STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

John Peavey, who co-founded the Trailing of the Sheep Festival with his wife Diane, was saluted for his far-reaching work that went beyond the Festival to address water rights and campaign transparency Saturday night.

Jim Phillips, a friend of the family, noted that Peavey had been one of the first in the state to stand up for water rights when Idaho Power Co. wanted to build a coal-fired plant that would have sucked much of the water out of the Snake River.

Peavey, who served seven consecutive terms in the Idaho Senate, also fought for the Sunshine Law that mandated public disclosure of campaign contributions. When the Idaho legislature refused to pass it, he took it to the voters who approved it with 70 percent of the vote.

John Peavey never went anywhere without a trusty border collie, if he could help it.

“He was one of those few politicians who truly loved campaigning,” said Phillips. “He thought: If you got to know someone, things would be better.”

Peavey, who presided over the Flat Top Sheep Ranch near Carey for 60 years before handing it over to his son Tom, was 90 when he passed away on Father’s Day. Friends and family celebrated a life well lived Saturday night at the Argyros Performing Arts Center, watching a “Life on the Range” video recounting the Peaveys’ work in conservation and telling stories about how Peavey had mentored so many in the ways of ranching and politics.

Norma Douglas recounted how she first met John Peavey when he knocked on her door while campaigning. When he learned that she was from New York City, he asked her if she would go talk to a young woman named Diane Josephy, whom he had brought out to the ranch for the summer from Washington, D.C., where she worked in public policy.

I really like her, John told Norma, and I want her to stay.

A riderless horse honored John Peavey and others that the Trailing of the Sheep Festival lost thiss past year.

Pam Colesworthy told how John and Diane watched numerous videos on VHS tapes during winters when they moved to Hailey from their century-old cabin on the Flat Top Sheep Ranch. One day, she said, she was outside her video store trying to shovel snow when John drove up wearing his signature cowboy hat.

He threaded a few videos through the return slot, then grabbed a shovel out of his truck and began helping her.

It was the cowboy way, she noted.

Martha Page recounted how Peavey had posed as the Willie the Wildcat mascot at Northwestern University, where he got a degree in engineering. One day, Peavey told her, he was standing with his tail in hand and he realized halfway through a march song that the band was following his tail as he swung it from back and forth.

John Peavey’s grandson Cory Peavey helped keep the sheep in line on Sunday.

The band director chased him across campus, Peavey told her. The only thing that saved him was that no one knew who the Wildcat mascot was.

One of Peavey’s most memorable legacies is the Trailing of the Sheep Festival, which is now in its 28^th year and has made numerous prestigious lists as Best Fall Festival and the like. It attracted Charles Kuralt’s CBS Sunday Morning a few years after it was founded and now brings 25,000 people to town each year from throughout the world.

It started when Peavey and fellow sheep rancher John Faulkner worked with the Blaine County Recreation District to build a bike path along the former rail trail once used to ferry sheep out of the valley when Ketchum was second only to Sydney, Australia, as the sheep capitol of the world.

They hammered out an agreement that the bike path could be constructed on the historic sheep right-of-way, provided the sheep could use it as they migrated to summer pastures in the spring and back to winter pastures in the desert every fall.

About 1,200 sheep made their way down Ketchum’s newly paved Main Street on Sunday.

But, the first time the sheep made their way down the path, Peavey’s phone began ringing off the hook. “Your sheep are on my bike path, and they’re leaving little brown things all over,” callers told him.

It being an election year, Peavey sprang into action offering to buy coffee for those who came out to help trail the sheep through Ketchum down to Hailey while learning about the historic legacy of sheep in the valley.

After a couple years of schoolchildren and others coming out, then-Sun Valley-Ketchum Chamber of Commerce Director Carol Waller noted: “I think we have a festival here. Let’s walk the sheep down Main Street.”

“I said, ‘Carol you’re crazy. Who’s going to want to watch sheep go down Main Street?’ ” recounted Dennis Burke, longtime manager of the Flat Top Sheep Ranch. “Yet, I was the first to bring them down Main Street and it’s just gotten bigger and better ever since.”

Cory Peavey, John’s grandson, said his grandfather spent the last few weeks of his life driving around the ranch, enthused about the green sprouts of grass emerging after winter snow. “He had a love of spring when baby lambs came and the world came alive,” he said.

Before John’s death, the Peaveys hammered out a conservation easement agreement with The Nature Conservancy designed to protect the land their ranch sits on.

“Knowing the area will look like this 500 years from now makes you feel good,” said John.