That tension even existed in the earlier years of North America's free-heel movement. Yvon Chouinard famously called out Peruvian hat-clad pinners and their supposedly meek turns in Paul Parker's seminal telemark treatise Free-Heel Skiing: Telemark and Parallel Techniques, first released in 1988. And telemark's original new school-brash, sarcastic, and hard-skiing-similarly found a foil in the hippies, with outlets like Descender not only artfully framing the rising telemark newschool of the late 1990s, but also its aversion to being lumped in with their progenitors; the hipped-out pinners.

But telemark has also long carried that subversive, countercultural, and–yes–jamband-leaning tendency. Not only did the likes of Widespread Panic and String Cheese play an outsized role in the soundtrack of 1990's mountain town life, free-heel and the jamband then shared a high water mark. While the stoned-out Deadhead seems an apt metaphor to some for describing an elder free-heel dogma some of the newer guard are repelled by, there's more to tele's long affinity with the jamband than those seemingly endless, tedious solos coupled with an archaic approach to skiing.

Telemark was then transgressive, and purposefully resided in a countercultural space. Steve Barnett's thank-you to one Bill Nicolai for Grateful Dead tickets decades earlier in the intro to his iconic 1978 work Cross-Country Downhill and Other Nordic Mountain Skiing Techniques wasn't so much a specific nod to Jerry and the boys as it illustrated the countercultural zeitgeist both telemark and jambands long inhabited. Off-center, often misunderstood, but wonderfully free and improvisational, the two crafts were a perfect marriage, and, to those who bristle at the modern movement toward optimization, remain so.

Still, The Turn seems to not only be less heady, but losing its subversive streak as time goes on. Skiing, in large part, has moved on.

But I–and perhaps many others–feel differently. From taking my three-pin rig on the resort for spring laps to skinning up the resort with a little tune in my head, I've always felt a certain inspiration from the likes of The Dead and Phish. And no matter how many may roll their eyes at the description of a type II jam from Vermont's finest, I still find it embodies the freewheeling free-heel turn in a certain, perhaps cosmic fashion. Because taking to The Turn remains the choice of those who go off piste in mind as much as in ski approach to find freedom; just like the jamband explores the edges of reasonable music to uncover moments of transcendence that could only be improvised.

Indeed, telemark's allure lies in the many ways it can be endeavored. And to a few of us-–from the first modern telemarkers who danced forth with heels free not long after Woodstock, to those who still like their telemark with a little long-form improvisation-still find it incomplete without the jamband.

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This story was originally published June 9, 2026 at 3:44 AM.