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Florists Liven Up Ketchum With Fest Zeit Page 4
Mazik Talks About Saying ‘Goodbye’ to Pain
Inflatable Avalanche Airbags Were Among Demos at Saturday’s Snow Safety Festival
Page 15
This Friday’s Gallery Walk Features a New Studio Page 18
read about it on PaGe 9
N o v e m b e r 2 1 , 2 0 1 2 • Vo l . 5 • N o . 4 7 • w w w.T h e We e k l y S u n . c o m
STORY & PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK
T Eli Roberts, of Ketchum, tries out a jump and rail feature he and his friends built Saturday on Dollar Mountain.
Sun Valley Gears Up For Opener STORY & PHOTO BY KAREN BOSSICK
S
un Valley Resort plans to open parts of Bald Mountain and Dollar Mountain for its 77th season on Thursday. But Luke Rizzo and his friends couldn’t wait. They built a small ski jump on Dollar Mountain Saturday, packing it around a PVC pipe. “We have the craving to ski. We’ve been doing this for weeks,” said Rizzo, as he watched Eli Roberts, Hunter Diehl and Lieder Schwartz sail down the PVC pipe. Even Rod Tatsuno’s Siberian and Samoyed huskies couldn’t wait, either. The two took off when Tatsuno hiked them up the Warm Springs side of the mountain Saturday and soon found themselves on the River Run side where Sun Valley was staging a preseason ski racing clinic. A ski coach carried the 65-pound Samoyed down in his arms while the Siberian followed, howling all the way. “Instead of poaching the snow, they pooched it,” said Tatsuno. “Apparently, they wanted the good groomed stuff, too.” Due to warm temperatures, Sun Valley will open only the River Run side of Baldy on Thanksgiving Day. The River Run and Lookout Express will offer skiers access to Upper College, Roundhouse Lane and Mid and Lower River Run. The Kinderspielplatz moving carpet will also be in operation. Skiers and boarders will be able to ride the Quarter Dollar lift on Dollar Mountain to access Poverty Flats and Quarter Dollar Bowl. There’s certainly been plenty of precipitation in the week leading up to Thanksgiving Day. But most of it came down in translucent form, rather than as the white gold that powderhounds crave. The snow line hovered around 7,500 feet. Mountain Manager Peter Stearns said the resort was trying its hardest to get as much of the mountain open as possible. “But we’re definitely behind last year because of the warm weather,” he added. Groomers were able to groom a few trails around Galena Lodge and along the Harriman Trail from Prairie Creek north on Sunday after the area received six inches of heavy wet snow. But even they had to throw in the towel Tuesday morning after the area got rain instead of snow. Groomers are counting on colder
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racey Baer is practicing saying Merry Christmas in Chinese for the onslaught of shoppers she expects to visit Sun Valley Signatures & Gift Shops over the holidays. “Shen Dan Kuai Le,” she chirps. Baer isn’t expecting an unusual number of visitors from Asia. But she’ll be stamping passports as window shoppers take a trip around the world via 3-D holiday decorations depicting Christmas in different countries. The decorations are going up this week in 13 different windows in the Sun Valley Village. Window shoppers will receive passports they can have stamped at each store. A bag of peppermint bark from Sun Valley’s Chocolate Foundry awaits those who complete the journey. “I think it will be a lot of fun,” said Baer, who oversees the gift shop. “We want to attract families from Twin Falls, even Bellevue and Hailey, to come up and spend time in the village,” said Jack Sibbach, Sun Valley’s director of marketing. Jonnie Hartman has been working from 7 in the morning until midnight since the weekend to install the threedimensional holiday decorations that are Sun Valley’s answer to the lavish Christmas window displays in larger cities like New York and Chicago. Sun Valley enlisted the help of four illustrators to provide the centerpiece of each display, which will be available for viewing Friday through Jan. 4. Danielle Davis, a graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art with a passion for hand-lettering, typography and illustration, designed the displays for Italy, Scotland and Norway. England native Ben Javens, an illustrator for “The Guardian,” Warburton’s and Hugo Boss, has a penchant for caricatures. He did the illustrations for Austria, Russia and Germany. Miguel Ornia-Blanco, an illustrator, hand-letterer and animator from Argentina and England, designed the celebrations from Kenya, Switzerland, the United States and Mexico. And Helsinki, Finland, artist Janine Rewell interpreted festivities from China and France with what she calls an “absurd, yet naïve” approach with a modern Slavic touch. The artists created the scenes digitally, transferring the images onto flexible panels. A laser-cutting machine created borders and drifting snow. Hartman is installing the pieces and cloaking them in 2-foot, fold-out snow-
Jonnie Hartman is in the midst of installing 13 holiday windows depicting the ways Christmas is celebrated around the world.
flakes, Chinese lanterns, colorful gumballs and Christmas ornaments. She strung brightly colored felt balls made by rolling felt in her hands like Play-dough and putting them in a dryer to shrink them. She strung handmade garlands and decorated a wreath for the Germany exhibit with hand-made crocheted flowers—all of which came in the back of a 40-foot truck. Hartman, who studied art illustration, has been decorating windows for Christmas for the past seven years for Struck design firm in Salt Lake City. She decorated Sun Valley owners Earl and Carol Holding’s Grand America Hotel in Salt Lake City last year. That project served as the inspiration for this project in Sun Valley Village. “These windows are three to four times bigger than the ones at Grand America,” she said. The displays resemble pop-up illustrations in children’s books in some ways, Norman Rockwell paintings in other ways. “I look at these and think ‘These came out of my two hands?!’ Crazy!” she said.
Susan Savage shows off the passport that Sun Valley will offer window strollers.
“They take a lot of patience—the hooks holding one display came out the other day and I had to start all over. But I really enjoy going out after they’re all done and watching people enjoying them.”
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