Bald Mountain Lodge Ketchum

Aug. 24 Arrived in Ketchum for a visit with Tim, Susie and Jake (aka Sam). After a gorgeous drive through a long and wide valley into the Mountains that create Sun Valley and Ketchum, famous for the skiing, we pulled into Timmy and Susie's driveway to find a note taped to their door. The note says the perfect welcome: "We are at the river swimming, will be right back!" It was about 85 degrees so Andy and suited up, took our bikes down and headed out to ...

We stopped right outside of Sun Valley to spend a couple days routing our next stops. First annual invitational for NADRA Western Office Golf Outing has been established! (NADRA does not yet have a Western office, but after this trip we are considering it!) Mike Beaudry and friend, Lance Meller hit up the greens of "The Big Wood".

4 Beautiful days of fun and great excercise! We stayed in a 3 bedroom Resort Quest Condo with nice view up warm springs and pleanty of room for 7 of us! We could walk to the lift at Warm Springs Lodge and at the end of the day enjoyed afternoons in the sun listening to live music. Loved the long, long, long runs at Sun Valley! Great food and great company. Some Sun Valley Info: Known as the "American Shangri-La ...

Jim's brother John had a party planned. We were to spend the night up at a yurt in the mountains getting drunk with nine other people, mostly guys. One might hesitatingly ask, "Why would you do such a thing". We would answer, "Why not?" So that is what we prepared to do. We rushed around getting boots for Jim, packing our heavy packs with bottles of booze, warm clothes and food for one night, though we looked like we had packed for a year ...

Wow, what a great day! Today Jim, John and I went skiing. John, who was formally a ski instructor gave me lessons. At first I was hesitant since the last time I skied I ended up with a concusion, but I eased into it and got much better. Jim and John were thoroughly impressed and so John moved us on to the harder slopes. Eventually, Jim and John who excellent skiers sent me down the begiiner slopes ...

We arrived Thursday in San Diego for a quick stop over to see my grandma (Mommom, as we call her). We did some last minute shopping for our trip - gotta love REI! We didn't have time to visit anyone other than our friend Zenaida who met us at my brother's gallery soon after we arrived. We had a nice dinner the Saturday night with my brother Grant, sister-in-law, Layne, dad and Mommom. It was great being together again ...

... Montana towards Idaho and on to Sun Valley, where we are at at the moment. Well, not quite there - about 13 miles away in a town called Hailey. Sun Valley is the playground - one of them - of the rich and famous apparently. Hence the reason why we are here! Aaah, and we thought you knew! Anyway, we plan to have a bit of a sticky beek and not sure yet how long we want to stay here. Shall see tomorrow what we feel like and then play it by ear.

... for a longer period of time. The trail curves along a high bench offering fantastic views of the peaks we would be skiing and eventually winds through a narnia forest and to the base of skiers summit and our home for the next 3 nights.
We all branched off and got after our own lines, scoping out the terrain for the following days and becoming orientated with approaches and exits.
The fourteen of us celebrated my 35th that evening, passing around the ...

... elk and bison, some blocking our way on the road. A few coyote, one owl and lots of geese. What we haven't seen are any moose. We went to all the places the guide book said they would be and even went out hunting moose at dusk which is when they are meant to be neat the water. Nothing, not even a long distance sighting. The weather has been mostly great. For the first few days we had clear blue skies with the temperatures in the 70sF. Then on Sunday we woke up to snow on the ...

Today we got up and I saw Dusty off because he had to go back to Portland, as he was finishing up a summer school class. I left with his family in the middle of the day, and had a very bumpy flight back to Sun Valley. I used this time to reflect on my short time in B.C., as well as the thoughts of being able to do more travelling like this in the future. See you soon.... Cheers