Why I Even Tried Telemark Here
I had skied alpine for fourteen winters before a guide in Hemu handed me a pair of three-pin bindings and said, “Try this on the cat track, just once.” I fell within ten metres. I also laughed harder than I had in years. That awkward, graceful, fundamentally silly discipline is telemark skiing, and in Xinjiang it is the best-kept secret on hills that everybody else is bombing on shaped skis.
The strange part is how well the landscape fits it. Most resort guides assume you want to ride lifts and carve groomers. Telemark asks the opposite of you: it rewards patience, a quiet knee, and a willingness to look ridiculous on day one. Xinjiang’s long, mellow approaches, its forgiving side slopes, and its enormous quiet backcountry are exactly the terrain where a free heel stops being a gimmick and starts making sense. I did not expect to fall for it. I did.
What Telemark Actually Is
Telemark skiing binds only the toe of the boot to the ski. Your heel lifts free. To turn, you drop one knee toward the snow, push the inside ski forward, and let both edges engage in a low, lunging arc. The motion looks like a curtsy crossed with a lunge, and the first time you see it done well it looks impossible, then obvious, then impossible again when you try it.
The history matters here, and not in a trivia-night way. The technique was born in the Telemark region of Norway in the 1800s, long before chairlifts existed, when travelling on snow meant earning every metre. Xinjiang has its own deep skiing ancestry too; the touring tradition in the Altai is often cited by historians as among the oldest on earth, with local skis documented centuries ago. Free-heel travel is, in a real sense, the original way humans moved on snow. Resort telemark is just that lineage wearing brighter jackets and standing in lift queues.
Gear You Actually Need
Do not buy a setup blind. A proper telemark rig uses a dedicated boot with a flexible bellows at the instep, a binding that pivots at the toe, and a ski with sidecut friendly enough for linked turns rather than racing stiffness. In Urumqi I rented a package for about 280 yuan a day from a shop near the rental outlets most visitors already use, and that let me fail cheaply before committing a single yuan to my own gear. Renting first is the single best decision I made, and the one I push on everyone who asks.
If you already own alpine gear, resist the urge to “just try it” on your normal skis. The flex pattern is wrong and you will fight the equipment instead of learning the movement. Borrow or rent a true tele setup for the first three days. Your shins will thank you, and so will your temper, because fighting gear is the fastest way to quit a discipline that already asks a lot of you on day one.
Boots, Bindings, Patience
Boots are the single biggest variable, more than the ski and far more than the binding. A boot that is too stiff defeats the free-heel point; one too soft leaves you unable to drive the ski and you wash out on every turn. I landed on a mid-stiff plastic boot after bruising my arches in a pair that was far too soft for the crusty spring snow above Altay. Treat the first fitting like a medical appointment, not a purchase, and tell the fitter honestly how many days you have on the discipline. They will steer you right if you are honest about being a beginner.
Where in Xinjiang It Works Best
The big resorts, Jikepulin included, are built for alpine and the cat tracks get crowded at lunch. But step off the groomed perimeter and the picture changes completely. The rolling tree lines below the main faces, the long green-run exits, and the silent side bowls are telemark heaven. I spent a morning linking slow, deliberate turns down an untracked side slope and saw exactly two other people all session, both of them too far away to judge my form, which was generous of the mountain.
Cross-country venues are even friendlier for learning. The flat-rolling loops around several northern resorts double as perfect telemark practice grounds when you are still mastering the drop, because the gradients are kind and a face-plant costs you nothing but pride and a little snow down the neck. I logged my first fifty clean turns on a flat loop before I ever took the discipline onto a pitched run, and that patience paid off for the rest of the season.
The Honest Downsides
I will not romanticise it, because that is exactly how people get hurt on expectations. Telemark is slower to learn than alpine, it is socially invisible here so you will explain yourself a lot, and on a hard icy day a fixed heel will out-perform you every single time. Lift queues look at you oddly, rental pools are thin so you may need to bring or mail-order gear, and if your goal is to keep up with friends on the steep stuff, alpine is simply faster and more efficient. I have been dropped by intermediate alpine skiers on boilerplate ice, and I was not surprised.
But for the traveller who wants a slower, more physical, more connected way down a mountain, Xinjiang is close to ideal. The snow is dry, the crowds thin off-piste, and the silence on a telemark descent is something you do not get carving a busy groomer with a speaker system announcing the next lift closure. There is a meditative quality to the lunge that alpine, for all its speed, never gave me.
Safety, Always
Any time you leave the resort perimeter, the rules change and the romance ends if you are careless. Avalanche awareness is non-negotiable, and a free heel does not make you safer in complex terrain. Take a course before you tour, carry a beacon, probe and shovel, and never tour alone on your first trip. The old way of skiing demands the most modern respect for the mountains it travels through.
Back at the homepage you can find more on resort access and beginner pathways, but telemark is the kind of thing you really learn by falling, slowly, on a quiet hill with no audience. Give it three days before you judge it. I went from sceptic to evangelical in roughly that window, one ungraceful lunge at a time, and the only thing I regret is not trying it a decade earlier.
Common Beginner Mistakes I Made So You Won’t
The first is leaning back, the alpine habit of pressuring the heel, which does nothing on a free binding and sends you onto your tail. Stay centred, even slightly forward, and let the front ski lead. The second is rushing the drop, trying to hit a full lunge on day one instead of a shallow knee bend that grows over a week; telemark is built in centimetres, not leaps. The third is ignoring the poles, which in telemark are for timing and rhythm rather than balance, and which I used for years as crutches until a coach made me ski a run with them tucked under my arms. The fourth, and the one that costs the most pride, is comparing your day-one telemark to someone’s decade-deep alpine; they are different sports wearing the same snow, and the comparison only ever demoralises the beginner.
If you take one thing from this: book three consecutive days, not one, because the movement does not click in a single session and the frustration of day one is precisely the wall that day two breaks. By day three you will link a turn that feels like nothing you have done on snow, and you will understand why a discipline with no World Cup glory and no resort marketing budget still has devotees who will talk your ear off about it at any lodge in the region.