Day 53 - Saturday Apr. 14 - TANDEM TELE!!!

"What's that?" you say - Yes, I said TANDEM TELE! As many of you know, winter is nearing an end here in the great state of Utah. It has been warming up for some time and climbing season is nigh at hand. I have always seen people on the last few days a resort is open doing things that you don't normally see. I think we topped them all. Jer and I had lunch at his house around noon today while we watched parts of the epic film, Waterworld. "I don't know what all the fuss is about. That movie ruled!" We then got dressed (as seen above) and on our way to Alta we picked up CJ's tandem telemark skis. While working for Black Diamond, CJ attended an employee only sale where they had a pile of free stuff. None of this gear was worth his time, he said, except for this beautiful pair of tandem tele skis. He brought them home and has not touched them since. This is where Jer and I come in. We just could not let a gem like this go to waste. They are some old Trucker skis about 220 or so cm in length with two pairs of 3-pin bindings on them. We were a bit nervous about whether or not we were going to be able to do it, but we were determined. It just so happened that there was an alpine demo day thing going on over near Goldminer's Daughter so we thought first we would take a stroll through there to check it out (we happened to stay on our skis for this stroll). It was here that Jer fulfilled his ultimate and final goal in goondom - people were going out of their way to take photos of us all day with their own cameras. We ran into only one person we knew at this time - Anna, a friend of Cody, whom we had met during the PowderKeg. She took a couple of posing shots for us, then we made our way over to the Albion lift to really start skiing. Jer would just get out of the skis in order for us to load the lift. None of the Alta employees gave us a hard time because they all thought it was cool. We went down a few times, but we were both surprised on how well it was going. I was in front, and I would simply call out when we would be making the next turn. Jer's job was pretty much just to throw off my balance every now and then and make me fall over. Just kidding. Jer was key in the balance of the ski, edge control, and turns in general. We took a few runs on Albion and then thought we were ready for the big stuff so we made our way over to Collins for a few turns. We saw one more person we knew as we were crossing along the rope tow, Carvel, from our institute class. The bummer is that neither of the people we saw that we know got to see us actually skiing, because they would have been impressed. We loaded Collins and as we regrouped at the top we had quite the crowd waiting to see us ski. This was somewhat flattering, but it was also a bit unnerving. We didn't want to screw it up. We got some guy to take a few pictures of us and we were on our way. We had a couple good turns until we screwed it up. We fell. But we weren't going to let that bring us down, and we quickly got back up and tore it up for the latter half of that run. I think people were impressed. We also got a video of us on this run as well. It took us a little while, but we made it all the way down and were ready for another. Tandem proved to be a bit harder on my legs than regular tele (seeing how I had to control Jer's weight too) so we took a few breaks each run down. We reloaded the chair and began our second descent. Again we had a big crowd waiting for us, and this time we totally delivered. We were shredding it up. It was at this time that we really started to get the hang of it. We had an admirer come up to us (as we did all day) to congratulate us and she was kind enough to take a few photos and video of us as well.

By this time we were practically tandem tele pros (which probably isn't that hard since we are probably in a group of a very small few that have ever attempted the sport). I have to say that today was good for my confidence as a telemark skier. I feel like a poor or average freeheeler would not be able to do what we did today. It was difficult, and we did it really well. It was about 4 o'clock at this time so we decided to take one final run over on Albion and ski our way to the car. We happened to take a pretty good fall on a sheet of ice over here so it was a good thing it was our last run. I landed right on my camera with my right leg and I have the bruise to prove it. All in all we had a good day. It was fun to mix it up since the snow is not exactly at its best. I hope you all enjoy the photos and video. Please feel free to leave a comment on what you think about the whole thing.