STORY AND PHOTOS BY KATE DALY
Pops Night typically attracts the largest crowd of the Sun Valley Music Festival season. And that means the odds are highest that some concertgoers left something behind after enjoying a medley of Latin-inspired dance music conducted by Jacomo Bairos.
If you lost something, you’ll find the lost and found in the Sun Valley Pavilion’s Welcome Center near the main entrance steps.
The lost and found department shares space with the store where logoed low-slung chairs, water bottles, cups, bags, T-shirts, hats, keychains and fans are for sale.
The Welcome Center is open from 5 to 6:30 p.m. and from 7:30 to 8 p.m. on performance evenings, and also from 1 to 3:30 p.m. during rehearsals on concert days—the last one being on Thursday, Aug. 21.
The most common items turned into the lost and found are chairs and water bottles and the occasional phone, said Raine Filbert, Sun Valley Music Festival Development and Administrative Summer Associate.
There’s not a large volume, she said, and that’s kind of surprising given how full the Pavilion and lawn have been on some nights, most notably when Time for Three played on Aug. 4 and when the orchestra played a tribute to Maurice Ravel on Aug. 10. The Pavilion alone seats up to 1,750 people.
If no one claims an item by the time the season ends, it gets moved over to the festival’s office in Ketchum.
Good to know, but that information comes a little too late for some lawn fans.
Earlier this month two people were spreading out their blankets in the morning to save spaces for later and they got to chatting about why they did not set up any seats. Turns out each brought two chairs to concerts last summer and afterwards went to put them away only to find out a carrying case gone.
A visit to the lost and found yielded nothing, so now both people are stuck with a coverless folding chair that is clumsy to carry around.
On top of the continuing case of the missing cases, one of those same lawn fans accidentally left a canvas Yeti cooler in the dirt parking lot across the street from the indoor ice rink after a concert last summer.
Once again, the item didn’t turn up at the Welcome Center lost and found, and a classified ad in the local newspaper did not generate any leads either.
There is an inkling of hope, though.
Filbert says sometimes concertgoers pick up things and drop them off at Sun Valley Lodge’s lost and found, so that’s another option for the forgetful to consider.