STORY AND PHOTO BY KAREN BOSSICK

Get your bike blessed by the Good Shepherd from St. Thomas Episcopal Church. Enjoy snacks and bike checks from the likes of Sturtevants, Sun Valley Resort and others.

And, if you can spare the time, enjoy the classic children’s book “Curious George Rides a Bike” courtesy of a StoryWalk set up along the Wood River bike path from Bellevue to Ketchum.

It’s all part of the free annual Bike to School and Work Day to be held Wednesday, May 14.

The Blaine County Recreation District has organized 25 sponsors to set up tents on the bike path from 6:30 to 9 a.m. on that day.

Past participants have served up everything from burritos and pancakes to hot chocolate with Schnapps as they bid well to Moms and Dads accompanying their young’uns to school, school groups riding en masse and commuters making their two-wheel treks to desks in Hailey and Ketchum.

The event highlights bicycles—and scooters--as a mode of transportation and a form of recreation, getting people out of their cars and into nature and the active lifestyle.

The BCRD is collaborating with Hailey Public Library and The Community Library to present StoryWalk beginning Wednesday and running through Sunday, May 18.

Pages of the children’s favorite monkey book “Curious George Rides a Bike” by H.A. Rey will be posted along the path between Fox Acres Road and Myrtle Street in Hailey. Pages will be spaced out so pedestrians and bicyclists can read sentences in English and Spanish and look at the illustrations as they meander down the path.

Kellie DuBay Gillis’s book “Big Bike, Little Bike” will be posted between 6th Street and Wood River Drive in Ketchum.

Bike to School and Work Day sponsors are The Y, Higher Ground, Girls on the Run, The Trailhead Bicycles, ERC, Hailey Public Library, Wild Rye, Big Wood School, WRTC, Power Engineers, Elephant’s Perch, Wood River Land Trust, City of Ketchum, KK, St. Luke’s Wood River, Sun Valley Resort, Sawtooth Botanical Garden, Kiwanis, St. Thomas Episcopal Church, Blaine County Education Foundation and Backwoods Mountain Sports. Other participants include The Sage School, Zenergy, Pioneer Montessori School and BCRD.

Booths will be set up from the Bellevue Public Library at the south end to the Wood River YMCA in the north.