Pro Guiding Service - Why Randonnee?

Alpine skiers often associate backcountry skiing with (and only with) the free-heel bindings and the square-soled boots of the telemarking system. It's an unfortunate association that has kept many an alpine skier from visiting those powder stashes beyond Dopplemayer's domain.

Why?

Because the thought of learning a completely new turn, of being a beginner again, of grovelling in the snow for a season, of confining one's self to five-degree slopes, is too hard to endure. And so the notion dies.

Martin Volken, a Swiss ski-mountaineering guide and the owner of Pro Ski Servive, a Seattle ski shop (and Pro Guiding Service), sees it all the time. People come into his shop and if the conversation turns to backcountry skiing, they frequently say, "I'd like to try it, but learning to telemark would take too much time."

In an extreme case, a visiting Boeing engineer said he was about to revolutionize backcountry skiing. Out came drawings of a binding that could be used with normal downhill boots, could be skied in a locked-down position like a normal downhill binding, BUT could be unlatched at the heel to let skiers walk (or tour) through the backcountry on their downhill skis.

"Oh, you're the inventor of the randonnee binding," Volken told Mr. Boeing, taking him to the shelves in the store where the Silvretta 404 and Dynafit Tourlite Tech bindings were displayed.

The fact that he'd been beaten to the punch was for the engineer to swallow, but that these bindings have been available for 40 years was unfathomable. "Why haven't I seen these before?" he demanded.

Ignorance might be the harsh answer. But in this country, with most media coverage of backcountry skiing having a telemark bias, it's natural for skiers who have been spawned in the alpine pond to assume that telemark rigs are the only tools for the backcountry trade. It's natural that they have heard nothing of the randonnee system, telemarking's lesser known but more able brother.

Not so in Europe. In the Alps, the number of randonnee skiers (also known as alpine tourers) swamps the little pond of North American telemarkers. Every spring weekend, train-loads of European randonnee skiers exit the city and inundate the high mountains. Every spring week, hotel-loads of randonnee skiers tour through all nooks of the Alps, using the extensive network of climbing shelters for hut-to-hut tours. For every telemarker seen in these domains, another 99 skiers are touring with randonnee rigs.

Why this disparity? For starters, most of these European skiers were raised on downhill boards. These are folks who want to sample another slice of the skiing experience; who want fresh fluff; who want to explore what's beyond the resort's border; and who want to escape their families for a week of peak bagging, wine drinking, and lie swapping. What this crowd DOESN'T want is to learn a new turn.

Furthermore, Europeans know that in their mountains, the randonnee system performs the job better. In the Alps, lifts and roads bypass the mellow terrain leading to the high peaks--skiers are usually ascending or descending relatively steep ground. And although those skiers hope for powder, the reality is this: They're likely to contend with sastrugi, breakable crust, ice, deep sludge, AND powder... all on the same tour.

The zealots of telemarking will argue otherwise but switch hitters like myself, who spend an equal amount of time skiing each system, rarely disagree with this decree: MOST skiers can negotiate steeper terrain, cruddier snows, and icier slopes with randonnee rigs and downhill turns.