Telemark Tinkerers: Robert Tusso

This is the first installment profiling DIY innovators in telemark skiing.

Spend much time traveling the dark backroads of the online telemark world, and you will start to see a familiar handle pop up, again and again: @bobbytooslow . Whether on Instagram or seldom-traveled telemark forums, this screen name appears always near the bleeding edge poignantly dissecting the telemark experience, whether culturally, or most astutely when discussing gear.

That figure is none other than Robert Tusso–an adept free-heel skier and tourer (and quite fast trail runner) who is amongst the sport’s leading DIY innovators. His inventions and innovations–and his penchant for sharing them–have been visionary, placing him amongst the sport’s latest in a long line of home innovators.

And telemark skiing has long been a bastion for homespun invention. Part of the sport’s very conception in this country was as a DIY work-around. Legend has it that the contingent of Crested Butte skiers often credited with rediscovering the Nordic downhill method in America weren’t necessarily looking for the telemark turn in the first place–the backcountry trail blazers experimented with many other descent techniques on their cross-country gear.

As told by Brad English in the 1984 book Total Telemarking, Rick Borkovec–one of those telemark pioneers–recalled, “the snowplow didn’t work very well for us in deep powder, and the parallel turn seemed too unstable on free-heeled binding and flexible boots. We eventually worked out the basics of the telemark, guided by an old picture I had seen of Stein Eriksen’s father demonstrating the turn.”

Since that time, telemark skiers–long without a robust industry and the hefty R&D budgets the rest of the snowsports world enjoys–have been left largely to their own devices save for the few remaining manufacturers in the scene. Thus many of telemark’s innovations have been developed in DIY garage laboratories. The telemark tinkerer has worked endlessly to not only find the turn that lets them ski on free-heel gear, but to also engage in the telemark in the most efficient and powerful ways possible. While free-heel touring equipment has made strides with advents like the recently revamped Tx Pro boot from Scarpa, telemark equipment is still marked by heavy, inflexible iterations compared to alpine touring counterparts.

Related: Review: Scarpa TX Pro

That reality inspired Flagstaff, Arizona-based Tusso to jump into the world of free-heel DIY. In the process, the hydrologist has become one of the most influential home creators in all of telemark. But before that, Tusso was like many telemark skiers–relegated to the gear of the day.

“I started tele skiing in 1998, and up through 2010 I was content to use whatever was on the market. By 2010 it was T-Races and Black Diamond O1s,” remembers Tusso. Taking a step back from the sport, Tusso jumped into distance running. The group he eventually got in with took to the slopes during the winter, skinning for fitness.

“Flagstaff has a very large endurance athlete community, lots of top, top marathoners and trail runners. And so a lot of the folks I would run with and train with would spend their winters skinning at the ski area for training,” says Tusso.

That group–using miniscule skimo racing setups–illustrated how far telemark gear had fallen behind alpine touring equipment. “I started going back to skiing with those guys and they were on ultralight Dynafit setups,” Tusso remembers. “Their whole setup weighed less than what I had on one foot with my heavy Black Diamond skis and O1s and even using my old T2s I was getting blown away by these guys.”

From there Tusso was inspired to create telemark gear that was on par with skimo equipment, striving for lightweight and touring-centric features. He jumped into the world of telemark DIY, where he became acquainted with the bleeding edge in telemark gear, centered around the use of Scarpa’s light, bellowed AT boots from the early 2000s–the F1 and F3–and the then novel tech toe in telemark gear, known as the Telemark Tech System, or TTS, first developed by Mark Lengel’s Olympus Mountain Gear.

“I got a pair of the Olympus Mountain Gear–the original TTS–and they had their benefits and drawbacks,” says Tusso. “And I found a pair of F1s, that helped a lot, mounted them on some skimo skis. I just wanted to try to get lighter and lighter and better and better. And that led down the DIY binding rabbit hole I guess.”

Tusso dove into the deep end of telemark DIY creations. Growing up in a home with an engineer parent and a machine shop, he had the knack and the know-how to put engineered mechanisms together. Tusso collected and experimented on various telemark bindings as well as the Scarpa F1 and F3 boots, even taking to removing their Vibram soles and sanding the plastic down from the boot itself to give it a flex that worked for his biomechanics.

One of the most consequential DIY inventions in recent telemark memory came next from the mind of Tusso: a 3D-printed new-telemark-norm midfoot connection (known as a "duckbutt," a play on the "duckbill" toes of 75mm boots) that could be affixed to a Scarpa F1 or F3 to create an NTN-compatible touring boot. It was playfully christened the Michael Bolt-On.

Tusso came to the idea after purchasing a Meidjo binding, the first NTN-compatible tech-toe trap developed by Pierre Mouyade of InWild (then known as The M Equipment). But the innovative binding–light and sleek– did not have a complimentary touring boot available at retail.

“I got a pair of Meidjo’s and I liked the way they skied, but to me touring in an [old model] Tx Pro is a non-starter. Once you’ve been in a boot like the F1 with this huge range of motion, unless you have a natural touring stride to tour in a pre-2024 Tx Pro, the weight and the range of motion, it’s not fun once you’ve experienced how pleasant it can be in other boots,” Tusso says.

The tinkerer in Tusso took over: “I said ‘well, I’ll see if I can make this F1 work in the Meidjo.’ I just sat down with my calipers and measured the duckbutt on a Tx Pro and modeled it up and pretty much the first one I had printed and attempted mounting worked.”

Tusso then shared his work on telemark forums, and made the CAD file available on Shapeways, a 3D-printing platform where free-heel skiers could purchase the item to affix to their boots themselves. Word spread in the small confines of the telemark online world, with many skiers applauding the work and proving the innovation out on snow. The process showed not only that there existed demand for lighter telemark boots, but that one could be eminently skiable.

“I think I did sell 200 or 250 individual duckbutts, so a 100 or 125 sets and then probably shared the file to another forty people who then shared it with I don’t know how many other people,” says Tusso. “But there’s a lot of them out there. And I think the point was proven that telemarking can be done on light-weight gear–everything is relative I gues– it’s still not skimo-light but it’s lighter.”

Ironically, the creator of the most sought after and shared modern telemark DIY component–the bolt-on NTN connection–feels the platform now plays second fiddle to the telemark tech system with its tech toe and cable/cartridge heel assembly. “In my opinion, the second heel is a bit of a dead-end engineering-wise,” says Tusso. “You can make real-heel connections that ski great, so I don’t see why you need it. And part of the enjoyment for me is trying to push the equipment in the direction that I think is the best direction to go. And for selfish reasons, for what works for me and the type of skiing that I do and want to do. It proved its point and it’s time to focus on cool TTS stuff in my opinion.”

Tusso’s work has been prescient. Not only has the Scarpa developed their new Tx Pro largely along the touring lines that Tusso and others have explored, the mini-telemark industry has picked up on the TTS binding all the more, with manufacturer Voile releasing their TTS Transit binding last season, the first model on the platform in a turnkey, non-DIY iteration.

Even though telemark manufactures have run with several recent DIY innovations of late,Tusso sees the telemark DIYer–always one who has inhabited the fringes–as continuing their endeavor as before. “DIY has always been people on the edges anyway, right? Either gate-racers who needed something stiffer or tourers who needed something lighter,” says Tusso. “And so those 10 percent of the people on those two ends will still continue to tinker.”

Telemark owes dreamers like Tusso much. From the Crested Butte contingent that rediscovered the telemark turn in those halcyon 1970s, to the hard-skiing “norpiners” of the 80s whose innovations presaged the first plastic telemark boots. Telemark–in practice and in industry–has long been a bastion of free thinkers with a do-it-yourself bent. This dogma is integral to the sport, and continues to the present day, one whose retail offerings are in no small part influenced by this cadre of innovators.