hotham

Just like Morgan, it was a matter of time before Rich dipped his toes into the NTN world. He pulled on his new Garmont Kenais and stepped into his first pair of NTN bindings and felt lightning pulse through his veins. Like Harry Potter finding his perfect wand, he felt the UNLIMITED POWER instantly and found himself under the guidance of Snape (Lucas), who initially seemed evil in this NTN Slytherin ways, but in the end, was ultimately a true freewheeling guru. In this episode, Rich confesses his NTN sins to a Free-heeling Lord and shares his thoughts about his first time away from 75mm.

The Bogong Bulletin, the catch of the day, the mailbag, how to do stuff, and telemark brand power also feature this week. 

Our guest this week wears several different hats from many walks of life. Kelly Van Den Berg is a backcountry guide working for Traverse Hotham and runs courses to get beginners into backcountry snow sports.  Last year, Kelly ran an intro to backcountry skills day for women looking to get out beyond the ropes and it was a huge hit.  This year, Kelly will be running another women's backcountry skills day on August 7th and it will undoubtedly be another great success.  When not guiding on Hotham, Kelly is pursuing other goals across many different occupations and interests, including performance coaching, horse training, journalism, photography, and pack rafting. Kelly is also a committee member of the Mountain Safety Collective and also collaborates with the ABC in Gippsland to share information about some of her interesting adventures and recreational pursuits. Please enjoy getting into the backcountry with Kelly Van Den Berg!

Use the link below to book a spot with Kelly on the woman's skills day or see many more of the great tours Traverse Hotham offer:

https://www.traversehotham.com.au/

The school holidays have arrived and so have the hoards of snow lovers to the NSW ski fields, including Those Tele Guys! Join us this week as we discuss our freeheeling adventure to the Snowy Mountains over the last week. We also talk about the strong telemark scene around Perisher and share some insight into our new favorite spot on the mountain, Guthega.  

We also present a new mystery sound of telemark....can you guess what it is to win an elusive snickers and stickers prize pack? Songs of the freeheelers also features for the first time this season and we sure hope you enjoy listening to it as much as we did creating it! 

This year, Australian skiers have seen the best snow propaganda in years, and so they should! It has been an amazing start to the season and everyone is certainly excited. However, we have also received a fairly large amount of rain in the last two weeks that has gone relatively unnoticed by most of Australia's snow lovers as the resorts certainly do not put as much emphasis on that as they do when 2 cm of snow dumps on their respective villages. This week, we talk about how to easily read the weather forecasts all by yourself by using some pretty stock standard applications you can download on your phone. We are actively promoting everyone to have a look at all the information available to get the best weather information to help you have the best day. We hope it helps. 

Those Tele Guys are ready to have their biggest season yet and may hopefully live out many of their original plans from the last two covid ravaged years.  This season should be the best in years as the ski resorts have already starting turing the lifts accross south-eastern Australia. But before they dive deep into the season, they have decided to conduct an internal review of the show to reflect on some of the segments that have glowed brightly or petered out to nothing.

They also discuss the seasonal outlook, rip open the mail bag and tune into the Bogong Bulletin for a look at the latest news. Also, Queen Elithzabeth joins us to pass on a very special message for the long weekend in honour of her birthday which traditionally coincides with the opening weekend for the ski season. While the seaon started one week earlier, we still really appreciate hearing from the head of the Commonwealth. God bless our gracious Queen! 

The wait is over. Winter is back and Those Tele Guys are keen to complete a winter season of free-heel skiing that is free of lockdowns and other ski restricting rules. Life is somewhat back to normal and it appears that skiers and boarders alike are permitted to enter the Aussie Alpine region as they please in the declared winter season to chase some campaign Downunder powder. Morgs and Rich have plenty to discuss for the up-and-coming season but have decided to pay homage to some of the songs that have graced your ears over the last two seasons. By using a unique algorithm similar to Alan Turing's Enigma code,  we have been able to determine the top 10 songs released for the free heelers on this humble show. Please enjoy as we take a trip down memory lane to remember some of the songs that kept us motivated to keep creating content for a ski-themed podcast in a time when we weren't allowed to ski. 

It is time to put the summer wax on and for those for 'Those Tele Guys' to wrap up the podcast for the season. In this episode, we look back at the 2021 ski season and discuss various influencing factors that determined how winter unfolded for us in Australia.  We talked about the weather, equipment, covid, and the general 'tele-vibe' that occurred throughout the season to paint an audible picture of our experience for the listeners to enjoy. We also catch up with Sven Gorham, a past guest of the show, who has been working as a patroller at the famous Treble Cone ski resort on the south island of New Zealand. He provides us with a seasonal breakdown and also sheds some light on the tele scene around his local haunt. The final 'songs for the freeheelers' also features, and keeping in the spirits of NZ, we parody a famous tune made by the Flight of the Concords. 

Thanks for listening, and we will see you next year!

We may have eluded that Tele Guys were wrapping up for the season in this episode, but we managed to sneak in one more before we finish the podcast for another year. We found some time to sit down with Mark Oates to talk about some of the adventures he has completed throughout all of Australia's snow-laden states. Mark often posts fantastic photos and detailed trip reports on social media about his endeavors in his home state of Tasmania. He chases the snow while the conditions are good to ski amazing terrain in breathtaking locations, showing just how good Tassie can be for those willing to put in the hard yards. This guest has also completed the Australian Alps Walking Track in winter on two separate occasions. The AAWT is a 655-kilometer, point-to-point journey that travels through some of the most remote areas of Australia's rugged mountain ranges.  In this episode, Mark shares some information about those two trips in regards to equipment, logistics, weather, motivation, and even a sneaky game of hide and seek with a lost food barrel. Please enjoy as we ski the Australian Alps Walking Track with Mark Oates.

Find out more about marks travels at https://markoates.exposure.co/

The 2021 season is wrapping up down here in Australia, so it is time to look ahead and use the power of hindsight to plan for the 2022 season. We hope for a season that is not hindered by Covid-19 for all Australians, and if all goes to plan with the government's vaccination roll-out, then we should have a season that is somewhat more 'normal' than what we have experienced over the last two years. We have compiled a few tips on how to be a dirtbag if we do get back to normal as many have suffered financially throughout the pandemic, highlighting the importance of making every dollar stretch as far as it can go. In this episode, we share some tips on how to save money on transport, accommodation, food, equipment, ski passes and entertainment. Please enjoy as we explain how to eloquently turn yourself into a skiing dirtbag. 

People often ponder the mysteries of this big ol' world and Google has become an avenue to find the answers to such conundrums. At the touch of a button, we have a library at our fingertips to make us more informed and educated about certain topics we find interesting and valuable. Telemark skiing is apparently one of such topics that have confused the brains of many, and this is evident when perusing the catalog of previously asked questions that Google has filed away ready for any curious and shy alpine skiers on a path of enlightenment.  In this episode, we go through some of the most commonly asked questions and see if our own knowledge of telemark skiing matches the internet mastermind of Google. 

Over the past two years, back-country skiing in Australia has been thrust into the limelight due to the global pandemic. Many feared the resorts would not open and began collecting essential items to start learning how to earn your turns in the Australian Alps. People are also curious to learn where it all began in Australia, and exactly how long have skiers been seeking the solace of the mountains. Unfortunately, some people are lamenting that back-country skiing is a relatively new prospect that has only been made accessible due to modern equipment available to us today. It has certainly made it more accessible, but we must acknowledge that skiers have been hiking up hills in Australia in search of snow for a long time. In this episode,  we talk about the early days of skiing in Australia, where it started, what they used, and where they went. We also share the story of Cleve Cole, an early skiing pioneer, that sadly lost his life after an ill-fated Hotham to Bogong crossing attempt. 

This week’s guest was first spotted in the distance free-heel skiing at Falls Creek. His distinguishing bright yellow pants and futuristic Bishop bindings make him easy to identify amongst the telemark crowd. He works for Tourism North East, a group actively working to strategically grow, enhance and promote the High Country tourism offering, and is also one of the main drivers behind the Bright Mountain Film Tour. 

We ask Eddie where his love for telemark skiing began, what Tourism North East is currently working on, how he got involved with the Bright Mountain Film Tour, but most importantly, what it is like stepping into the modern era when using Bishop bindings. Please enjoy Riding the High Country with Eddie Wilson! 

These are dark days for resort skiing in Australia. New South Wales and Victoria are both in lockdown and all ski resorts are closed. Events have been cancelled, lifties are getting the boot and Vail are extremely busy processing refunds for season passes that were little used. Will restrictions ease enough to allow resort skiing to return for harvesting September corn? Unfortunately, nobody knows what the future holds, but with cases continuing to pop up all over the countryside, it is looking increasingly harder to see restrictions being lifted. Thinking about the future is somewhat unnerving at the moment, so in this episode, Those Tele Guys contemplate the good times had in the past to get us through these rough times. We take a stroll down memory lane and have a laugh about some of our finer moments shared on telemark skis. Thinking about these memories sure made us smile, and hopefully, they provide a few laughs for those listening too. 

In this week's episode, we welcome Tim Macartney-Snape to the show. Tim is famously known for his mountaineering pursuits, particularly in relation to his two summit trips on Mt. Everest. His first summit of the mountain was made in 1984 with Greg Mortimer. The pair were the first Australians to reach the summit of Everest without supplementary oxygen via a new route on the North Face . In 1990, Tim completed his second summit, but this time he started in the Bay of Bengal and walked every single one of Everest's 8848 meters,  becoming the first person to walk and climb from sea level to the top of the world. 

We talk with Tim about these two journeys, ask where his passion for adventure began, chat about ski equipment but most importantly, ask if he really did summit the highest mountain in the world wearing an old pair of leather telemark boots. We hope you enjoy our chat with Tim Macartney-Snape.

In this week's episode, we chat we Rouchelle Gilmore from the Mountain Cosmos Podcast. Rouchelle is a rare Western Australian skier that has made the annual pilgrimage across the country for as long as she can remember. She is a ski instructor currently working at Mt. Hotham but has also spent a significant amount of time working Northern Hemisphere winters in Japan and America.  The Mountain Cosmos is a show about 'life in the mountains, the ups, downs, and everything in between' and is definitely worth subscribing to if you have not done so already. It showcases mountain-loving people from all walks of life that offer different passions and perspectives that makes listening intriguing.

We catch up with Rouchelle to hear about her backstory, find out what motivated her to make a podcast, see what it was like living in a lockdown resort town, and finally, discuss future projects. 

We also provide a little snippet of Telemark therapy time for anyone stuck in lockdown to help them get through these tough times.  We feel for you. 

In the words of the great band Abba, 'Mumma Mia, here we go again.' Things were going so well here in Victoria. We had powder days, bluebird days, and even ordinary days but Victorian snow lovers skied them all just to feel the white stuff beneath their feet. Our premier was gloating about having no cases one day and then shutting us down the next when eight cases popped up in Melbourne.  Needless to say, after 9 days of operating since the last lockdown, the resorts had to shut their doors once more. 

In this episode, we talk about the most recent lockdowns and conduct a mid-season review of the 2021 season. What will the future hold? To be honest, we have no idea but we can probably bet on more lockdowns and lost time on skis.  In the long run, it is for the best of everyone, but it is just so sad to see an industry we love squirm under the giant, soul-crushing foot of COVID-19. 

We also release a tear-jerking song to help all skiers get through this lockdown and promotional snow also features to bring you the latest gags. Enjoy. 

Ahhh, lockdown 5.0 is being enforced in the state of Victoria and our resorts have shut down. Needless to say, many snow-loving people are growing tired of this scenario that continues to plague our powder dreams. To top it off, the Australian Alps are getting absolutely hammered with pristine snow and could easily be the best lamb chowder for the season.  Nevertheless, we are all playing our part and staying home to avoid this disease from spreading. In this week's episode, we provide the listeners some details about the recent lockdown, but more importantly, we introduce a new segment called 'Australian Alps, this is your life.' This segment aims to share historical skiing information that influenced how we experience the mountains in the modern era. In the first installment, we discuss the Summit Hut, Mt. Bogong.  

We also get a song for the Freeheelers from Morgs featuring a parody of 'Am I ever gonna see your face again?' by the angels.  Enjoy! 

Those Tele Guys reside in Australia and love skiing on their own home soil, however, they have also spent a little bit of time on the land of the long white cloud and realise it is about time to catch up with somebody from their Southern Hemisphere neighbours.  In this weeks episode, Rich and Morgs head 'Across the Ditch' to catch up with Ash-Weyman Jones (a.k.a Soyboooy) to hear how the NZ season is going and to learn what the telemark scene is like amongst the general population of sheep and hobbits. 

Ash moved to NZ a few years ago from Australia and immediately was hooked on Telemark skiing. He loves spending time in the mountains during winter and is doing everything he can to help protect our winters for future skiers by making small changes to his lifestyle that can create massive change. Those Tele Guys learned a lot off Ash and they hope you do too. 

Please join us as we host our first-ever session of telemark therapy. As telemark skiers, we standout against everybody else and are sometimes scrutinized for being different. Our motives are questioned while our equipment is ridiculed, and while this is all in jest (most of the time), this can really start weighing down on the shoulders of all the telemark skiers in the world. It is for this reason that we decided to host our first therapy session, so please, join us as we look to heal the wounds inflicted on us from our friends with training heels on. 

It is time to bring out the leather and lace...

...but it is not what you think! 

In this weeks episode, Those Tele Guys talk about one of their most recent escapades into the realm of pinheads and leather boots. For the very first time, Rich and Morgan ski telemark on equipment that is older than time itself and recorded this episode to share their experience. 

Also, Those Tele Guys get together once more to record another tune for 'Songs for the Freeheeler.' Please enjoy, 'Stuck in the liftline with you.' There is also a bonus track sent to us from Ottawa, Canada from a huge fan of the show. Enjoy!