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Backcountry Skiing blogs, videos, photos, and a whole lotta stoke.

Nobody Cares That You Tele | Mt Baldy, Breckenridge Backcountry, CO United States | 05/15/09, by TeleAlex

...Unless you're with an Olympian.

As I followed a world champion up one of the easier backcountry treks in Breckenridge, Colo., my huffing and puffing at 12,000 feet above sea level started to get the best of me. A newbie to the Rockies, I had never backcountry skied before and just picked up telemark skiing two weeks prior. Here I was, ascending the 13,638-foot Bald Mountain, eventually fixing crampons on my skis to make it up the steep, ice-packed slope. Oh boy, I thought, this will only be more fun going down.
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But Greg Ruckman, the 35-year-old former Olympic rower, was not about to let me get away with a season of resort-only skiing. He was not going to kill me either. Keeping the hike as mellow as possible, he turned around at the top of Baldy's lower face. This was, after all, about having fun and sharing a treasured activity - one he discovered a year and a half ago when he moved from Boston to Breckenridge.

This winter, I worked with Ruckman at the Breckenridge Nordic Center, where we instructed novice cross-country skiers. As one can imagine, however, customers aware of his two-time Olympic status in Sydney 2000 and Athens 2004 unsurprisingly flocked to him. The fact that he rowed and only started Nordic skiing a few years earlier was irrelevant. Rather, Ruckman's go-getting attitude of mastering whatever sport he was enthralled with garnered respect.
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"When people know you in one context, they conflate how good you are at everything else," said the nine-time U.S. national team member, 1999 lightweight-eight world champion and Harvard graduate.� "[It's] thinking, just because I can do one thing really well, there's no reason I can't do everything that well."
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Ruckman has dabbled in everything from running to cycling to skate skiing and maintained a relentless desire to win any race entered. Sheer drive aside, rowing best suits his genetic build and raw talent. Seemingly taller than 6-foot-1 with a lean frame and larger upper body, the "big guy," as some ski competitors have called him, belongs in boat.
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His exceptionalness in one sport only fuels his widespread competitive fire. While he continues training at altitude all winter, winning Nordic races or coming real close, then grabs the oars in the summer, Ruckman finds solace in his tele skis.
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"I'm not a good skier," he admits. "I have moments. That feeling I'm looking for is that bouncing, floating, flying feeling."
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He recalled the "best ski day" ever - the one I shared with him at Vail in early April. With some 2 �-feet of fluffy new snow, we were ecstatic. Then he remembered breaking into telemark skiing last year after never having an interest in alpine.
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"The first time I telied on powder, it brought tears to my eyes," he said. "To the point that, after the first few turns, I had to stop and wipe my eyes. There are certain events in life that justify everything else and make it great."
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Case-in-point: his love for the backcountry.
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"It's huge, having that balance of something that's not competitive," he said. "And I'm not an artist, not a musician. It's not surprising that the artistic outlet for me is backcountry skiing - working hard on the way up and skiing beautifully on the way down. Well, not always for me..." He laughed.
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On the caf� table between us, where we chatted and ate after my two-hour initiation into skinning, lay a pile of 11 outdoor resource books. He flipped through Ski the 14ers, a local compilation of extraordinary photos from big-mountain skier Chris Davenport's adventures. Here, again, he found an idol and an idealistic goal. He talked about crampons and specialized poles and how he could climb those same 14,000-plus-elevation routes.
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"When you're driving around and you see these beautiful peaks up there, and the radio's blaring, and you're listening to everything that's wrong with the world, why wouldn't you want to ski up there once a least a week?" he said. "It's just simple. Pure."
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An honors philosophy major, he contemplates deeply. "I think about modern life, about how complex and insane it is. It's not bad, just crazy. What's the percentage of heart and stress-related issues?" he asked, convinced that refuge in nature creates a necessary escape.
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He romanticizes the mountains to the point of eventually accepting his fate among them. "I don't want to [die] in a hospital. I want to take runs I really should be taking without worrying about the risk," he said. "I'm going to do this until it kills me. I love this so much."
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Of course, Ruckman insists he is far from suicidal, and I was banking on that affirmation we skied Baldy that day. He continuously stressed the importance of avalanche knowledge and gave me an idea of when and where to ski throughout the season. Sitting in the coffee shop, he pulled The Avalanche Handbook out of his pile.
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Herein lies an all-around summation of this individual -- a competitor at heart who relishes in natural exploration, yet never surrenders his intensity. Everything he does is to the utmost, so he was eager to share the newfound freedom his tele skis provide.
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As a took my first tentative turns down lower Baldy's bare slope, I felt that rush of unrestricted playfulness. There were no tracks, no trees, no real visibility either, but that did not matter. I stopped to watch Ruckman, catch my breath and affirm that I was heading the right way. Despite the hard-packed, powderless conditions, his smile was as big as mine - although mine may have been spurred by nerves and frozen in place. He called over to me with his trademark "Whoo-whoo!" of excitement. "You're a better tele skier than me," he said. This is one humble man.
Regardless of how good I am, I consider myself a tele skier because of Ruckman. He lent me all the inspiration, gear and guidance necessary, and hopefully by next year, I will be able to make several treks beside him without having to restrain my wheezing.
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In time, I aim to get good enough to pass the baton, to give others the unwavering support he showed me. I'm no Olympian, but I learned from one.