Madsen and I have been scheming for years on ways to grow interest in telemark skiing. We have no illusions about taking over the world in a wave of free heel euphoria, but our best laid plans will come to naught unless the equipment to do the dance remains available.

So imagine our consternation when we learned of yet another telemark boot to be removed from the market for next year. To confirm the rumor, all it took was a visit to Scarpa’s booth showing off next years ski boots. On the shelf facing traffic were the Freedom line of boots, including the new Freedom RS along with the light weight AT offerings like the the F1-Evo, and the Alien series of rando race boots. Inside, spread out on two shelves, were next season’s telemark boots. The line up was disturbing, not for what it showed, but for what was absent — the TX, the lightest, and softest of their NTN boot line with inserts.

I called out to Samantha Kilgore, marketing director for Scarpa, and pointedly asked, “What’s wrong with this picture?”

She knew exactly what I was asking and protested, “we had to cut something and that boot sells the least.”

“You should have chopped the TX-Pro,” I countered.

“But that’s our best selling [NTN] boot,” she exclaimed.

“That’s only because Scarpa refuses to put inserts in the TX-Comp,” I replied, then added, “The reason people buy the TX-Pro is they want a stiffer boot than the TX, but the TX-Pro is the same stiffness as the TX, it just has two buckles on the cuff. They either want stiff or soft, so what they really want is either a TX-Comp with inserts, or a TX.”

“You need to tell that to Italy,” she joked.

With any luck, I just did. And if you’ve been thinking you might get a T2-like boot when you switch to NTN next year, you might think about getting those TX’s sooner than later.

PS: Love your boots. Mean it.

© 2015