BY KAREN BOSSICK

While Roger Mankus celebrated his milestone of skinning up Baldy 2,000 times, other Sun Valley skiers have been pressing hard to get their 100 days of skiing in so they can earn a 100-Day Pin that Sun Valley has given out for the past nine years.

George Caton got his on March 6 a hundred days after the resort opened on Thanksgiving Day, meaning he had perfect attendance.

For that his friend Stefani Holcomb awarded him with a golden cape marking “100 Days of Displayed Stupidity.”

George Caton stands next to the Ranger-turned-Caton Replica with Ranger Cook and Stefani Holcomb.

It was an inside joke for Caton and a small group of eight to 10 people who wait at the front of the line daily for the Roundhouse Gondola to ferry them to mid-mountain.

Three winters ago, Caton said, the gang stood in line for an hour in minus-17-degree temperatures waiting for the lift attendants to usher them onto the gondola.

“One of the guys--Jack Heatherington--said, ‘You know, this takes a special kind of stupid to stand in line under these conditions.’  So, for the rest of the season we kept talking about being a ‘special kind of stupid’ and it sort of became our mantra,” Caton recounted.

That summer Rick Bruder, one of the gang, made a logo and had the logo put on ball caps.  And, before the season started two years ago, Caton had stickers made with the SKS logo, which everyone put on their skis. He followed that up with SKS pins.

The cape is embroidered with “100 Days of Stupidity Displayed.”

“My friend Ranger Cook is more consistent than I am in the Roundhouse line because I volunteer with Higher Ground over at Dollar Mountain.  There are lots of people who look at Ranger on the webcam every morning and it is amazing how many people stop us and say, ‘Hey, you’re the guys on the camera every day!’ ”  Caton said.

In February, Cook accompanied Jim Wood to Reno to pick up a motorcycle. That caused Cook to miss two days of skiing.

“Not wanting people to log onto the website and see Ranger missing, I had a cardboard Ranger Replica made, which I put at the front of the line the first day Ranger was not in line.  Lots and lots of people had their pictures made with the Ranger Replica and we left it up until about noon,” Caton said.

“Sara Wastvedt and others, who were in the lodge looking out, didn’t realize it was a Ranger Replica until they came outside.  You could clearly see the Ranger Replica on the website and it looked very realistic.  Lots of laughs, which people were talking about for days.”

Caton had a gold cap with “100” on it made for Stefani Holcomb last year on the day she got her first ever 100 pin. She loved it and skied in it all day, then brought it out this year to give to Caton to wear on the day he got his ninth “100” pin.

When he refused to wear it, she put Caton’s face on the 6-foot-5 Ranger Replica and wrapped the gold cape around it. Then she painted the pants, poles and boots to match Caton’s pants, poles and boots.

“The cape has ‘100 Days of Stupidity Displayed’ embroidered on it—quite an upgrade from the original cape I made for her,” said Caton. “So, this is how I spend my winters, doing stupid stuff that gets more and more out of hand each year.”

Sun Valley Resort will close out the 2024-25 winter season on Sunday, April 20, with 145 days of skiing.

While Bald Mountain only got 180 of the 220 inches of snow, it was a pleasantly warm season with the exception of three frigid days in February. And the mountain resounded with accents from France, Italy, Austria and other European countries as visitors in town for the 2025 Audi FIS World Cup Finals took to the mountain in what approximated Christmas holiday skier numbers.

This last week of the season has offered some wonderful skiing, with Wednesday’s spring skiing being the best day of the year in some skiers’ minds.

Sun Valley Resort will celebrate the end of the season today—Saturday, April 19—with Moonshine Schubert, a Sun Valley band, hip-hop reggae and life-inspired folk 2 to 3:30 p.m. on the Warm Springs plaza. Cycles, a Denver, Colo., trio will play an eclectic mix of music from 4 to 5:30 p.m.

Trevor Green, a transplant to Sun Valley from California, will bring his acoustic folk and didgeridoo to the patio from 2 to 5 p.m. on the last day—Sunday, April 20.