STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK
There was more camouflage sandwiched into the Sun Valley Inn’s Limelight Room Friday night than you’ll find at Cabela’s.
In a fun twist, those attending the Sun Valley Ski Education Foundation’s 47th Wild Game Dinner were invited to show up dressed as if they were in the hunt. And the 325 guests who showed up for the sold-out fundraiser for the Sun Valley Ski Education Foundation responded by showing up in flannel and camouflage.
Carter and Kate Minor showed up as trophy heads, while Morgan Landers showed up as a ram and her husband-coach Brian Eggleton, a hunter.
Diners stepped into a magical atmosphere where they could sample duck sausage appetizers under a hunting camp and order huckleberry mules from Hemingway’s Bar.
“Very creative,” said Ellie Ellis, who attended with French native Michel Rudigoz, who coached several Sun Valley Olympians, including Susie Patterson ad Christin Cooper as a coach with the U.S. Women’s Alpine Team in the 1980s.
Rudigoz, who owns Christiania Restaurant and Olympic Bar, was there for the first Wild Game Dinner. Coaches and parents of skiers brought freezers full of wild game to his restaurant and he cooked the venison and other meat with the help of U.S. Ski Team members and SVSEF coaches.
“We probably had about a hundred people that year,” he recounted. “It became famous. Everyone wanted to attend.”
In fact, the Wild Game Dinner grew with the program. The SVSEF has grown from 175 skiers and 18 coaches to 850 athletes and 85 coaches taking part in Alpine, Big Mountain, Cross Country, Freeski, Freestyle and Snowboard programs.
Started as a way to celebrate Sun Valley’s mountain culture, the Wild Game Dinner now raises funds to help the SVSEF give out about $500,000 in financial aid each year to its athletes.
“This started 47 years ago with the idea that we could make our kids better,” SVSEF Executive Director Scott McGrew told supporters Friday night. “You help keep our kids engaged.”
One of the highlights of the Wild Game Dinner is, always, the presentation of the Jack Simpson Dedicated Coach’s Award. And this year’s presentation was a bittersweet one as the award was given posthumously to Susanne Connor, a longtime SVSEF coach who unexpectedly passed away a month before the season was due to begin while receiving medical treatment in Boise.
Days before she passed away, she wrote about how she was terrified of gravity as a 10-year-old growing up in the German Alps. She overcame that fear to become a passionate skier, noted McGrew.
She moved to Vancouver, Canada, in 1972 and then to Sun Valley in 1978, where she started a gliding business taking clients soaring over Bald Mountain and enrolled her child in the SVSEF’s Devo (development) program.
“I could not keep the huge smile off my face when I got my first Sun Valley ski pass,” she wrote.
Connor, who also served as a fly-fishing guide for Lost River Outfitters, went on to coach with the SVSEF for 30 years, as an Alpine Devo coach and a Laser and Rota Ripper coach, teaching youngsters who had never set foot on skis how to overcome their own fear of gravity at Rotarun Ski Area.
McGrew recalled how Connor told others not what they wanted to hear but what they needed to hear in order to bring out the best in them: “She was the champion of the underdog. There was no child who escaped her eyes and her heart.”
Those attending the Wild Game Dinner included Bradley Burwell, a former ski racer who has a 7- and 5-year-old in the Devo Alpine Program.
“Both my kids participate and I love it,” he said. “It’s a great, great, great ski program–best in the country. And I can say that from personal experience, having been raised in Aspen and racing at Andover. The SVSEF coaches have incredible resumes—as good as I’ve ever seen. The Ski Education Foundation has produced a lot of great ski athletes, and the coaches are really great with kids 5 and up and those learning to ski.”
Among a plethora of youthful volunteers was Tymon Shell, a newcomer to SVSEF.
“I’ve been skiing since I was in third grade and I love jumping and stuff,” said the Wood River High School junior who is joining the moguls program. “They look like they have a lot of fun and I want to learn to do a 360, a spin seven. It’s kind of scary thinking about it, but it’s my dream.”
To help youngsters like Shell accomplish their dreams, the SVSEF auctioned off several lots, including a VIP Experience at the upcoming U.S. Alpine Nationals, complete with a dinner for two at the Ram Restaurant, $500 gift certificate to the Brass Ranch and a chance to ski with former U.S. Ski Team member Bryon Friedman, who had three Top 10 World Cup finishes and two national championships
Other lots included a week aboard a Vida Yacht in British Columbia or Mexico; a Full Moon dinner for 24 at Galena Lodge, a Dollar Mountain two-seater chairlift and a Hawaiian spearfishing experience donated by survivors of the Maui wildfire.
Jesse Keefe, a member of the U.S. Paralympic Ski Team, recounted for the audience how he began skiing with the Sun Valley Ski Education Foundation at 6.
“Even though I had only one leg, none of the staff treated me differently,” said Keefe, who had his foot amputated because he’d been born without an ankle bone. “It’s a lifeline for athletes like me who dream of conquering the mountains. Without your support, I wouldn’t be here proudly representing our nation. Thank you for being the wind beneath our skis.”
SVSEF Executive Director Scott McGrew told the crowd that every civilization has had its rite of passage and that the SVSEF is the rite of passage for many Wood River Valley youth, leaving its signature on kids’ hearts.
“With that comes opportunity for growth, for something that’s transformative,” he said.