A Love Letter to My Favorite Telemark Setups

The first nip of cool weather means one thing: ski season beckons. And as the mind looks forward to winter, it has a way of thinking of things past. Bygone seasons resurface as the rosiest memories. The deepest days, the sweetest corn, the tangled recall of those hazy apres moments.

As sweet as those memories are, one of the most enduring keepsakes of winters’ past are the very implements that let us slide on snow: our skis. Going to the garage I run my hands over my planks, and those days I’ve been so lucky to enjoy come back to me all the more.

There’s my 22 Designs Axl’s mounted on Blizzard Brahma’s of many yesteryears ago. The active and stout 75mm binding–the grandchild of the revolutionary Rainey Designs Hammerhead–continues the legacy of hard-charging duckbilled gear. I long to take these out on a powder day, bashing through the late morning chop, feeling my quads scream as cable and spring gain tension, again and again.

Skied with my old, beyond broken-in T-Race, I have the beautiful balance of being able to ski aggressively with a wonderful freedom of flex–a delightful legacy of the old Nordic norm, perhaps nearing its demise.

The Axl itself may be on that last train home soon–22 Designs owners Chris Valiante and Collins Pringle have hinted that the binding may not be long for this world, their 2024 catalog speaking to borrowed time: “For those 75mm diehards, we will continue making the Axl for a little while longer.”

With that promise of short time comes a small savings account earmarked for a few of the last Axl’s, whenever their time may come.

Moving down the line I find one of my newer favorites, a setup in many ways more in tune with the new guard, though it borrows heavily from the old: my Voile Endeavors, the maker’s new, skinnier, mountaineer-oriented plank, mounted with their TTS Transit–amongst the latest in telemark bindings.

This setup–svelte, efficient, and touring-minded–also skis with a supple flex, naturally giving it a sweet telemark sensation.

And the Transit TTS bindings exemplify a free-heel world that has fully entered the modern fold. The two-pin tech binding grants a touring prowess on par with alpine touring counterparts. But the classic 75mm-style heel assembly gives the binding a flex not unlike its duckbilled cousins. It’s the best of both worlds. And skiing them on my Scarpa F3s–esoteric, soft, bellowed alpine touring boots from the aughts now only available used–grants me a unique skiing experience; slopless edge transmission, light touring capabilities, all with the free-heel feel I’ve come to love. Thank goodness I stumbled upon the bleeding-edge in telemark discussion –I would have otherwise never known of these gems.

Then I come to an old stalwart–at once an eminently skiable setup but one that is also a relic of another time: my K2 World Piste mounted with G3 Targas.

It’s almost hard to believe now that K2 once epitomized telemark, what with their brash free-heel marketing and ubiquity during the Second Great Wave of American Telemark Skiing in the 2000s. These skis were so popular–and often mounted with the equally omnipresent G3 Targa bindings–that they still fill second hard stores in ski towns the nation over.

But regardless of any past popularity, skiing this setup isn’t just a nostalgic trip. It’s a beautifully balanced rig, a neutral binding refuge with a dexterity foot-to-foot almost unheard of in today’s more active gear paradigm.

Alas, that’s because these skis are indeed not of this era–the technology has moved on, and for the better. And not only has K2 long since abandoned any free-heel trappings, G3 similarly left the telemark scene, dropping the Targa–possibly the best-selling telemark binding ever–years ago.

The binding, oft reviled, looked back on not-so-longingly for its cable’s propensity to catastrophically fail, deserves better. The neutral flex is still preferred by many, and remains a great tool for honing technique on the cheap. Any newcomer to the sport will not only find Targa’s mounted to K2s for a steal, this free-flexing setup will pay dividends to any skier’s craft as a learning tool. And, on capable feet, they still hold magic most any day out.

Sadly, it's not just the Targa that seems ill-fated for this world–G3 itself is teetering on the abyss, ordered to liquidate or sell its assets “as the Royal Bank has been granted a Receivership Order over the company,” as reported by Backcountry Skiing Canada.

It is all ephemeral, afterall. Like our memories, our seasons come and go, just as our skis do, moving toward that eminence front. The snow packs, as the skier tracks, people forget, sang Townshend . My mind, too, sometimes escapes to the evanescent, going to the setups that only survive in memory–like those beat-up blue Scarpa T2s, two sizes too big–and the Black Diamond O2 bindings my wife mounted on my Blizzard Bushwackers over Christmas of 2013– my first telemark setup.

My heart even goes out to the ones that literally got away. Whether from an ill-timed mid-slope fiddle or from yanking the binding completely off the ski, a few of my planks skied themselves into oblivion, and are now lost to time. They remain, somewhere in the woods, off trail, glinting now in the late summer sun, snuggled in a thicket.

But I return to what’s in front of me–and gush at my favorite (remaining) telemark setups–a cadre of equipment that is but a sliver of the permutations we may behold, but is as intimate and familiar as any inanimate object could be.

Related: Review: Scarpa TX Pro