STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK
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.
Rosso, who is being honored as the face of the 50th annual Boulder Mountain Tour on Saturday, has not only outfitted Sun Valley-area residents and visitors in Nordic gear over the years. He helped introduce modern-day Nordic skiing to the Wood River Valley as he coached the first Sun Valley Nordic ski team and started some of the valley’s early Nordic races, including the Boulder Mountain Tour.
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 1984.
After a stint in the Air Force Reserves, where he served as a paratrooper and trained to recover capsules for the Gemini Program, Rosso followed friends to Sun Valley. He came intending to be a ski bum for a year but never left.
“I loved the openness here, the elbow room,” he said.
Rosso did a brief stint as a bus boy and a chef for the Country Kitchen and got a gig as a rock climbing guide. Then took his Yosemite-style climbing skills to Snug Mountaineering, which specialized in technical climbing and backcountry skiing.
“Rob Kiesel had opened the first specialty outdoor store in Idaho,” he said. “Before, it was just Joe’s Sporting Goods.”
In 1976 a K2 rep who lived in the valley talked Rosso into opening his own backcountry store in a 75-year-old white clapboard house that was once the home of Isaac Lewis, who operated Ketchum’s big hitch ore wagons that ferried silver and supplies between Ketchum and mining camps near Challis.
Rosso named it after one of his favorite climbing spots, a monolith of granite near Redfish Lake that he calls “the best rock in the Sawtooths.” Ostensibly, it got its name because you can see the outline of an elephant’s head and trunk in the massive rock. Rosso also contends that there’s a natural dip in the rock that looks as if an elephant might have perched there.
“I would like to say I had some strategic business plan when I started The Elephant’s Perch, but I didn’t,” he said of the shop that employed more than 300 employees until last year when he and his wife Kate sold it. “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.”
In 1971, one year after Olympic Nordic skier Leif Odmark had opened America’s first cross-country ski center 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, attracting racers from as far away as Japan and Scotland.
The race 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.
EJ Harpham recalled putting a glob of klister on top of each ski so she could wipe it on the bottom of her skis halfway through the race as the temperatures warmed.
“You had to worry about your kick on the old classic wax skis. If you lost it, you would die,” she said. “The only thing you could do was double pole the rest of the course on your heavy bamboo poles with those big baskets.”
There being no aid stations in the beginning and no Power Bars, either, racers stuffed Snickers bars in their turtlenecks to keep them warm until they needed a pick-me-up. Less competitive skiers filled their bota bags with wine and stuffed baguettes in their daypacks for picnicking along the way.
“Bob was setting up an aid station years later at Prairie Creek when he lost his cellphone in the dark,” said Kate Rosso, who was a young woman attending Colorado State University in Fort Collins when she met Bob while camping in Adams Gulch in the summer of 1972.
“He went back and looked for it but it wasn’t until over two months later in April that Muffy Ritz saw something bright green sticking out of the snow as she skied the Harriman. It had been groomed over all winter with a Pisten bully and was finally emerging through.”
The Boulder Mountain Tour took a big step forward in the when the Blaine County Recreation District collaborated with the Forest Service to build the Harriman Trail along the fragments of an old logging trail. But it nearly didn’t happen.
Rosso and Jenny Busdon were nursing their disappointment at being told by Sen. Mike Crapo that the trail couldn’t be built when Teresa Heinz Kerry, a parttime Sun Valley resident, walked into The Elephant’s Perch. Noticing their glum faces, she retorted, “We’ll see about that.”
She placed a call to Vice President Al Gore and, before Rosso could give his skis a hot wax, the Harriman Trail was on its way to becoming a reality.
“Today, it’s a highway in the woods,” said Rosso. “It’s a treasure.”
Over the years, Bob and Kate Rosso kept valley fundraisers supplied with raffle prizes, from the bicycles they gave to the Smart Move Challenge designed to get people out of their cars to the avalanche beacons they donated to Friends of Sawtooth Avalanche Center for its annual fundraisers.
Rosso prided himself on the fact that his sales people knew what they were talking about.
“It was 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,’ ” he reminisced.
The Elephant’s Perch stood behind every single product it sold, whether a pair of shoelaces or a $5,000 mountain bike.
“I brought my first hiking boots from the Elephant’s Perch,” recounted mid-valley resident Cindy 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.”
That said, Rosso readily admits he made a few 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 he taken any I.D.
“I told my employees after that 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 tried 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.”
Rosso served on the inaugural Blaine County Recreation District Board, helping to oversee the construction of the 22-mile bike trail that runs between Ketchum and Bellevue. He helped plot the valley’s Nordic trails and the building of 45 miles of hiking and biking trails surrounding Galena Lodge.
He also started a variety of events, including the Shop to the Top run up Baldy and the Adams Gulch Fun Run that kicked off the summer season for years.
“What drives this community is that we have so many businesses like mine supporting all these different things,” he said. “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. 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.”
Several years ago, Rosso--always a mesmerizing storyteller with a penchant for details--noticed he was having trouble remembering small things like how to open his email.
As with everything else, he has tackled his diagnosis of dementia with a positive attitude and even humor. He’s quick to point to the shiny space-age like espresso machine he and his wife share at their Elkhorn home and recount how he accidentally substituted dog food for coffee beans one day.
“It tasted pretty awful,” he said.
He and his wife Kate work hard at staving off the progression of the disease through diet and supplements, attending yoga, greeting friends over croissants and skiing daily with their flaxen-colored dachshund Honey Girl at Galena Lodge and the Sun Valley Nordic Center.
Last year, the 75-year-old skied the Boulder Mountain Tour for the first time in decades. He got more hugs than a newborn baby as he crossed the line with his friend Kris Thoreson in just an hour and 40 minutes.
“I hadn’t done this in so long and my wife pushed me into it,” said Rosso, who spent years as finish line announcer. “In the ‘70s it was so much smaller, so much simpler. But there’s still a piece of that in that a whole lot of the skiers I skied with then were the same people I skied with today. All good friends—talking and pushing one another down the trail.”
Rosso will toe the line again Saturday when the 50th annual Boulder Mountain Tour begins in Senate Meadows outside Galena Lodge. This time he will ski it with Joan Scheingraber.
“It’s hard to believe we’ve been doing this for 50 years,” he said. “What I love is how it brings people together. We have racers come from all over—even outside the country—and we have this unified experience we all do together. It’s the power of the race.”