STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK
Ann Christensen, one of the founding members of the Sawtooth Society in 1997, was honored with the Champion of the Sawtooths Award for her work preserving and enhancing the Sawtooth National Recreation Area during Thursday’s Sagebrush Soiree.
Monica Church, the granddaughter of Bethine Church who conceived of the organization to advocate for the SNRA, presented Christensen with a tree that will be planted in her honor on the SNRA.
Christensen has not only advocated for the salmon that swim 900 miles from the ocean to the Stanley Basin but she has spent decades teaching children about the environment in hopes they will come to love and protect it.
Church praised her as someone who’s “willing to slow down, look down and show us what’s at our feet.”
“Ann and I would agree: There’s no greater feeling of accomplishment than watching the child you’ve mentored become the future you hoped for,” she added.
Christensen’s passion for teaching about the outdoors had its genesis at a bird sanctuary in Marin County, Calif., where she worked as a naturalist before moving to Idaho. She and her husband Doug discovered the SNRA while leading a Sierra Club trip to Castle Peak in 1978.
They returned the following winter and flew over the Circle A Ranch near Stanley, which was buried under six feet of snow.
“They fell in love with it. Steve McQueen was bidding on it, too, but my Dad outbid him,” recalled Aimee Christensen. “They moved here full time in 1983.”
Beholden to the outdoors, the Christensens began taking Aimee backpacking when she was 13 months, her mother carrying her in a gerry pack.
“One time a pack mule tried to chomp on my fingers and I screamed bloody murder. My father came running for miles since he was leading a group of people to see if I had fallen off a cliff,” Aimee recounted.
Another time they found a chinook salmon that had come up Valley Creek and gotten stuck in an irrigation ditch near Elk Creek. Ann, Aimee and daughter Eloise scooped up the salmon, put it in a cardboard box and walked it over to the creek. That began a love affair with native salmon that has lasted through today.
“My mother taught me how special nature was,” said Aimee. “I’d be in the gerry pack on her back, listening while she taught others, so I found out how amazing plants and creatures are. And my father taught me about justice and what’s right.”
Aimee Christensen parlayed her love of the environment into working on environmental policy in Washington, D.C. She also founded Christensen Global consulting, the Sun Valley Institute for Resilience and Sun Valley Forum to seek and advocate for solutions.
She knows her work is needed more than ever as she reads a daily barrage of headlines about heatwaves, flooding, tornadoes and wildfire.
“Before I had to make a moral argument. Now, I make arguments based on what’s safe for people and animals and what’s best for the economy,” she said. “It’s so urgent and people are already suffering. If we had started 20 years ago, it would’ve gone smoothly. Now, it’s going to be a bumpy ride. “
Over the years, Ann Christensen has led winter animal tracking classes for the Environmental Resource Center and gotten her feet wet showing youngsters how to find hidden creatures beneath rocks in her Ants and Plants classes.
At 89, she still plants the seeds of curiosity, hoping to inspire future generations to care for the land, by volunteering at the Sawtooth Botanical Garden’s bug zoo and taking baskets full of tarantellas and animal skulls to the Big Wood Preschool.
“Climate change is urgent,” she told those attending the Sagebrush Soiree. “We do not want a desert. This land has to be nurtured and loved.”