January 4th 1st Telemark Lesson

We arrived in Taos on a very snowy day. We spent most of the morning getting our bearings, signing up for the lessons, buying a Taos Card, finding rental gear. After a little lunch for energy we set out to the beginners hill. The first challenge of course was figuring out how to get the suckers on in the first place. The bindings are not at all like alpine (and for Donna who is a snowboarder this was even more foreign). It took a while but we finally got our skis on and were ready to roll. I had heard many times, if you run into trouble you can fall back on the alpine, so I decided first that I just needed to get comfortable that this would be true. So we took a couple of runs just for that reason before the class was to start.

The time finally came to meet our class. There were about 30 or so people who had signed up for this class, but there were about 8-10 instructors so they had us do a ski-off to place us in groups. Donna and I landed in the bottom groups since we had NEVER been on tele-skis before. We were joined by a Taos local Heather.

Our instructor Stephanie started us out very slowly, she emphasized making parallel turns and ensuring that we weren't resorting to snow plow or stem turns. We practiced the lunge's in the straights and made parallel turns. I clearly had a stronger side, one side was feeling good and the other was a disaster. I have not felt so incompetent on skis in a long time so it was certainly a little frustrating. I think overall I did pretty well. Stephanie is going to let me try to ski with the next group up next week, we'll see how it goes.