The Long Read: A New Vision for Telemark

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“Honestly, what did you think of the film?” he asked. Even through the phone his earnestness felt tangible to the touch. And, in the moment, it surprised me.

After an hour and a half of enthusiastically answering interview questions, pivoting on different tangents, and ruminating on what it means to be a modern free-heel skier, CJ Coccia - founder and chief filmmaker of the telemark advocacy group TELE COLO - was still excited to talk telemark. Even at that late point in the call, he genuinely asked for an appraisal of his latest ski movie.

In a ski world so often rampant with sound bites, cool consumerism, and big personalities to go with, the sincerity of his question was almost stunning. But it shouldn’t have felt that way. Coccia’s candor comes from neither bravado nor boastfulness. And the heartfelt nature of his endeavor to inject telemark with new energy - one that neither pays well nor brings wide notoriety - couldn’t be borne on anything but genuine passion.

And telemark needs it. Long a bastion of countercultural dogma before evolving into a mainstream-adjacent paradigm some twenty-plus years ago, free-heel skiing – once containing the hallmarks of a strong subculture – has more recently entered a state more like the quiet throes of retrograde. While the faithful still keep the flame alive, a vacuum has opened - not just in participation - but also within the energy of the scene. Be it book, article, or film, telemark struggles with a dearth of content.

But a modern flicker of hope has emerged in the form of Coccia’s 2023 film tour and his grassroots organization. His vision of telemark transcends the notion of the sport’s decline, instead pointing to a strong if not always visible vibe, especially in contemporary iterations of the sport. And capturing that in film and touring the work has given the subculture a rallying point it hasn’t seen in years.

Coccia traveled the ski town nation from Pacific Coast to Intermountain West and beyond.this fall and winter, showing the film in many a telemark oasis. Complete with an adjunct magazine, its newschooler vibe struck a new and different chord in a telemark world that often seems to trend grayer, though Coccia would beg to differ. A groundswell has followed, exciting patrons with a fresh vision of what form telemark skiing can take.

All it took was ten quiet years in the scene, and a skateboarding-turned free-heeling Ph.D who couldn’t help but pick up a camera and make a telemark movie.

Coccia, the main driving force behind TELE COLO and “This Is Telemark,” comes to the sport with a decidedly unique background. A geotechnical engineering Ph.D and Summit County resident by way of Florida, the high-energy and enthusiastic Coccia came of age immersed in the surf and skate scene of the Sunshine State, a milieu that first inspired him to pick up a camera. Musing on his path, Coccia speaks in long, excited streams. “I grew up in New Smyrna Beach, Florida with a background in skateboarding and doing skateboard films,” he says, “and kind of doing what you do as a kid: which is thinking whatever you are doing is life-changing or funny or important to document so we kind of always had a camera with us and that turned into us making skate videos.”

Coccia found his way to Colorado pursuing first his bachelors, then masters, and finally doctorate in civil engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “The Ph.D wasn’t so much that I felt like I needed that sort of level of education in civil engineering,” Coccia remembers laughing, “but I had kind of weaseled my way into a way that I could start to ski more, and be in the snow and enjoy the Colorado outdoors with that kind of schedule.”

Coccia made his way to the slopes, first on snowboard. But a connection in the Front Range skate scene would push him toward free-heel skiing.

“I happened to meet a really strong skateboarding community, and one of the people skateboarding here was Brian Strickland, and during the winter, funny enough, we would plan to meet up at the end of the day to go skate or something like that and he would always show up late”, Coccia remembers.

“And of course me being the dedicated kind of skateboarder I would always ask him, you know, ‘what’s up? We were supposed to meet here at five.’ His answer was always ‘Oh I went telemark skiing for the day.’ Which was something I had never heard of, was unaware of. I knew that alpine skiing obviously existed but knew nothing about telemark skiing.”

Soon the path was set in motion. Over summer beers with Strickland – Coccia vaguely remembering taking place at a Buffalo Wild Wings – he agreed to give telemark a try.

Coccia soon found himself not just telemarking, but absorbed in a sport with a welcoming subculture and challenging nature that inspired him to take part in deeper and more meaningful ways.

“There was something about that experience that felt, not so much as I liked the aspect that it felt hard – and I think that’s kind of a common use for why people say they tele, is because it’s hard, which is I don’t think is something I’ve necessarily agreed with” says Coccia, continuing, “but one thing I think that we as humans do all enjoy is something that’s a challenge which I do believe to be different than saying it’s hard. And something that feels rewarding when you learn something new or something feels better in your body or mind.”

Coccia quickly felt a belonging in the telemark community, a cadre he found unique in its friendly attitude. “The next step of attraction to me was how interested, how engaged, how animated this telemark community was,” Coccia says, noting how the mere act of donning telemark gear could create the impetus for an interaction.

“It’s really cool to me that, even me as someone new into the community and everything else, I didn’t know a lot of telemark skiers, I could get in the lift line and someone would say hi, they would ask my story, they would share their story.”

That inspired Coccia to take part in the telemark subculture more directly. “That kind of made me want to dive more into what was going on with the community outside of just the people I was meeting in the lift line – are there movie premieres that are happening, are there meetups?” Coccia remembers.

But by the mid-2010s, telemark had found itself well past the heights of its Second Wave that had risen on the momentum of the first plastic boots, culminating in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. The vibe and content that came with it had long since abated. “There were the films with Josh Madsen, and there was the Powder Whore films, and all of this stuff, and you would see some telemark skiing in Sweetgrass,” Coccia says, recounting the telemark film entities that previously existed. “But I realized once I was finally trying to engage and educate myself on this that that time had already come and gone.”

This motivated Coccia all the more to begin what he originally called Telemark Colorado in 2018 – a grassroots group that would advocate for the new guard in telemark through meetups, merch, and finally, telemark ski films.

“This sort of activity existed in the past but it wasn’t happening now, which kind of bummed me out because it’s really cool in the early season where you hit fall and you’re getting excited for skiing,” Coccia reflects. “You’ve got films coming from TGR, Matchstick, or Level 1 but I wasn’t seeing that anymore with telemark.”

CJ Coccia’s telemark journey had begun in earnest, but so, too, had a vision for recapturing the vibe that once carried telemark.

TELE COLO thus began in the most homegrown of fashions - with unofficial meetups, screen printed shirts, and engagement at telemark events like Tele Festivus at Monarch Mountain, and celebrations surrounding World Telemark Day, an event first put forth by Freeheel Life’s Josh Madsen on the first Saturday in March each year. Coccia saw an opportunity to recreate an atmosphere and energy that telemark seemed to have lost.

Things evolved quickly. In 2018 telemark luminaries Bevan Waite and Ty Dayberry dropped their trailer for their film “A Telemark Tale.” Though Coccia was only vaguely aware of Dayberry and his legendary free-heel exploits at the time, he saw the film’s release – and its seeming solitariness – as a chance to create momentum for the sport. He arranged a showing of the film in Denver for that fall.

Attendance was strong at the event put on by TELE COLO, with Coccia remembering the movie-goers representing a range of ages and backgrounds. That piqued Coccia’s interest – and showed him a latent potential in the telemark community, a corps starved for content. From there TELE COLO took to fall telemark film showings and premiers; the next year hosting Waite’s 2019 film “Our Family,” again including Dayberry.

By 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic had upended the momentum of the already threadbare telemark media world. Consequently, Waite moved on to other enterprises, but Coccia felt the verve continue to build; the telemark community may have been small, but its desire for content remained unrelenting.

2021 came around, this time with Dayberry taking on his Future Freeheel 2 project. This, along with Marshall Thompson’s film “King of Lurk” joined Coccia’s first ski segment, the park edit “WHY NOT?” rounding out TELE COLO’s first short film tour, and its first multi-state outing.

“My goal [was] just to keep the movies going, keep them touring, that was the first time we toured outside of Colorado so I believe that was seven or eight stops or so,” Coccia remembers, continuing, “it was really fun and again I’m seeing the populations grow that are showing up to these showings and seeing the excitement, people are just stoked there’s a telemark thing they can go to to get hyped for the winter.”

The 2022 film season thus came on the horizon, and with no other telemark films set for release, Coccia decided to move forward with another short film tour, again encompassing three movies – the Bishop Telemark-supported “Orange,” “MAYBE NOT,” the second in a series of telemark park films by Coccia, and “That’s Life” with Taylor Hennum.

Hennum’s film was exemplary of Coccia’s vision; that a telemark scene exists outside of what many might perceive as the standard free-heel route. To Coccia, the edit acted as a “non-narrated view into who [Hennum] was as a personality, kind of his trials through the season, and just to give people an understanding of… the differences in telemark and what sort of personalities existed versus allowing people from the outside to kind of assume that it’s an older collective of people, or people that have turned into dads or moms and they want to be interested on greens while they teach their kids again, or people that are on a granola diet and listen to Grateful Dead.”

Making the distinction that telemark indeed holds a newer school is important for Coccia, especially in the face of telemark’s perception as belonging to a previous generation. “I say all this stuff jokingly,” Coccia continues, “but also it comes from a place that I do think - weirdly enough - some people on the outside assume that telemark is a very aged thing and there’s not really a quote-unquote newschool or newer population that’s becoming interested into it.”

Coccia was long inspired to make a full-length telemark film that he could bring his own creativity to. And with that, his own vision of what he wanted a ski movie – especially a telemark one – to look like.

“Generally, I feel like ski movies went from just ski porn I guess you can say quote-unquote, and then all of a sudden the idea of B-roll came into play for better and for worse. I think it does a great job of laying out background of what's happening in a non-verbal way but it’s also a way to fill in movies, too,” Coccia notes.

“And then it started turning into a lot more heavy narratives where we hear about some person that’s getting to fly to Alaska and ride some spines or someone talking about how sick it is to make turns in powder, you know? Obviously there’s some movies that exist that take on bigger issues or a much bigger kind of goal to achieve…but overall you see a lot of privileged people that are narrating about something that only so many people are lucky enough to understand,” Coccia analyzes.

Coccia wanted “This Is Telemark” to be different from what he was seeing in mainstream ski films. “When I went into trying to come up with this movie, I knew that I wanted to keep the narrative more focused on fun and more focused on who, in a non-verbal way, so purely just showing kind of what I’ve experience with tele which is seeing the fun of it, feeling that turn,” Coccia says. “Instead of being the obnoxious person in the lift line telling people about it,” he says laughing.

Echoing Hennum’s 2022 edit, Coccia felt it important to illustrate the modern breadth of what it could mean to be a telemark skier – and that incorporating a cross section of contemporary skiers and styles would establish that continuum in the film.

This included Ty Dayberry, continuing his legacy as telemark film veteran-emeritus for the better part of a generation, and who continues to be one of the preeminent big-mountain telemark skiers. Coccia’s friend Greg Yearsley was also prominently featured in the film, bringing his laid-back park-oriented feel to the film, complete with an innovative approach to skiing and a cat joke or two. Coccia had become close with Yearsley through TELE COLO’s Kings and Queens of the Heel – a video competition where free-heel skiers earn points by completing objectives out of a task booklet, making an edit of their free-heel exploits, and submitting it to TELE COLO.

The film also included a group of skiers calling themselves the Tele Mommies – a crew of female skiers who’s fun but charging approach strikes its own divergence in a telemark world that often appears male-dominated. “It’s a really cool group of girls. Some of them have been teleing for all their lives and some of them have only been teleing for about a season and a half,” says Coccia. “And to be able to expose people to that cross section of a crew, to see how much fun they’re having, seeing them learn through the movie, seeing them just be with a good group was really important.”

Coccia took to the road, hitting more than a dozen stops over thousands of miles on the film tour. And reaction to “This is Telemark” was consistently positive. “I was blown away that essentially every stop that we had there was way more people than we had the previous year,” Coccia reflects.

Coccia feels the film’s disparate angles give something for most any telemark skier to gravitate to, saying “at the showings everyone was always stoked – a lot of people tend to like different parts. Ty Dayberry’s part is definitely the most big mountain-esque, most traditional ski movie focused type of segment, then you have the SLC crew segment, you have the urban segments.”

But beyond the specific edits people may have enjoyed, the vibe of the film as a whole seemed to connect with audiences. “I think people really enjoyed the light heartedness of it, you know, the movie’s not meant to be taken too seriously,” Coccia says. “it’s really meant to reflect everybody’s personalities, at least how I’ve seen them through my friendships with them, whether they’re kind of more serious or dialed or more quirky and cat focused.”

Patrons agreed, with one Steamboat attendee saying “the room was packed with free-heelers and supporters of all ages and the vibe was only what I'd consider the definition of ‘stoked,’” continuing that “it really was a fun spread of the current state and range of telemark skiing today, that leaves telemark skiing to whatever the skier wishes to interpret [it] to mean.”

Capturing telemark as a fun endeavor was paramount to Coccia, who says “I really want this movie to be an opportunity for people watching…to learn about the people that are in the movie.” The youthful casualness in “This Is Telemark” marks a direction the sport’s content hasn’t taken in some time, especially in a subculture where practitioners often count their experience in decades, not years, and who can seem to take a single-minded devotion to free-heel skiing. Coccia’s fresh take and background of disparate interests has injected the telemark world with a fresh energy, but also an alternative view point.

Asked if the film’s goal was to act as a counterpoint to the old guard in telemark, Coccia further explained his angle: “telemark skiers are very opinionated, right?” he said with a laugh. “We all have opinions on what the gear should be, is NTN even telemark, are you skiing too low, are you skiing too high.”

“I think this is a really cool community because you have enough care and love and happiness to actually share those opinions.”

With that Coccia’s “This is Telemark” adds fresh color to the palate of the telemark experience. Where the sport often finds itself thrust against old schisms – telemark vs. alpine, old gear against new innovation – and too often gets caught on dividing lines that can come from defending one’s free-heel camp, Coccia brings a different take, one that doesn’t wade into the territory of how someone should engage in the sport, but more so illuminates the different avenues telemark and the individual can take, and why someone might go that path. Almost invariably: because it’s fun.

With that TELE COLO and “This is Telemark” marks a departure from the usual in telemark and may be one of the strongest modern vehicles for moving the sport into the future, tapping into a younger, freeride oriented atmosphere. And in doing so, Coccia has not only been instrumental in molding the modern canon of telemark’s cultural content, but has put forth a more philosophical inquiry on what it means to be a modern free-heel skier.

Coccia hopes that he can be a springboard for others to create more innovative telemark content, even for those who may not have loved the film. “I think a good motivation for creating something in this world is because it doesn’t exist, right? I mean you think of a product to create, usually you’re trying to do that either because the product doesn’t exist or a version of it exists but it doesn’t accomplish the checklist that you want,” Coccia says. “So people go to these movies and, yeah, there’s a telemark movie, boom, that’s one checked box right there, but it’s not checking the box of what kind of skiing they want to see, or the soundtrack, or the type of skiers, or they want it to be more relatable.”

“I hope people go and check them themselves, and now we have more movies,” Coccia concludes.

Coccia joins a select group of telemark filmmakers and advocates that spans generations, including the eminent Dickie Hall, whose advocacy group the North American Telemark Association (NATO) kept the free-heel flame alive for more than 40 years, and whose 1987 film “The Telemark Movie” is paid homage to at length in “This is Telemark.” Individuals like Hall and groups like NATO did much to keep the sport vibrant and moving forward. Coccia’s work is certainly in the same vein. .

But he takes to the role as the next telemark troubadour in a decidedly modest fashion. “None of this was ever created because I wanted to be known or I wanted to be that guy or anything like that,” Coccia says. “To me it’s almost unfortunate that, in a way, for these things to exist there has to be some face, and I think it’s positive because people want to know where this is coming from, right? And not think that it’s just coming from the void or…some other media conglomerate, not that anyone would think that this is where that is coming from at all,” he says laughing.

“But truly I have no interest in being recognized as the telemark film maker of this time or ‘he was the telemark movie producer for this period of time’ or anything else.”

As much as that may not motivate Coccia, he may in fact be stepping into those shoes.