STORY BY KAREN BOSSICK

PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK AND SUSAN SNYDER

The view from the window in her new apartment is nice, Jane Conard says. But it doesn’t begin to match the view of Bald Mountain that she had from her home in Sun Valley.

Conard will have to hold Sun Valley images in her memory now as she makes a new home in a retirement community in Basking Ridge, N.J., in rolling farm country 40 miles west of the Newark airport.

“It’s hard to leave Sun Valley,” she said. “I was getting things ready to be shipped out on Tuesday and it was that typical beautiful Sun Valley day with blue skies and white snow on the mountain peaks. I have a really pretty view from my apartment but it’s not the same as looking at mountains.”

Conard, who has served on the Sun Valley City Council for 10 years, submitted her two-week notice effective Feb. 1 this past week. City Administrator Jim Keating said the city will appoint someone to serve out her remaining two years.

“It was a great disappointment to me to have to resign because I had been on the council for 10 years, and I felt I was making a contribution because I was able to use my legal training and skills,” Conard said. “But my only child—my daughter--lives in New Jersey and she wanted me to be closer to her where she could take care of me because I’ve experienced a few dizzy spells.”

Conard was a flatlander from Ames, Iowa, when she went off to Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., and law school at University of California-Davis.

But, soon after she moved to Salt Lake City to work for Intermountain Health Care in its then-new in-house legal department, she met an engineer who asked if she’d heard of Sun Valley.

“Rick (Maneval) worked in the mining industry for Kennecott and Bexel and as a consultant on major mining construction projects in South America and Australia,” she recounted. “He said, ‘If you came from California, you must have skied. Have you skied Sun Valley?’ We went to Sun Valley and two years later we were married by (former Sun Valley Mayor) Ruth Lieder in the Lodge.”

From that point on, the couple’s goal was always to live fulltime in Sun Valley.

“We liked the beauty of Sun Valley in the winter and summer,” Conard said. “The people are so very friendly, and we loved the mountains and the changing seasons and the wonderful recreational opportunities. We always laughed and said it’s like summer camp for adults because there’s so many fun things to do.”

Conard is proud of the role she had in helping to pass a low-interest bond for repairing the roads in Elkhorn and Sun Valley—a project that was finished two years ago. Before, she said, the roads were bumpy—the street department filled the potholes every spring and patched the patches every fall.

She’s proud of her role building affordable housing units for firefighters at the Greenhorn fire station near East Fork Road and Highway 75. And she’s proud of the decision to purchase the Ellsworth Inn in Hailey for workforce housing.

“Some questioned why the City of Sun Valley was buying land and doing projects outside its city limits. But housing is a valley-wide issue, and in Sun Valley land is so expensive. People sometimes pay $1 million for a lot to build a house so it made sense for us to lay the groundwork for housing projects elsewhere,” she said.

The biggest issue facing the city continues to be housing, Conard said, and so she is relieved that the Sun Valley Community School got the green light to build duplexes for faculty on land near the school’s Sagewillow Barn and athletic fields.

“The Community School worked very hard for a year with the planning department to get zoning approval to build duplexes on the property they were bequeathed,” she said. “It was very contentious at first because there were some large beautiful homes not far away. But they worked with the city to make changes in terms of sight lines between their buildings and those homes so it’s more compatible. Their teachers say they can’t afford to live in the valley so they think it will be important for the recruitment of their faculty.”

Conard was an enthusiastic supporter every time the wraps came off an Olympic Lady statue at the city’s Festival Meadows. And she’s sorry she won’t be here during the 2025 World Cup Finals March 22-28 when a new statue honoring Picabo Street is unveiled and the park is renamed Champion Meadow.

“That park is coming into fruition and slowly it will be enhanced—I won’t say ‘developed’ because you raise all kinds of concerns when you say ‘development.’ People think, ‘Oh no, there goes the park.’ But it will be landscaped and enhanced and the statues, I think, will be a wonderful entry point for the Sun Valley, like the Red Barn has been all these years.”

Conard contends that the City of Sun Valley is on sound financial footing—it was recently able to buy new snow plows with its reserve. One of its next major project will be addressing the intersection at Sun Valley and Saddle roads where traffic lights failed a couple years ago.

“I’d like to see a roundabout there—the roundabouts in Europe and the eastern United States work well. They’re much safer because there’s no head-on traffic and they’re more economic and efficient at moving traffic than a four-way stop,” she said. “We’ve had preliminary discussions with Sun Valley Company to get a little more land on each side and they’ve been very cooperative as they would like to have a nicer entryway, as well.”

For now, Conard is getting used to the traffic patterns in her senior living village with its single-family residences, duplexes and two-story apartment buildings spread out on 72 acres of land. The village features three “very posh” restaurants, a 200-seat theater, swimming pool with a retractable glass roof and day spa. All that in addition to medical care, memory care and a skilled nursing center.

“I’ve got an apartment at the very end so I look across wetlands and a white fence that’s part of horse farm. If I have to be here, it’s not a bad place to be,” she said.

Conard is a 15-minute drive from her daughter and son-in-law who met at Colby College in Maine before going on to graduate schools in Berkeley and Stanford. Her daughter works for W.W. Norton Publishing in New York; her son-in-law, who majored in health care economics, for the Robert Johnson Foundation in Princeton.

“I’ll get to see more of my grandsons, who are ages 13 and 16 and becoming very interesting to talk with,” she said. “I already miss so many of my friends. But three have already invited me to stay with them, so I will be coming back.”