HISTORY
TTips for Life Early tele-ski forum serves up trip reports, dog pics and wedding vows words & photos :: Kristin Schnelten Ah, the once-ubiquitous internet forum. A smarter and infinitely nicer precursor to the Facebook group, a message board was a place for like-minded folks to gather. Kiteboarding your thing? Driftwood carving? Oompah-band dancing? No matter your obsession, in the early 2000s it took little effort to find your people. Telemarktips.com, TTips to devotees, was more than a forum for telemark skiers. It was, for a core group of a few hundred addicts, our everything. A source for industry news and gossip. How-to videos and interviews. Gear reviews, gear swaps. Trip reports. General dickwaving and chest-thumping. And, god bless it, dog pics. I discovered TTips as a lost 20-something, a little fish in the big city of Denver, stuck in a soul-sucking office job. I’d ditched my alpine gear a few years back, but my view of the telemark culture was still from the outside looking in. In the TTips forum I found community. We gave each other advice—ski tuning, trip planning, beer and music selection. Shared in each other’s triumphs, both on and off the hill. Encouraged one another through injuries and recoveries. Moaning about breakups was common. Inside jokes were rampant. We would
all be spancered one day. Each one of us was more fast and danger than the other. And none of us would be caught dead poodling. A decade before smartphone addiction took hold, logging in to TTips was the first step of every cubicle morning, its window forever being refreshed. Who would be the first wise guy to respond TPIWWP* on that trip report? What kind of shenanigans went down at the telemark festival last weekend? Really, what is your thigh circumference? My tenure in the desk job was short, and I found myself doing a brief stint in my midwestern hometown. I penned a thread: “Help! Drifting in a Sea of Rednecks!” and received the encouragement I longed for: It’s okay, kid. You’ll make it through this. The mountains will be here when you’re ready. The “Dog Pics” thread was my place, my home-within-a-home on the forum. When a newby attempted to post a photo and failed, I reached out via private message, walked them through the process. (Sharing an image to a forum was rough back then, folks—it involved servers, URLs, actual coding.) I assisted dozens of members before one decided to strike up a conversation. This AndyL guy admitted he was drifting, too, a couple thousand kilometres away. 41
