STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

Editor’s Note: The Elephant’s Perch will celebrate its 50th anniversary from 4 to 6 p.m. tonight—Feb. 5--with 20 percent off sales, refreshments and a special appearance by longtime owners Bob and Kate Rosso. Just for kicks, we are looking back at the 30th anniversary celebration of this iconic outdoors store.

One ski covered everything from backcountry telemarking to track skiing when Bob Rosso opened The Elephant’s Perch in 1976. Skate skis wouldn’t be invented until the mid-1980s. And wool knickers—not lycra--comprised whatever fashion statement was to be made.

“I just went to North Face, and loaded up my pickup truck with sleeping bags, tents and climbing gear. Starting a specialty outdoor shop was really pretty simple in those days,” said Rosso.

It’s not that simple anymore. Rosso has a handful of buyers, each with a niche, such as bicycles or clothing. And each spends the better part of the year poring over catalogs, talking to manufacturer reps and researching product lines to find what Rosso calls “the cream of the crop.”

It’s a strategy that’s worked as The Elephant Perch toasted its 30th anniversary Sunday with a barbecue for more than 300 former and current employees and business associates at River Run Lodge.

“Fortunately, we’re able to carry the best gear that’s out there. We have people from Boise and Salt Lake City come here because they say they can find stuff they can’t find at home,” said Rosso. “And we stand behind every single product we sell whether it’s a pair of shoelaces or a $5,000 mountain bike.”

Rosso grew up in the shadow of Mt. Baldy but it was the Baldy near Cucamonga, Calif., rather than the Baldy that looms over Sun Valley.

He spent summers at Meeks Bay Resort at Lake Tahoe, which his grandfather bought in the 1920s and owned until he sold it to the Hewletts of Hewlett-Packard fame. But, mostly, he grew up surfing, working as a life guide and swimming competitively at Long Beach State College, where he majored in education with a business minor.

His coach at Long Beach State College was Donald Gambril, who coached Mark Spitz and Matt Biondi during his Olympic coaching career, which spanned from 1968 to 198

After a stint in the Air Force Reserves, where he was a paratrooper trained to recover capsules for the Gemini Program, he came to Sun Valley to be a ski bum for a year. He never left.

“I loved the openness here, the elbow room,” he said.

He did a brief stint as a bus boy and a chef for the Country Kitchen, then took his Yosemite climbing skills to Snug Mountaineering, which specialized in technical climbing and backcountry skiing.

“We were on the cutting edge of the specialty retail genre in the early to mid-1970s,” he said. “Rob Kiesel had opened the first specialty outdoor store in Idaho. Before, it was just Joe’s Sporting Goods.”

In 1976 a friend who was also a K2 rep talked him into opening his own backcountry store in a 75-year-old white clapboard house that used to serve as a stage stop and the home of the Lewis family, who ran the Big Hitch ore wagons up and down Trail Creek Road to ferry supplies to Bayhorse and other mining towns.

Rosso named it after one of his favorite climbing spots, a monolith of granite near Redfish Lake that he called “the best rock in the Sawtooths.” Ostensibly, that rock was so-named because you can see the outline of an elephant’s head and trunk in the massive rock. But Rosso also contended that there’s a natural dip in the rock that looks as if an elephant might have perched there.

In honor of his new shop, he started the Tri-Elephant-thon.

In between all the fun and games, his shop became a gathering place for jocks wanting to brag about their latest exploits and locals and tourists wanting to get tips on everything from off-trail hikes to the best place to eat.

“I would like to say I had some strategic business plan, but I didn’t,” he said. “I did it all from the heart—a love for the outdoors and an appreciation of my customers. We were able to carry the best gear that’s out there. We had people from Boise and Salt Lake City come here because they said they could find stuff they couldn’t find at home.

“The people who come in want to have fun,” he added. “They walk in saying, ‘Turn me on to something new.’ We have a good conversation and whether they buy something or not really doesn’t matter. If they have a good experience, they talk to people about it and, sure enough, sooner or later someone does come in through that word of mouth and oftentimes they buy something.”

Rosso admits he’s made plenty of business mistakes along the way. He recalls nodding as someone asked to take a bicycle for a spin around the block. He was so busy he didn’t notice until later that the customer hadn’t brought the bike back, nor had Rosso taken any I.D.

“I’ve told my employees ever since that the best defense is good service. If you’re alert and paying attention to the customers, those sorts of things don’t happen,” he said.

“We try to provide the same service to everyone, whether they just got off their Lear jet or whether they just drove into town in their beat-up VW van. I tell my employees the brand of cross-county ski we carry is not as important as the store. And the store is not as important as the customers who come in here.”

Over the years, more than 250 people have worked for the Elephant’s Perch which, Rosso said, made sending out invitations to the anniversary party akin “to planning a wedding party for the daughter you never had.”

(At last tally, more than 300 people have worked for The Elephant’s Perch).

About two-thirds of the employees still live between here and Twin Falls. Local  employees have ranged from Don Wiseman, who now heads up the Sun Valley Ski Education Foundation, to Muffy Ritz, a longtime skier on the Rossignol team who has participated in a variety of adventure races including Eco Challenge.

The staff has included a young man in the Olympic training program and a young woman who’s on the U.S. Ski Team.

“We try to be so flexible about it that if someone can walk in and say, ‘You need help?’ we can say, ‘Sure.’ And it’s great for us to be able to tell customers, ‘This young lady, Morgan Arritola, is one of the fastest women in the world. She can tell you something about skis.’ ”

Rosso’s influence in the community has extended far beyond his shop doors.

In 1971, one year after Olympic Nordic skier Leif Odmark had opened one of America’s first cross-country ski centers at Sun Valley Resort, Kiesel asked Rosso to help coach a startup Nordic team for the fledgling Sun Valley Ski Education Foundation.

Until then, some had scoffed at the idea that people would want to ski on the flats, rather than the mountain. Buck Levy, a Nordic combined racer and jumper got his teammates from the U.S. cross-country ski team at the 1956 Olympics in Cortina, Italy, to bring their skis and put on a cross-country ski racing demonstration outside Ketchum’s Hemingway School.

They built a racing track by having one person ski around a circle. The next person would put left ski in that person’s right track as he skied around. And the third person would put his left ski in the right ski track of the second skier.

Both he and Rosso had to convince people that the hassle of burning syrupy pine tar on the bottom of wooden skis was worth it.

“Pine tar was wicked. It was so goopy,” said Rosso. “It got your hands all goopy. And, if you weren’t careful, you could get it on your clothes and pretty soon everything was sticking to you. Get it on down and you were tarred and feathered.”

Rosso agreed to Kiesel’s request, even though he didn’t know anything about cross-country skiing at the time.

“Kiesel was a former alpine ski racer who eventually went on to become the first to promote glide waxes for cross-country skis and to become head coach for the U.S. Cross-Country Ski Team. He had the skills and one thing led to another. It was a lot of fun, and the kids nicknamed me Hummingbird Man because I was all over the place.”

To stoke the enthusiasm for Nordic skiing, Rosso and his friends organized numerous cross-country races, including one from the top of Galena Summit to the flats where partners switched to tandem skis and proceeded on to Busterback Ranch.

But by far the most notable race was the Boulder Mountain Tour, which he started with Kiesel, Bob Gordon and former Galena Lodge owner Dale Gelskey to commemorate the occasion that Sun Valley ski instructor Louis Stur skied from Ketchum to Galena Lodge to deliver medicine.

That race, originally known as the Sawtooth Mountain Marathon, became one of the most prestigious Nordic races in the country. The course initially followed a trail set once a year by a snowmobile that hugged the berms along Highway 75, or what was known as U.S. 93 in those days. Skiers had to cross the highway several times and, if they weren’t careful, they could slide off the trail onto the highway.

Rosso was among those who waded out into the Big Wood River to construct a temporary bridge each year out of pallets and pine logs before Murphy’s Bridge was installed north of SNRA headquarters.

Four or five skiers had to ski the course the day before to push the air out of the snow so the snowmobile could pack the course, Rosso said. It generally took three to four hours for people to ski as skate skiing had yet to be invented.

Rosso also was on the inaugural Blaine County Recreation District Board, helping to oversee the construction of the 22-mile bike trail between Ketchum and Bellevue, as well as plotting the valley’s Nordic trials and the building of 45 miles of hiking and biking trails surrounding Galena Lodge.

He’s started and maintained a variety of events, including the Shop to the Top run up Baldy and the Adams Gulch Fun Run that kicks off the summer season.

And anytime there’s a silent auction or giveaway for organizations ranging from the Council Circle relational organization to Wood River Rideshare’s Smart Moves program, you can be sure there’s a gift basket with the Elephant Perch’s name on it.

“What drives this community is that we have so many businesses like mine supporting all these different things,” said Rosso. “That, in turn, is why it’s so important for locals to support local business.

“You can guarantee the big-name guys –-Bobco Ripco, Zipco and Dipco-- are not going to spend a dime on behalf of the community,” he said, using his pet names for shops like Shopko and Costco. “And local businesses flavor the community. When guests come here, they’re not coming to see what they can see at home. They want Mom and Pop shops that provide a sense of community.”

Rosso’s community involvement is one of the reasons his business has become such a gathering place, said Bob’s wife Kate, who works alongside him as a clothing buyer.

“He connects with people who support him in return,” she said.

The connections extend far beyond Ketchum, added Nappy Neaman, who undoubtedly is the store’s most colorful salesman with his salty vernacular and his painted toenails.

“I’ve been in Thailand and someone will say, ‘You’re Nappy from the Elephant’s Perch. We don’t realize what the store has become in the world. What would we do without the store? That’s the real question,” he said.

Rosso turns 60 next year but, with son Stephen just entering college, he isn’t even mulling retirement.

“Maybe I could have had a retirement if I’d been a numbers cruncher but I haven’t,” he said. “I’d rather be outside than sitting there looking at reports. And, to be truthful, I miss the days when business was so slow we could hang a ‘Gone climbing’sign on the door or close down for a month and go somewhere during slack.

“There’s no such thing as retirement for me. This business fully takes my time, but I love it. And, as long as we can turn off the phone in our office occasionally, get out the door and do the things people do around here—like a little mountain climbing, a little biking, a little skiing—we’re happy.”

BACK TO THE ‘70S

The Elephant Perch’s 30th anniversary celebration was a sight to behold:

Architect Ned Hamlin showed up in a T-shirt touting the Commander Cody concert that was held at River Run in the 1976.

Ketchum Ranger Kurt Nelson showed up in complete ‘70s attire from the hat to the striped bell-bottoms. And Jenny Busdon dug out a mini-skirt and go-go boots as the community turned back time to the ‘70s to celebrate the Elephant Perch’s birthday on Sunday.

Charley French, one of the community’s oldest but most steadfast athletes, marveled at how young he looked in pictures of triathlon participants in the 1980s that hung on a memory board.

And Cindy Hamlin and Minnette Broschofsky reminisced about the outdoor gear of that time.

“I brought my first hiking boots from the Elephant’s Perch,” said Hamlin. “And I remember we had to take a class on how to take care of our skis with linseed oil and klister. It was a big process in those days.”

“And the cross-country boots then were like regular shoes,” added Broschofsky. “You didn’t have to have a different boot and different ski for everything you wanted to do.”