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s t a n l e y • F a i r f i e l d • S h o sh o n e • P i c a b o
Shakespeare Festival’s Outdoor Play, Twelfth Night, Starts Thursday
PBR Brings Thrills, Smiles
Page 5
This Week is Abundant With Free Music Page 6
read about it on PG 15
Student Kaitlyn Landis Perseveres Challenges Page 9
A u g u s t 1 5 , 2 0 1 2 • V o l . 5 • N o . 3 3 • w w w .T h e W e e k l y S u n . c o m
Sun Valley Ski Education Foundation coach Kelly Sinnott egged on those trying to dunk her during last year’s “6 at Sochi.”
Six at Sochi Celebration
Wind-Born Adventures
STORY & PHOTO BY KAREN BOSSICK
T
he TV remote is still warm from watching 2012 Summer Olympics in London. But Sun Valley Ski Education Foundation officials are wasting no time in fast forwarding to the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. They’re holding their second annual “6 at Sochi” celebration from 5 to 9 p.m. Thursday at the Ketchum Town Square to raise support to send six local kids to the Winter Olympics. The evening will feature live music by Doublewide, the honky-tonk ballads of Austin, Texas, singer George DeVore and the rock reggae surf music of Safety Orange. There’ll be Russian vodka available in souvenir Sochi shot glasses, along with Sochi souvenir hats, shirts and other merchandise and food for purchase. And with this summer’s hot temperatures, everyone—from Idaho legislator Wendy Jaquet to Bob Rosso, Nappy Neaman, Rick Kapala, Colin Rodgers and Greg Randolph—it seems, has volunteered to take their turn atop a dunk tank. In addition, raffle tickets will be sold for $10 each, offering opportunities to win a season ski pass for Bald Mountain, a Nordic pass for the North Valley trails and a Schwinn cruiser bike. The goal is to send six athletes to the Winter Olympics to compete in alpine racing, freestyle skiing, snowboarding and cross-country skiing. The number was derived by assessing the capabilities of the athletes training with the Ski Education Foundation’s Gold Team, formerly known as the Olympic Development Team, said Alex Sundali, development director for the ski education foundation. Sun Valley sent three athletes— snowboarder Graham Watanabe and Nordic skiers Morgan Arritola and Simi Hamilton—to the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, B.C. The money the Ski Education Foundation raises with events like the Janss Pro-Am and the Wild Game Dinner go to the Sun Valley Ski Education Foundation and are not used for the Gold Team, Sundali added. The Foundation created the Gold Team fund in 2005 to financially assist qualified Ski Education Foundation athletes who had risen through the top to become the less-than-1-percent who compete at the international level. Aspiring athletes include Simi Hamilton, who just began his third year on the U.S Ski Team, Tai Barrymore, who was named to the U.S. Halfpipe A Team and Tanner Farrow, who is serving his second year on the
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BY KAREN BOSSICK
L
isa Scales knows better than to plan dinner when she sees her husband Nate pack up his gear and head to Baldy. No telling when he’ll be home—or even where he will end up. Just a couple weeks ago, Lisa got a call from Nate saying he and his Niviuk Icepeak 6 paraglider had wound up near Bozeman, Mont. That 198-mile eight-hour flight on July 31 set a new U.S. mountain distance record for paragliding, breaking the 187-mile record set by Scales’ buddy Matt Beechinor a month earlier. “I know pretty much every day that I want to see how far the day will allow me to go,” says Nate. Nate, Beechinor and other local pilots like Mike Pfau are gearing up to host some the world’s best paragliders this coming week as the 2012 Paragliding World Cup comes to Bald Mountain. The 2012 U.S. Paragliding Nationals will take place the following week on Baldy. Nate has never won a competition at Nationals or Worlds. But his passion for paragliding has taken him on some great adventures. He’s set a couple of Idaho distance records. He’s paraglided throughout North America, Mexico, South America and Europe. And in 2007 he flew the length of the Alps in Red Bull’s X-Alps, an endurance competition in which competitors can use only their wings and hiking boots as they race non-stop for 17 days across Austria, Switzerland, Italy and France. Nate’s wife Lisa drove the support vehicle with their then-one-year-old daughter Ripley in tow. “I didn’t see a lot of Europe,” she confessed. “The whole time I was looking up trying to find Nate.” Nate has wanted to fly ever since he saw hang gliders near his boyhood home
in the Puget Sound. “Paragliding is the ultimate alpine adventure,” he said. “You take off from the side of a hill, soar above that hill, go to the next mountain and work your way along the terrain… It’s like magic. No noise, no motors. How cool is that?” Scales finally got his chance when a pilot came into Ski Tek where Scales was working after moving to Sun Valley following high school graduation and asked one of Scales’ co-workers if he’d like to go paragliding. “My co-worker said, ‘No,’ but I said, ‘I would,’’ “ Scales recalled. “Dave gave me three lessons and said, ‘Now you know everything I know,’ and he sent me to Salt Lake City.” There Scales found up to 50 people flying each morning in a flight park between Salt Lake City and Provo. He spent two years there living out of his Subaru station wagon as he learned to read air currents. And then he returned to Sun Valley. “Salt Lake is a good place to learn because it has a lot of smooth back-and-forth soaring. Here, we have smooth soaring in the morning and evening. But in the middle of the day as the sun heats the ground and provides thermals, we have the best cross-country flying on earth.” Scales doesn’t get to go paragliding as often as he’d like—he has to make a living using carpentry skills his grandfather Nelson Pomeroy, who’d built the Pearl Harbor military base and the Golden Gate Bridge, taught him. But, when flying’s too good to say no, he leaves the comfortable home he and Lisa built in Hailey and rides the chairlift to the top of Bald Mountain. Armed with a peanut butter sandwich, an apple and a few Sun Valley energy bars that his mother created, he dons a wool shirt, two puffy jackets, a baklava, a Camelbak hydration pack, a pee tube
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courtesy photos
Scales’ July 31 flight from Sun Valley to an area near Bozeman may be the longest straight-line distance in big mountains in the world, said Sun Valley pilot Honza Rejmanek.