4 minute read
“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.
Direct messages led to emails. A boasting “Look at me, I like to go on adventures!” image or two. Two dirtbag telemark skiers, too far from the mountains, commiserating. When winter hit, we decided we should probably just meet up and go skiing, damn it.
Waiting for this guy—not an axe murderer, I assured my friends— to arrive at the airport, I wasn’t positive we’d find one another. Two blurry, distant photos really wasn’t enough. But there he was, emerging from baggage claim. A fresh-faced long-haired guy in Carhartts, ski bag over his shoulder. Clearly too young for me. We’d just be friends.
We spent a full month in a Subaru. Two complete strangers, two people who’d known each other forever. Thankfully, the guy could ski (you never know with those internet dudes, eh?) and it turns out he wasn’t quite as young as he looked. Road trip foolishness took over, and we belly-laughed our way through the Rockies, tallying up new friends along the way.
I kept a running thread on the forum, updated daily: Tomorrow we’ll be at Loveland, the next day Telluride. Who’s coming out to ski?
People I’d met once—or never—put us up in their guest rooms, on their couches. One handed us the keys to his empty condo. They used their precious vacation days to give us private tours of their home mountains—Jackson Hole, Grand Targhee, Bridger Bowl.
We crossed the border, met up with Andrew’s telemark buddies in Golden. Somewhere around Nelson (or was it Fernie?) we decided we might as well get hitched. Jump in for the lifetime road trip. Why not?
We made our way back. Snowbird, Alta. On the final day, we were a gang of ten in Winter Park, suffering our way through the icy bumps of what felt like the worst snow year on record. But, assuming these grainy, grinning old photos don’t lie, we were all having the time of our lives.
We managed a couple summertime visits before following through on our marriage threat, eight months from that day in the airport. Amidst the heartfelt congratulations and expressions of surprise, our wedding trip report received proper critiques: Why didn’t you wear your tele boots under your gown? You couldn’t kneel in a telemark stance to cut the cake? But it was all in good fun, and par for the course.
That post, however off-topic, was full-colour JPEG proof: The TTips community and its dogs managed to bring at least two lost souls together. (And, near as I can tell, we’re still happily married—16 years, two children and five dogs later.)
*This Post Is Worthless Without Pics. Obviously.
Gaggle of telemarkers, Winter Park, Colorado, 2005.
