STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

Bartender Aidan Proctor, dressed as Scooby Doo, caught some Vitamin D as he served beverages from a bar outside the Kasino Club.

Across the street Randy Bradford cooked up a steaming vat of paella far from the sun-kissed land of Valencia, Spain, where it originated.

“I used to cook it up all the time in Boise at the Basque Market so I thought I’d do it here,” said Bradford, dressed in a colorful ocean shirt that belied the fact that snow was stacked up four and five feet high around him.

The occasion was the annual Stanley Winterfest, which brought people wearing chicken hats, bear hats, coonskin hats, unicorn hats and Willy Wonka hats to town as they engaged in silly games like Snowshoe Drag Races and Three-Legged Races that broke the winter doldrums if just for a day.

The event is held every year in conjunction with President’s Day Weekend. And this year’s was particularly significant because the town of Stanley lost a big hunk of its summer tourism season from July through September 2024 when fire closed down Redfish Lake for a few weeks and another  rampaged through the Stanley Lake area.

“We may have lost some visitors this year due to avalanches closing Highway 21 between Boise and Stanley,” said organizer Jeffrey Hall. “But a lot of people are willing to make the drive through Ketchum. The road was closed during the Snowmobile Ball and I don’t think we lost a single snowmobiler.”