20 Questions
Describe your skiing background:
Began telemarking as a means to access springtime backcountry climbing routes. After college, I moved to Tahoe, skiing four times a week in winter, pushing myself to explore the boundaries of the sport. After six years in Tahoe, I moved to Mammoth to venture into the more committing and dramatic lines that the East side has to offer.

What was your big breakthrough or defining moment in skiing?
Surpassing my alpine skiing buddies I’d been skiing with for years in speed and bigger, more complex airs.

Any training advice or suggestions?
Train all year round. Don’t pussy out and go sport climbing all summer—go hammer out some six-hour, 5000 ft elevation gain approach to a wicked backcountry rock route and slog back to the car in a day.

Who or what inspires you?
The telemark youth of today and the heavy hitting, badass alpinists of yesterday.

How do you see skiing evolving in the next five years?
Telemark will continue to be the fastest growing snow sport, converting people all the time. The technology will delicately “improve,” as it always has, and sway more people to the sport even more. The young tele skiers will start pushing the sport to new levels and, because of that, the sport will receive more media exposure. Telemarking will become a household name, not “that cross country thing on skis.”

Do you think the best skiers today are better than the best skiers 20 years ago?
I think the skiers 20 years ago were more willing to suffer, which made them more hardy and tenacious and possibly more technically rounded. The technology back then didn’t allow them to ski as powerfully as we do now. So, I bet if you gave Dave Page a pair of T-Races and a 190 cm Verdict under his feet 20 years ago, he would have kicked all of our asses.

How does fear affect your skiing?
Makes me need to pee a lot before the run, but it doesn’t affect my skiing, just forces me to focus.

Do you have any vices that you would like to share?
Caffeine, buying cool unnecessary tools for the job site, and my wife’s belly button...

Ever been caught speeding or ever been arrested?
Just got pulled over, again, last week for a 75 in a 50 (Bad cop, no donut!), but somehow have managed to escape the fuzz for anything worse.

Any tattoos or body piercing?
No, and damn proud of it! Oh, wait, does branding my buddy’s initial in my forearm with a non-filtered Camel during a blurry moment at Mardi Gras count?

What are your future plans or goals in skiing?
Ski lots, stay alive, and ski that unnamed, untouched, perfect spine in some far away land that the worm taunts me with in the back of my mind.