NORDHAUS: Coming full circle in Full Tilt boots

By Hannah Nordhaus, Special to the Rocky

Published January 5, 2009 at 6 p.m.

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I spent my early 20s skiing in Taos. I lived in a crumbling, hippie-era adobe, I hitchhiked to my job as a ski instructor, I drank beers every day at 4:30, and I was a bit of a ripper. I skied on a pair of green-and-black Raichle Flexon Comp boots, the same ones Bill Johnson wore when he won a gold medal, and I was fast, fun and afraid of nothing.

Then, when I turned 25, I got a telemark setup. I wanted a new challenge, and I wanted to be cool. I decided that people who kept their heels locked down were major losers. I threw my old Raichles in the trash, and for the next 14 years, all I did was telemark.

But last year, I read an article about my old ski boots. People had loved those Flexons so much that after Raichle stopped making them, an underground market developed for the parts on eBay, and K2 decided to reissue the boots.

They're now called Full Tilt, and although they're a different color and have comfy thermoformable liners, they're otherwise exactly the same as the boot I skied in during the early '90s; same plastic, same buckles, same tortured crustaceous look.

I decided I had to have them.

I ordered a brown and white pair, and I visited my friend Larry the bootfitter so he could heat the liners to accommodate all the bone spurs I had acquired from my original Raichles. I asked him if the people wearing Full Tilts these days were all aging nostalgics who had worn them in the '90s.

Well, yes, he told me, there were some of those, but mostly you'll find teenage jibbers wearing them. My boots and I were so retro we were hip.

Last week, I finally got them on the snow. I thought I would need some outside help to recapture my alpine form, so I convinced the folks at Vail to let me drop in on one of their SKImmersion classes for "motivated learners" who spend five days with the same instructor running drills, practicing skills, tweaking equipment and scrutinizing on-hill videos. As program director Carol Levine explained, SKImmersion is about "changing your brain" and bringing a new focus to your skiing.

Others in the class were working on flexing their ankles or keeping their weight centered. My focus was to get my backside out of the back seat, widen my stance and stop skiing like I was stuck in the '80s.

There was a strange sense of deju vu, getting on alpine skis again, in the same boots I had worn when I was young and carefree and would straightline it down anything. The trip was also my first night away from my daughter since her birth, and at 4:30 p.m., instead of picking up a fussy baby from the sitter, I was drinking beers with a bunch of motivated learners after a satisfying day on the slopes.

It was almost as if I could pretend all those intervening years - the "real" jobs, grad school, the house, the marriage, the kid - had never happened.

Almost, I say, because although the setup was the same, my brain had changed. I was back on the alpines, but I was 40 now, and I would probably need a few more months of SKImmersion classes before straightlining down anything.

It is unsettling to realize that the self you were 10 years ago would scoff at the self you are now. I was no longer too telemark-cool for alpine skis. In fact, there were times when I felt, mach-ing down the groomers, that it might actually be kneepad-wearing meadow-skippers like me who were the losers here: At the very least, they were a lot slower than I was.

It was like coming full circle, but with a new color scheme, and much more comfortable liners.

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