BY LESLEY ANDRUS

 Looking at the photos in his living room, you would assume David Barovetto was a fisherman and architect.  The architect part is correct, but David smiles at the picture of him next to a 195-pound Ahi tuna.

It is, he admitted proudly, the only fish he has ever caught!  His sports passion, and the reason he is so happy in this valley, is his love of skiing and its culture.

 While born in Fresno, Calif., Barovetto grew up in Davis. His paternal grandfather had come from Italy to Davis with his wife in the early 1900s. And there he worked, contributing his vines to the viniculture department at the University of California-Davis.

Davis was, Barovetto said, a great place for he, his older brother and two younger sisters to grow up.

 Dave idolized his brother John--a tremendous athlete who was an all-conference football and baseball star, basketball MVP, and record holder in high hurdles and shot put at the University of California-Berkeley.

His brilliance and leadership continued in Vietnam, Barovetto said, where he died leading his men.  Barovetto proudly remembers his trip to Ft Knox, Ky., in 1990 where a building was dedicated to John for his exceptional service.  David later wrote a story celebrating John’s life and exploits.

 Skiing became a part of Barovetto’s life early on.  His family had a cabin off of Highway 50 and skied often in the Lake Tahoe area.  When he was a Boy Scout, he pursued badges in skiing.  At age 16 he found out about “apres ski” and he was hooked.

 Barovetto’s first trip to Sun Valley came about serendipitously.  On New Year’s Eve in 1967, he  and a friend went to Squaw Valley to ski.  Halfway up K-2 the lift stopped for 45 minutes.  When he and his friend could not get the resort to issue them new tickets to make up for the lost ski time, they decided to drive north where his friend told him he would find “a real ski resort”– Sun Valley.

Barovetto fell in love with it immediately.  The opportunity for another visit came the next year, albeit in a roundabout way.

After traveling around the Greek islands for a month, Barovetto joined his parents in Germany to attend the wedding of his sister Joan, who was stationed with the Army there. Flying back to the east coast, he accepted a job driving a car to California.

Enroute, he took a slight detour to visit a friend in Ketchum.  It was the 1960s—a decade of  parties and pot and ski bums.  It was at one such party that he met Paula, a beach girl who had grown up in Santa Monica.  Barovetto would not, could not, forget her, although it would take  them a little longer to seal the deal.

In the meantime, Barovetto graduated from the University of Oregon and joined an architectural firm in San Francisco. And when Bill Janss, a southern California developer who had developed Aspen ski resort, took over Sun Valley from Union Pacific in 1965, he began putting feelers out.

When Janss put the word out that he was looking for workers, Barovetto was quick to respond. He knew, he said, that the move would bring southern California surfers and their “hot girlfriends” to Sun Valley and that there’d be plenty of skiing and partying to be had.

Barovetto moved to Ketchum in 1970, supervising construction for Bill Janss. And he reconnected with Paula. 

 But Paula was equally attracted to the sun and surf in Mexico. And, so, for a while, Barovetto commuted to Mexico while maintaining his architectural practice in Ketchum.

Paula returned to Ketchum after the birth of their son Sean and the couple had two daughters, as well—Krystal, who is in the child care business in San Diego, and Darien who works for Carbana in Boise.

Eventually, however, sun and surf once again lured Paula away and she and David went through a congenial divorce.    

 Today, David is pursuing a project within the City of Ketchum to develop an 800,000-square foot building in Warm Springs with 300 housing units. As envisioned, it would offer a mixture of dorms, rentals, deed-restricted and fair market-value condos.

He is as passionate about this place as he was about the skiing that brought him here in the first place.

 When he sees a need, he says--whether it be affordable housing, a skateboard park or preservation of the ore wagons through designing and building a museum to house them--he jumps into the project.

He is also an ambassador for Sun Valley. Or, as he calls it, “cruising and schmoozing” at the Roundhouse.

Exciting work, days of skiing in the winter and biking through the hills in the summer—David Barovetto is a contented man.