Can Telemark Skiing, or Any Micro-Niche, Be Self-Sustaining?
CJ Coccia speaks in animated spurts, projecting intently, his bespectacled eyes rarely breaking gaze. It's innate to the trendy telemark filmmaker who holds a Ph.D. in geotechnical and geoenvironmental engineering. And he's keen to aim that enthusiasm toward wondering if an off-the-radar activity like telemark skiing can ever sustain its own energy. Or if it's destined to fall apart, over and over again.
"Honestly, I don't think tele has evolved into a spot that's any bigger than what it was 20 years ago," Coccia, in many ways the sport's leading modern figure, says.
It all revolves around the cyclical nature of niche activities, like skateboarding or windsurfing. "The issue is telemark goes through these points of now we have movies, now we have teams, we have athletes and support. That got dropped, and we're back to nothing," Coccia says. "And we're just constantly going back through building the same framework that was already done before because it never stays consistent or we never get enough people to keep it going where it starts to grow more and more."
Coccia references the many free-heel media entities that have come and gone since the sport last rose in the aughts. Lipstick Films and Powderwhore Productions, movie houses that brought the bleeding edge of free-heeling to many during telemark's high times, have been shuttered for more than a decade. And there's Descender, the brash publication of the original telemark newschool, paused over twenty years ago, now only found on the Wayback Machine.
Strong cultural assets seem isolated to the good times for telemark, when enough energy brought not only stronger participation, but also stronger consumption of its media, both of which seem fraught now for free-heel skiing.
That reality is a stressor for Coccia, a filmmaker concerned with craft, but also continuity and legacy.
"I feel like if I were to stop right now, how long until someone else starts making films again and then they start touring it and doing this?" Coccia wonders. "I actually feel this pressure, trying to keep it up for the telemark community in hopes that somebody else is going to jump in and start to do it. And then it's going to inspire more people to do it because if not, we just keep doing this thing all the time," Coccia says.
The ski world of 2003 was, by all accounts, a very different one from today. Among the best-selling skis that year were hourglass-shaped mainstays like the Rossignol Bandit and Salomon X-Scream, planks whose memories evoke helmetless carving and Oakley wrap sunglasses of another time. Warren Miller's Journey was also released that year, marking the final film the legendary itinerant would narrate himself, some twenty-three editions ago for the moviehouse now owned by Outside Inc.
And 2003 saw another evolution in skiing, one that couldn't have happened perhaps at any other time. That year, a glossy, real-deal magazine about telemark skiing came to be, for sale at a newsstand near you. But like any subcultural institution-like any niche activity-Telemark Skier would struggle to survive.
Born as a spinoff of the eminent backcountry magazine Couloir, Telemark Skier marked a heady time for the free-heel scene. The alternative form of skiing had ridden a decades-long wave of intrigue, first in the leatherbound 70s and 80s as a countercultural slough-off of the lift-served mainstream. But soon the sport would have more than cachet. Telemark added plastic boots, trendy skiers, and the perception that its backcountry sensibility marked the true skier.
As high as those times were, the era represented something of a twilight for telemark. Though decades-old, Dynafit bindings would soon see widespread adoption, and with that, telemark participation ebbed. And, so, too did Telemark Skier Magazine. Just three years later, the title was dormant. Paraphrasing Couloir founder and publisher Craig Dostie, eminent skiing scribe Lou Dawson noted that "it was difficult to differentiate a telemark-specific book from other backcountry skiing magazines, as there is so much overlap. This made everything from selling advertising to designing the magazine a challenge."
That would be far from Telemark Skier's last gasp. Just months later, the magazine was back, this time helmed by Height of Land Publications, the owners of Backcountry Magazine. Soon, newschool upstart Josh Madsen-a big air shredder who would become the sport's most prolific figure-was editing the hardscrabble title before buying the entity from Height of Land in 2012. Madsen shook things up, presciently shifting to an all-digital format while aiming for a more sustainable international audience.
Still, Telemark Skier fizzled, jumping in and out of operation during telemark's retrograde before a final attempt to relaunch came in 2021. After just twelve months, the magazine again faded. This time, for good.
It's something that has befallen more than a few outdoor publications. Magazines like Dirt Rag, a grittier, independent mountain bike publication, ceased publication in 2020 after thirty years in print. Skiing has its own example in the eponymous Skiing Magazine. Long the counterpart to SKI covering the mainstream snowsports experience, Skiing was folded in 2017 when it was purchased by its competitor's parent company, all after a seventy-year run.
But these titles were part of a broader ecosystem. Skiing Magazine wasn't the only publication putting out stories on ski areas and technique; just like Dirt Rag may have had a unique perspective, but was far from alone in covering the mountain biking revolution. Though it was integral to the early run of publications like Backcountry, Couloir, and Cross-Country Skier, telemark skiing has rarely appeared in mainstream ski magazines for the better part of two decades. And while other telemark-leaning publications have risen-like the brash Descender of the Y2K years or Craig Dostie's blog EarnYourTurns–free-heel skiing's last fully realized coverage ended when Telemark Skier folded, a ballast the sport no longer enjoys. Just like the sport's filmmaking lay mostly dormant for a decade.
It all echoes a question Lou Dawson posed nearly twenty years ago; a query didn't just interrogate a telemark-specific publication, but broadly wondered how niche subcultures can be framed by media at all:
"Can you base a skiing publication on a turn and type of binding? I'd say the answer is yes if enough of a unique culture comprises telemarking," Dawson wrote. "But I have to wonder if that unique culture really exists other than in the minds of a few free heelers who still identify with the olden days of telemarking. I guess we'll see"
"Whether it's the Atlantic Monthly or Outside, the New Yorker or the oft-overlooked vertical Skiing, magazines, by the very nature of their slower production schedules, produce richer narratives than newspapers and websites," Marc Peruzzi, a former editor at Skiing, wrote in early 2017 in reaction to the title's closing. At its best, that deeper narrative asks broader questions of the subculture itself, where it is going next, and why we take part.
It also sustains a narrative, granting continuity and meaning to activities that are defined by action, but so often also transcend it.
Niche endeavors struggle to create and maintain that scaffolding. And it's not just in the way these subcultures consume thoughtful media in a saturated, digitized media landscape. It's how fraught the next generation of chroniclers always is in small, esoteric corners of the human experience; realms that are just as reliant on thoughtful discourse but rarely have the momentum to sustain it.
Writers who covered the telemark revolution have naturally moved on. Bob Berwyn, who once profiled telemark revolutionaries like Rick Borcovec, now covers climate policy after a career in local news. And writers like Peter Kray, the author of a ski novel and a senior contributor at Mountain Gazette, long ago reviewed free-heel gear and chronicled telemark's rise in Couloir.
And that's what telemark misses now-a generation of not just free heel skiers, but those who explore its topography. Without that, the subculture is destined to face the fate it has before, seen in the shuttered Telemark Skier and its departed moviehouses, or the countless niches in our world that only rarely find the limelight. Rebuilding, only occasionally, on forgotten ruins.
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, ‘Skiing and the Outdoors' Endless Struggle Between Art and Commerce: A View Through Dean Potter and "The Dark Wizard".
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This story was originally published June 24, 2026 at 11:12 AM.