Freeheeler 2nd International_Edition Saison_19_20

“Dad, Watch This”
“Dad, watch this.” I proclaimed to my sixty-three year old father, Mike Robinson, as I walked him through the intricacies
of an uphill kick turn on a skin track in steep terrain in the backcountry of Niseko, Japan. Many years prior to this,
Dave Magoffin and I dreamed up a trip to Niseko with our sixty-plus year old fathers. Dave and I had fallen in love with
the powder skiing paradise while on various film and photo projects,
and we wanted to share it with the men who taught us to ski. I kind
of chuckled to myself after I asked my Dad to watch me. Speaking the
phrase, “Dad, watch this.” had immediately taken me back to some
subconscious recollection of a time that I was certain he had experienced
before with me when I was a little boy vying for his attention
and repeating, “Hey Dad! Watch this! Dad! Hey Dad! Watch this!”
However, this time around I wasn’t a five-year old boy anymore trying
to show off for my Dad so he could see how cool I thought I was. Not
completely at least. I was trying to show my father how to do an uphill
kick turn with skins on the bottom of his telemark touring skis. It had not occurred to me up until that moment that he
had never learned to make the maneuver. At that point my father had been touring for years in the woods in our hometown
hills of southeastern Wisconsin. He had even toured some slopes with me in my current home in Ogden, Utah.
The part I had failed to recall was that none of that terrain was really steep enough to warrant making a kick turn uphill
because none of that terrain was steep enough to need the kind of switchback skin paths required in steep terrain. He
was wearing a beacon I taught him how to use strapped under his jacket. All of which was cinched down tightly by the
backpack containing a shovel and probe inside that I also taught him how to use. I had drilled him on beacon searching,
but no kick turn instruction.
Now as I talked him through it, and he struggled to master the “kick” that frees one’s tip from the uphill snow bank, I
was imagining myself as a five-year old boy struggling as he patiently spoke encouragingly to me. On that day I learned
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