The PlaneSense fractional aircraft program offers quality at every turn. Private flyers will find every detail has been thoughtfully designed aboard their state-of-the-art aircraft, featuring luxuriously spacious cabins. Whether flying to your vacation home in Sun Valley or thousands of national and international destinations, every facet of your travel will be impeccable.
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Inquire today at whitetailclub.com/properties/legacy-ranch/ or call 877.6 34 .1725. With only thirty-six homesites, ranging in size from five to twenty-one acres, Legacy Ranch is a rare find that is in high demand.
Homesite prices range from $400,000 – $1,375,000
A 365-acre enclave naturally embraced by the mountain-lake landscape of McCall,
a Property Report required by Federal Law and read it before signing anything. No Federal agency has judged the merits or value, if any, of this rty. Warning, the California Bureau of Real Estate has not inspected, examined or qualified this offering. Whitetail Club is represented by Whitetail Club LLC. This is not an offering in any jurisdiction where prior qualification is required and no marketing or sales literature will be forwarded to or disseminated in such jurisdictions unless or until we have met such qualifications. The Developer expressly reserves the right to make modifications to the offering in its sole discretion. Membership in the Club is not guaranteed and requires the payment of additional dues, fees, and expenses to maintain pledged to the letter and spirit of U.S. policy for the achievement of equal housing opportunity throughout the nation. Scenes and views may be of a related to the property. Scenes and views are artists renderings.
Custom-built, sustainable homes since 2004.
As a Certified Master Builder with the Idaho Home Builders Association and proud member of the elite Artisan’s Builder Collective, we bring unmatched expertise and artistry to every project. Named the 2025 Parade of Homes Luxury Home Division Winner and ranked the Top Builder in Magic Valley for three consecutive years, our reputation is built on excellence. We create custom homes that embody timeless design, refined craftsmanship, and the art of luxury living.
Building Quality Residential and Commercial Construction Projects Since 1989
Blaine County’s Mental WellBeing Initiative Seeks Solutions to a Community-Wide Issue
BY ADAM TANOUS
Greg Dunfield’s Sun Valley Haven BY HAYDEN
Contemporary Design and Eclectic Artifacts
Create the Unexpected BY
An Unassuming Elkhorn Gem
Golden Eagle Home Features Clean, Precise Designs and Exquisite Lighting BY
Greg Dunfield’s home in the White Clouds, Sun Valley, designed by architect Michael Doty, was sited to accommodate expansive mountain views in all directions. (see story, page 90).
PHOTO BY GABE BORDER
HAILEY HOT SPRINGS RANCH
THE ‘COUNTRY CLUB’ IN THE COUNTRY
The Small Community of Gannett Boasts a Culinary
TRANSFORMING MINDS, INSPIRING CHANGE
Flourish Foundation’s Mindful Awareness Program
SAY ‘OM’
The Health Benefits of Meditation
OVERCOMING STIGMAS
The Sanarai Program Offers Support for the Valley’s Spanish-Speaking Community
THE THRILL OF THE HARMLESS HUNT
Birdwatching in the Wood River Valley
HAVE BIKE WILL GRAVEL
Adventure Begins Where the Pavement Ends
‘A WEIRD AND SCENIC LANDSCAPE’
The Surreal Craters of the Moon National Monument
TRENDS & INSPIRATIONS
Tips from the pros covering handblown glass elements, tile and pattern design trends, bronze accents, woven rugs, swivel chairs, and designing with color.
CAPTURING STILLNESS, EVOKING FLIGHT
Through Glass and Stone, Jane Rosen Reveals the Essence of Form
EMPOWERING CHILDREN THROUGH ART
The Burrow Art School and Studio
The Sun Valley Magazine website, at sunvalleymag.com, is user friendly and incorporates responsive design so that you get the same award-winning content on phones, tablets or desktop computers. On our site you will find all of our print stories, as well as a wealth of additional online content, including resource guides, videos and online features. Look for the best of Sun Valley life in our Arts , Food & Drink , Community, Health , Adventure , Home & Design , and Wedding sections. You can also enjoy digital editions of Sun Valley Magazine in our extensive archives and access all of our social media sites.
To explore our magazine archives, dating all the way back to the Winter 1973/1974, visit sunvalleymag.com/magazine. On our digital magazine page, you can enjoy back issues of Sun Valley Magazine . Travel back in time to see what we were covering at the turn of the century (21st!) and beyond. Looking for an old article? Spend some time in our archives—an ongoing, living record of life in the Wood River Valley. Also check out our digital edition of TASTE of Sun Valley on the Food & Drink page!
Building a home is an exhilarating, inspiring, and often lengthy undertaking that can span months or even years. Collaboration is essential in an industry where every contribution— from architect and engineer to electrician, mason, roofer, designer, and landscaper—builds upon the work of others to create a finished house. No trade works alone; timing, organization, and communication ultimately determine the outcome.
My husband and I are currently building a home in a canyon on the west side of the Wood River Valley, so have experienced this firsthand over the past 14 months. The sheer number of decisions—thousands upon thousands of details and choices on finishes, fixtures, colors, textures, styles, sizes, material choices, budgets and systems; as well as alternatives, substitutions or replacements when, needed—can feel overwhelming. Yet the guidance and solutions-focused expertise of the professionals we’ve worked with has been both effective and inspiring, reminding us how essential collaboration is when navigating complexity.
This spirit of teamwork is reflected in the Dream Homes featured in Sun Valley Magazine’s annual HOME + DESIGN edition. Read about Greg Dunfield’s partnership with architect Michael Doty, Conrad Brothers Construction, Ben Young, and interior designers Jen Hoey and Abbey Mayhew of Suede Studio in designing a contemporary home that seamlessly blends indoor and outdoor living (“Harmonizing Indoor and Outdoor Living,” page 90). Or discover how Carla Buffington-Wilcox and Jeff Wilcox worked with Scott Payne of Farmer Payne Architects and Sarah Latham of L Interiors to craft intimate spaces filled with eclectic artwork and treasures collected through years of travel (“A Home in the Meadow,” page 98). Each home stands as a testament to what can be achieved when many minds and hands unite to shape spaces that reflect the lives within them.
Teamwork and partnership also shine in Blaine County’s Mental Well-Being Initiative (MWBI), a community-wide effort
spearheaded by the St. Luke’s Wood River Foundation that seeks to build an integrated mental health and well-being ecosystem that improves the lives of all people in our community. Developed in response to the urgent need for improved mental health resources and the rising mental health crisis, especially in small mountain resort towns, MWBI has brought together more than 50 partners to build an integrated system focused on prevention, education, treatment, and crisis response. This initiative demonstrates the power of collaboration to create lasting infrastructure, reduce stigma, and strengthen resilience across our community (“Healing Minds,” page 74). You can also learn more from a few of the individuals driving this work (“Sheriff Morgan Ballis,” page 84; “Jenna Vagias,” page 86; or “Dr. Katie Quayle,” page 88) and from managing editor Adam Tanous’ conversation with cognitive scientist and Yale professor of psychology Laurie Santos on the science and research behind happiness (“ The Science of Happiness,” page 80).
This issue brings together the narrative of many different projects and partnerships, demonstrating that collaboration is the thread that weaves our efforts into something greater than any one of us could imagine or achieve alone. When visions align and leaders take action, working in partnership with others, walls become homes, initiatives become movements, and challenges transform into opportunities. In both design and community, it is through working together that we strengthen our foundations, creating more than structures or programs. It is how we build connections, possibilities and stronger, more compelling aspects of whatever vision we hold—whether it be a home or a more connected and resilient community.
Laurie Sammis publisher / editor-in-chief
Lindsay Boeger is a fundraising communications professional specializing in stewardship and grant writing. Born and raised in Killington, Vermont, she grew up skiing and skating and went on to earn a degree in psychology and play lacrosse at Williams College. Lindsay also earned an MBA in Health Sector Management from Boston University and has spent 20-plus years working for various nonprofits. At the beginning of 2020, she moved to Sun Valley—her husband’s hometown—and is now a parent to three young kids who love growing up in the mountains.
Stories by Lindsay Boeger:
“Profile: Jenna Vagias” page 86
“Profile: Dr. Katie Quayle” page 88
Mark Dee, born on the Red Sox side of Connecticut, has lived in and covered Idaho since 2016. A former writer and editor of the Idaho Mountain Express, his work has been featured in The Atlantic, Deseret Magazine, the Idaho Statesman, and the Boise Weekly, among other leading publications. He lives in the Warm Springs area of Ketchum with his wife, small dog, and geriatric cat.
Stories by Mark Dee:
“Hailey Hot Springs Ranch” page 42
“Overcoming Stigmas” page 56
“Have Bike Will Gravel” page 64
“Gravel All-Star Rebecca Rusch Learns from the Road” page 68
“Profile Sheriff Morgan Ballis” page 84
Emma Drucker has worked in education and the environment for over a decade, capturing the moments that move her through writing. Curiosity spurred her to study and work in places ranging from Brussels to Ulan Bator before making the Wood River Valley home. Midwestern creeks and hedgerows were Emma’s first teachers, and her formal education was in American Literature and Environmental Studies at Middlebury College. Emma is fascinated by the relationships between humans, nature and the stories we tell. She enjoys thinking about big ideas in small, quiet moments with her husband, daughter, and the wild, beautiful places of Idaho.
Story by Emma Drucker: “Transforming Minds, Inspiring Change” page 50
writers L indsay Boeger, Mark Dee, Emma Drucker, Kate Hull, Patti Murphy, Laurie Sammis, Hayden Seder, Cristy Sellas, Adam Tanous.
From Santa Fe to Sun Valley, photography has taken local studio owner, Dev Khalsa, all over the map. Over the past 22 years, Dev has become the Valley go-to for wedding photography, family portraiture, editorial and iconic Sun Valley events. Dev credits her success to her roots in photojournalism and the lasting relationships she has built with each of her clients. For her, photography is an act of storytelling, weaving stories through her lens.
Photos by Dev Khalsa: “Healing Minds” page 74
“Profiles” pages 84, 86, and 88
photographers C raig W. Benkman, Gabe Border, Karen Bossick, Tim Brown, Wyatt Caldwell, David Clarks, Jacob W. Frank, Dev Khalsa, Ray Gadd, Francesco Ridolfi.
FALL 2025/2026
publisher/editor in chief L aurie C. Sammis
managing editor A dam Tanous
associate editor Cristy Sellas
guest art directors L illie Cooper R oberta Morcone
s enior designer L iz Parmalee
s ales & marketing director S ara Adamiec
marketing coordinator G race Ostolozaga-O’Brien
c opy editor Patty Healey
controller Brenda Carrillo
c irculation director Nancy Whitehead
Sun Valley Magazine Online: sunvalleymag.com
Sun Valley Magazine Awards
2024 OZZIE AWARDS
Gold Winner, Best Cover Design - Summer 2023
Gold Winner, Best Feature Design - “Men of Steel”
Gold Winner, Best Use of Photography in a Feature - “Kings of Rodeo”
2024 EDDIE AWARDS
Finalist, Best Feature Article, “Men of Steel”
2018 MAGGIE AWARDS
Finalist, Best Feature Article - “Primal Necessity”
2017 MAGGIE AWARDS
Finalist, Best Feature Article - “The Long Journey Back” Finalist, Best Profile - “A Life in the Sky”
2016 MAGGIE AWARDS
Finalist, Best Feature Article - “The Great Migration”
2015 MAGGIE AWARDS
Finalist, Best Annuals & One-Time Custom Publication/Consumer Finalist, Best Cover/Consumer
2014 MAGGIE AWARDS
Finalist, Best Annuals & One-Time Custom Publication/Consumer
2013 MAGGIE AWARDS
Finalist, Best Semi-Annual & Three-Time/Trade & Consumer Finalist, Best Special Theme Issue/Consumer
2012 MAGGIE AWARDS
Winner, Best Semi-Annual & Three-Time/Trade & Consumer
2011 MAGGIE AWARDS
Finalist, Best Semi-Annual & Three-Time/Trade & Consumer Finalist, Best Special Theme Issue/Consumer
2010 MAGGIE AWARDS
Finalist, Best Semi-Annual & Three-Time/Trade & Consumer Finalist, Best Special Theme Issue/Consumer
2010 OZZIE AWARDS
Gold Winner, publication fewer than 6 times per year
2010 EDDIE AWARDS
Gold Winner, publication fewer than 6 times per year
2010 MAGGIE AWARDS
Finalist, Best Semi-Annual & Three-Time/Trade & Consumer
2009 MAGGIE AWARDS
Winner, Best Semi-Annual & Three-Time/Trade & Consumer
BY MARK DEE
Thirty years ago, when the Wood River Land Trust set out to sell its soon-tobe inaugural executive director on the job, board members drove Scott Boettger west of Hailey and up the rise into Democrat Gulch. Before them, the 2,300 acres of what’s now called Hailey Hot Springs Ranch wrapped around Democrat Creek and up the drainage, peaking on the far ridgeline some 5 miles and 1,700 vertical feet away. The board’s message was clear: Imagine.
For the nascent conservation group, the
visit was as much an expression of a dream as a statement of intent. Someday, they’d have the means and support to purchase and preserve something like this, a mile or so from the downtown county seat.
That day came in the summer of 2024 when a “For Sale” sign popped up along Croy Creek Road. The opportunity also presented the Land Trust with a problem: For $15 million, anyone could buy it. With 360 acres of the property zoned for residential housing, the clock started when the sign hit the roadside.
“It’s essential to act now,” said Land Trust board member Jeff Seely. “It’s been a really high development cycle in the Blaine County region. This would be the perfect place to build 100 houses.
“Now, more than ever, we have to do this. We have to get this money.”
So, Executive Director Amy Trujillo and her team got to work on the Land Trust’s largest fundraising mission to date. They’d need to buy the land plus raise another $1 million to endow maintenance.
It didn’t take long for the Land Trust to find partners that shared its vision. The Blaine County Recreation District promised to help. So did The Heart of the Rockies Foundation and the Idaho chapter of The Nature Conservancy, as well as a committed cadre of local, state and regional donors.
The first checkpoint came on Feb. 11, when they successfully showed the necessary $10 million to keep the land under contract. The rest, Trujillo said, is due at the end of 2025.
For Trujillo and Lands Program Director
Chad Stoesz, the value of the ranch justifies the cost. They took a “comprehensive look at the history of the property” before launching the campaign, Stoesz said. Their conclusion: The ranch is not only representative of the valley’s past but also indicative of its future.
Looking back, Democrat Gulch once held the Hailey Hot Springs Hotel, among the first commercial retreats promoted in the Idaho Territory until in burned down in 1899. Two decades later, landowners piped water down the canyon to fill a pool at the Hiawatha Hotel.
‘‘We’ve been working 30 years to protect important, special places—this is the epitome. It checks all the boxes.”
A MY TRUJILLO, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, WOOD RIVER LAND TRUST
Today, a stand of willows marks the spot of the long-gone attraction. Partnering with the Blaine County Recreation District, Trujillo hopes to reintroduce that use with a simple visitor center—and geothermal pool—by Croy Canyon Road, accessible by a BCRD bike path that will connect to downtown Hailey.
Looking forward, the wide, sloping canyon represents one of Blaine County’s most resilient landscapes in a changing climate, according to a broad study by The Nature Conservancy. The canyon walls rise 2,000 feet from mouth to peak, offering a huge range for flora and fauna to find a livable environment amid uncertain conditions.
That continuity is important for people, too, especially as access debates rage across the Mountain West. The current plan doesn’t call for additional trails aside from the BCRD’s new bike path. Usage will likely stay the same as it has always been: walking, biking, or snowshoeing the designated trails. But Hailey Hot Springs Ranch abuts a swath of other open spaces, including the Hailey Greenway, Draper and Simons/Bauer preserves. A dedicated pedestrian could start on the far end of the greenway and walk 6 miles of wetlands, streams, and sage—traversing prime habitat for sage grouse and migration corridors for big game—to the end of Hailey Hot Springs Ranch without touching a fence. Beyond the last peak, you’re on public land, with tens of thousands of acres ahead.
“When you talk about different conservation values, this has just about all of them,” Trujillo said. “We’ve been working 30 years to protect important, special places—this is the epitome. It checks all the boxes.”
On a warm March afternoon, Stoesz and Trujillo walked the late winter road up Democrat Gulch. At the crest, where Boettger and the board stood 30 years earlier, they looked up at the snowy peaks that bounded the ranch. Trujillo imagined the hillsides months on, seeing it purple with lupine in spring, flame orange in encroaching fall. She saw Hailey Hot Springs Ranch as it could someday be—which is to say, how it has always been.
“The scale of this, you just couldn’t do it with one person,” she said. “It’s going to take a lot of work.”
“But,” Stoesz noted, “we’re on the right track.” ï
BY CRISTY SELLAS
Years ago, if you told an acquaintance that you lived south of town, she might assume you meant Hailey, maybe even Bellevue. But south of that? Shoshone—sure—but before that even, nestled along Silver Creek, are a few small, quiet towns: Picabo, Carey, and Gannett.
Perspectives have shifted in recent years, and people are taking note of the area. Some are moving there for the opportunity to own
land at an affordable price, others simply to enjoy the pace of country life. Living in the “south county” has taken on new meaning.
Gannett is technically an “unincorporated community” but can boast all the best attributes of a small town. With only 316 residents, the community is close knit and enjoys a peaceful lifestyle 45 minutes away from the “hustle and bustle” of Ketchum, Hailey and Sun Valley. Gannett also affords
visitors beautiful landscapes and a wide assortment of year-round outdoor activities. Unlike the other towns, however, Gannett has one, and only one, restaurant—7 Fuego at the Gannett Country Club—known to locals as the GCC.
The GCC has become the social hub of Gannett. The “club” moniker is apt because it is a gathering place where locals meet to socialize, catch up on the gossip, and enjoy a good meal.
As it turns out, this has been true for a long time. Back in the 1980s, there were living quarters at the back of the property and a “general store” connected to the restaurant, so the owners, Vern Gibbons and his wife, were almost always there. It was well known throughout town that Vern would serve the high school kids one beer and one beer only, playing the part of the “cool uncle” to Gannett’s youngsters. So, the kids would fish all day and stop in for a burger and a beer on their way home, feeling a little bit grown up as they discussed their luck on the river.
The next owners were snowbirds from Arizona. They opened the restaurant four to five days a week from June through October. They had brunches on the weekends and even a little live music periodically. Neighbors, visitors and locals gathered and enjoyed the long summer nights together.
Eventually they sold the club to the notorious Lady Victoria and her husband Tom O’Gara. Lady Victoria White O’Gara was a former model who took on, and kept, the title of “Lady” because she was once married to a duke. Lady Victoria was gorgeous, charming, and always welcoming.
In 2003, she tore the place down and rebuilt it. She purchased new tables and chairs, nice silverware and tablecloths, and top-of-the-line appliances: Wolf cooktops, Salamander ovens, and brand-new fryers. Unfortunately, those fryers stayed clean and untouched by hot oil for 18 years. The O’Garas were divorcing, and Lady Victoria’s time in Idaho came to an end. She was, however, unwilling to let go of the Gannett property, just in case someday she wanted to reopen the restaurant. For years, the
‘‘We hope that anyone who takes the time to come dine with us will be given an experience that they will always remember, from the beautiful scenery to the incredible food.”
—JOE LAMANNA, GCC MANAGER
refrigerators, though empty, kept running. Eventually, the caretakers shut down the fridges and the place went quiet.
In 2022, local Brett Bashaw scooped up the property after long and involved negotiations on the phone with Lady Victoria. The transaction wasn’t easy, but eventually they were able to come to terms.
Charlie Gerard from the restaurant 7 Fuego in Bellevue ran the club for a time but then connected Bashaw to Joe LaManna and Veronica Hawkes, who became manager and chef, respectively.
LaManna came with food and beverage experience in the Wood River Valley—from Tulley’s coffee to Starbucks to Wiseguy Pizza—where he worked closely with Hawkes and eventually convinced her to partner with him and explore the opportunity at the GCC.
LaManna handles front of house, and Hawkes does all the cooking and prep. Experienced culinary guru, Goose Sorensen redesigned the menu to help appeal to a wider clientele. The trio has elevated a quaint old restaurant to a wonderful getaway with great service and fantastic food.
Local favorites include the artichoke crab dip, buffalo cauliflower, and the pan roasted chicken entrée. The steak and burgers are tried and true choices as well. The fries are crispy and delicious, and the wedge salad is truly something to behold. We joined the Bashaws for a Friday night dinner—a five-minute commute for them. The Club feels comfortable and familiar, like the fictional “Cheers”— “where everybody knows your name.”
Both LaManna and Hawkes love that 7 Fuego at Gannett Country Club has such a rich history and that everyone who comes in usually has a story.
LaManna noted, “We love the location, and even though we are a little out of town we hope that anyone who takes the time to come dine with us will be given an experience that they will always remember, from the beautiful scenery to the incredible food.”
Bashaw added, “Historically, Gannett was more of a town; there was a school, and a cheese factory, and even a mini golf course! I think the GCC is a good starting point to bring some of that back!” ï
Flourish Foundation’s Mindful Awareness Program
BY EMMA DRUCKER
Mindfulness is the ongoing cultivation of kind, deliberate presence in one’s thoughts and actions. Try this simple mindfulness practice: Take three slow, focused breaths and let any thoughts drift by. How did that feel?
For over 15 years, Ryan Redman has taught mindfulness in schools across the Wood River Valley. He co-founded Flourish Foundation, a local nonprofit whose mission is to support “mental health and personal growth in K-12 students and adults through mindfulness, compassionate action, and environmental stewardship.”
One of Flourish’s main initiatives is the Mindful Awareness Program, which offers in-classroom facilitation of a K-12 mindfulness curriculum based in social-emotional learning. Redman, along with his wife Paige Redman, the organization’s educational program director, and Flourish facilitators have expanded the program from its origins in a single fifth-grade classroom at Bellevue Elementary School to over 60 classrooms in Blaine County. Flourish also supports classes in Twin Falls, Emmett, Teton County, and Makhanda, South Africa. The Mindful Awareness Program offers students tools to contribute to Flourish Foundation’s vision of creating “a kinder and wiser world.”
Recent research at the intersection of neuroscience and mindfulness has borne out what was previously considered ancient wisdom: Our brains change depending on how we use them. Ryan marvels at the implications: “As humans, we are empowered to shape the quality of our lived experience. Kindness, compassion, and happiness are skills we can cultivate, not traits we were born with.” Individuals can change their inner world, and those shifts impact the outer world.
Students in the Mindful Awareness Program meet with Flourish facilitators once a week for 25 weeks of the school year to “cultivate attention, compassion, and socialemotional intelligence.” The curriculum is tailored to the specific developmental opportunities of each grade and builds on skills learned previously.
When working with elementary school students, Paige explains mindfulness in simple terms, describing it as “paying attention to ourselves, each other and the world around us with kindness” or “growing peace in our minds and kindness in our hearts.” To help children
By Joy Prudek, Public Relations and Communications Business Partner, St. Luke’s Wood River
This fall, St. Luke’s Wood River is excited to welcome two accomplished psychiatrists—Dr. Christopher Doxey and Dr. Katie Quayle—to its growing behavioral health team, strengthening its commitment to timely, compassionate, and comprehensive mental health care.
DR. CHRISTOPHER DOXEY, D.O., PH.D., brings a rich background in neuroscience and rural medicine. After earning a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Brigham Young University, he completed his medical degree at Campbell University and psychiatry residency at Wake Forest University. His clinical interests include treatment-resistant depression and bipolar disorder, with advanced training in neuromodulation techniques such as electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS).
Driven by the osteopathic philosophy of treating the whole person—mind, body, and spirit—Doxey emphasizes collaboration and listening. His desire to work in a close-knit community was shaped during a rural medicine rotation, making the Wood River Valley a natural fit. “The skiing drew me in first,” he said, “but the real sense of community was what ultimately made me want to live and work here.”
Outside of medicine, Doxey is a pianist, former BYU Men’s Chorus member, fluent Icelandic speaker, and outdoor enthusiast. He and his wife, Carlie, are excited to settle in the valley.
DR. KATIE QUAYLE, M.D., is returning to the Wood River Valley with a unique blend of experience as both a pediatrician and child/adolescent psychiatrist. Formerly a pediatrician at St. Luke’s Wood River, she left to pursue specialized psychiatric training through a fellowship at University Hospitals/Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, Ohio. Now dual-trained, she’s uniquely equipped to address the complex overlap between physical and mental health in children and adolescents.
“My training as both a pediatrician and child psychiatrist gives me a broad perspective,” Quayle said. Her approach is holistic and family-centered, emphasizing therapy, lifestyle factors, and collaboration with families and schools. She’s thrilled to return and reconnect with patients, colleagues, and the valley she and her family consider home. Dr. Quayle and her husband, Forrest, are excited to raise their two children, Liv and Wilder—both born in Ketchum—in the outdoors they love, from hiking and trail running to skiing at Galena Lodge.
The addition of Drs. Doxey and Quayle represents a milestone in St. Luke’s efforts to expand access to behavioral health services in the region.
“This investment strengthens our clinical capacity and supports our Mental Well-Being Initiative,” said Megan Tanous, Chief Development Officer, SLWR Foundation. “We are committed to ensuring individuals in our community receive the support they need to thrive.”
This fall, Drs Doxey and Quayle join a dedicated team that includes Alison Burpee, Priscilla Bake, Hillary Godsill, and Sadie Macquarrie.
For appointments or more information, contact: St. Luke’s – Mental Health Services 1450 Aviation Dr., Suite 202, Hailey, ID 83333 (208) 727-8970
understand, she uses accompanying gestures, holding thumbs and forefingers in a heart shape over her center. Teaching mindfulness to students involves a full-bodied exploration of concepts like generosity, introspection, and interdependence.
Discussion and games accompany practices of “following the breath” or reflecting on the fundamental goodness of others. In one mindfulness challenge, students are given two chocolates with the instructions that they can eat one and give one away or give both away. Students make their choice, then reflect on the experience. They realize that though the chocolate tasted good in the moment, their enjoyment was fleeting. The joy they felt from sharing the chocolate was more lasting; it lights up their faces when they recall being the source of someone else’s delight. This practice reinforces the distinction between inner and outer happiness that Flourish teaches. Students learn not only to repeat this rhyme but to live it: “Outer happiness comes and goes. Inner happiness comes and grows!”
Though building resilience and well-being is important to many parents and teachers, it can be challenging to schedule mindfulness lessons in an overfilled school day. Yet, once schools create the time to integrate these essential skills, teachers quickly see the benefits. The program provides students with tangible actions that can help them through difficult moments, whether academic or social. In an end-of-school-year anonymous survey, one educator reflected that participation in the
program gave students “an intentional space to be vulnerable” and “to see each other as human beings and … learn they are not alone.”
A kindergarten participant noted, “When I’m feeling super angry, I just do the ‘flower breaths,’” and educators advancing social emotional learning, a high schooler reported “sending compassionate thoughts to people.” The mindfulness skills lay a foundation for all the learning in a student’s day.
The Mindful Awareness Program is for grades K-12, but schools are rarely able to offer the program for consecutive school years. As part of the Blaine County Mental Well-Being Initiative, the Spur Foundation and St. Luke’s Wood River Foundation have partnered with Flourish to pilot a program for students in kindergarten through fifth grade to participate in Mindful Awareness every year. The Social Emotional Learning Consulting Collaborative, a national consortium of researchers and educators advancing social emotional learning, will develop an evidence-based model to better study the efficacy of the program and measure how engaging in regular mindfulness practice during grade school years contributes to students’ internal infrastructure of well-being, individually and collectively. The pilot program will launch in the 2025-2026 school year.
The Bellevue fifth graders, who were the first Mindful Awareness Program students, are now in their mid-20s. Some of these students participated in the Compassionate Leader Program (Flourish’s second main initiative),
According to 2025 end-of-schoolyear surveys:
100% of teachers supported having Mindful Awareness Programs in their classrooms this coming year, and 97% saw a positive impact on their students.
89% of upper elementary school students reported an improvement in being able to relax and calm down, and 87% reported being kinder to others.
76% of middle school students showed an improvement in how they relate to themselves, and 84% reported an improvement in being more aware of other people’s thoughts, feelings, and emotions.
93% of high school students reported an improvement in relaxing and calming down, and 74% reported an improvement in their relationships with others.
and many may still be sharing their chocolate. Mindfulness is a lifelong skill and Flourish Foundation offers a web of practices for people at all stages of life, including Mindful Based Childbirth and Parenting classes, “Rest and Renewal” teacher cohorts, retreats, breathwork classes, senior groups, and online offerings. With Flourish Foundation’s community of support, anyone can change their mind. ï
‘‘ As humans, we are empowered to shape the quality of our lived experience. Kindness, compassion, and happiness are skills we can cultivate, not traits we were born with.”
—RYAN REDMAN, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, FLOURISH FOUNDATION
BY HAYDEN SEDER
“Meditation” in the popular lexicon is a broad term, encompassing a variety of mindfulness practices and techniques. Focusing your attention on the present, allowing thoughts of the past or future to simply pass through your mind freely—this is what is meant to be mindful.
Meditation does not entail emptying one’s mind of thoughts but rather not becoming attached to them. This can be achieved through several methods: from focusing on your breath or bodily sensations, to repeating a mantra, listening to certain music or chants, or being guided in meditation. Meditation can be done sitting on the ground, on a bed, in a chair, lying down, walking, or in any scenario where one can feel mentally present.
In our increasingly stressful world, learning to be more mindful can be beneficial, decreasing anxiety and stress. The Harvard Gazette reported that in 2015, 16.1 million Americans were experiencing major depression. In the report, Dr. Benjamin Shapero, a psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Depression Clinical and Research Program, said that while behavioral therapy and antidepressants help many people, there are also many others who do not benefit from these interventions, creating a greater need for alternative approaches like meditation. Even those not afflicted by depression are increasingly experiencing stress. The American Psychological Association recently reported that the nation has reached a new high point in the nation’s stress quotient.
The organization’s “Stress in America” survey found that nearly two-thirds of Americans are stressed over the nation’s future, and more than half are distressed by the divisiveness present in everyday life.
Reducing stress is one of the most common reasons people try meditation, which can have long-term benefits. Dr. Kate Erickson of Ketchum’s Integrate Internal Medicine, who often recommends mindfulness in her treatment plans for patients, explained that when our stress response is activated, it releases cortisol. If this becomes chronic, constantly elevated cortisol levels can lead to problems such as hypertension, high blood sugar, insulin resistance, diabetes, and other conditions.
Dr. Cory Szybala of Sun Valley Natural Medicine explained that his practice often recommends mindfulness and meditation because they address one of the most fundamental drivers of chronic disease: dysregulation of the nervous system. “This dysregulation contributes to a wide range of physical, emotional, and cognitive issues,” he noted. “Practicing mindfulness and meditation can help to activate the parasympathetic nervous system—our ‘rest and digest’ mode— supporting the body’s natural healing capacity.”
The mind–body connection is borne out in the research. A 2018 Harvard study published in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine showed that the mere act of clearing your mind for 15 minutes a day alters how your genes operate. Researchers found that people who meditated over an eight-week period had a positive change in the expression of 172 genes that
regulate inflammation, circadian rhythms, and glucose metabolism, which, in turn, led to a meaningful decrease in blood pressure.
This isn’t to say that meditation is the end-all, be-all answer to every ailment, but it is certainly a good practice to incorporate along with medical recommendations from one’s doctor.
“Everyone can benefit from including a mindfulness practice into their daily routine/ ritual,” said Szybala. “We see mindfulness as a foundational lifestyle tool—one that empowers patients to build resilience, develop body awareness, and create space between stimulus and response. It is the reason most of us live here; we can find mindfulness in hiking, biking, walking, sitting, and just being in nature—either alone or with friends.”
Flourish Foundation: Weekly yoga and meditation, Wednesdays 12 – 1 p.m.
The Crystal Healing Room: Private meditation sessions available for booking.
Hailey Sun Club: Weekly meditation, Sundays 5:30 p.m.
Pachamama Studio: Private meditation sessions available for booking
BY MARK DEE
Ayear ago, at the launch of a countywide mental-health push, Jane Lopez handed a flier to an older Latina. The woman seemed puzzled. “I’m not crazy,” she said. Lopez, a community organizing supervisor at the Bellevue-based Hunger Coalition, had heard that before.
“Mental health isn’t about craziness,” she remembers saying. “It’s when you work, work, work, but you can’t catch up on bills. When you keep going but can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. When you know that you’re tired, and full of these anxieties and emotions, and you’re flooded with feelings you can’t understand. Something is happening to you, and it’s not going to get better until you have these conversations. That’s mental health.”
Nearly one in four Blaine County residents identifies as Latino, including more than 40% of kids in the Blaine County School District. A similar number speak a language other than English in the home, according to 2023 Census data. Among the county’s substantial Latino population, relatively few, for reasons of stigma or circumstance, seek mental health care or counseling, behavioral health providers say.
A pilot program in Blaine County’s Mental Well-Being Initiative aims to bridge that gap through virtual Spanish-language counseling sessions on a platform called Sanarai. The firm matches clients with licensed providers who have more than five years of professional experience in Mexico, Argentina and Venezuela. It isn’t the same as traditional therapy. Sanarai’s providers can’t diagnosis mental illness like a U.S.-licensed psychologist or prescribe medicine like a board-certified psychiatrist. Sarah Seppa, who runs St. Luke’s Center for Community Health, refers to the sessions as “coaching.” But the sessions are gratis, the barriers are low, and the returns, so far, are promising.
“It’s free, it’s easy and there are always options,” said Claudia Mendoza, a case manager with The Hunger Coalition who has referred clients to Sanarai. “They’re really seeing an impact on their health. I’m 100% sure they’re spreading the word.”
The numbers bear that out. Sanarai usage has risen every month since it launched in December. Clients referred by The Hunger Coalition, Center for Community Health, Alliance of Idaho and The Advocates logged 161 sessions in June, up from 21 in the first month. The Advocates began referrals in April with “excellent” reviews from clients, according to Executive Director Tricia Swartling. The Family Health Services in Bellevue also offers codes for free sessions.
“It is getting used and is a valuable resource due to the shortage of Spanish-speaking counselors,” Swartling said.
Locally, bilingual providers are booked months in advance, if they’re available at all. Insurance rarely covers the cost of traditional therapy, and a lot of seasonal workers she sees don’t even have insurance through work, according to Lopez. Plus, hourly employees must miss work for medical or mental health appointments; some employers don’t allow it, or workers can’t afford it, Seppa said. In the near term, that’s unlikely to change.
“Ideally, we’d have more in-person Spanishspeaking therapists in the community,” Seppa said. “It would also help if employers offered health insurance or stipends and allowed time off for medical needs. Unfortunately, the future cuts to Medicaid that Congress just passed will likely worsen access and be devastating for so many across the whole community—and country—including those seeking behavioral health care.”
Sanarai offers a huge roster of providers with virtual appointments spanning nights and weekends. Patients can view the therapists’ professional experience, nationality and areas of expertise: anxiety and stress, grief counseling, migratory mourning. Patients pick a provider that fits his or her needs and can switch at any point. Then, counselor and patient talk over the digital platform.
The sessions are online by necessity— providers and patients can be thousands of miles apart. But even that has been a plus, Lopez said. There’s a common saying in Latino communities: “La ropa suicia se lava en casa.” In English: “Don’t air your dirty laundry in public.” Even if you can afford mental health care, there’s a real fear of your secrets getting out. The stigma runs deep in Latino communities, Lopez said; just the fear of seeing your therapist in line at the
Five valley organizations offer free referral codes to Sanarai sessions.
To get yours, talk to staff at:
St. Luke’s Center for Community Health: 450 Aviation Dr. Suite 200, Hailey. 208.747.8733
The Hunger Coalition: 110 Honeysuckle Street, Bellevue. 208.788.0121.
The Advocates: Hailey. By phone at 208.578.0340.
The Alliance of Idaho: 314 S. River Street, Suite 201, Hailey. 208.913.0067.
Family Health Services: 621 N. Main Street, Bellevue. 208.725.3145.
grocery store—someone who knows your secrets and might spill them—is enough to keep people away.
“As a community, we try to protect our families and our private lives,” she said. “This is a good option, because we don’t know the person. Who are they going to tell?”
Slowly but perceptibly Lopez and Mendoza see the stigma around mental health eroding. At their biweekly women’s group, word about Sanarai is starting to spread. (Almost all of The Hunger Coalition’s referrals have been women.) Conversations are less about the crises of their lives, and more about the joys.
Mendoza says, “Mainly, they feel secure— like they can talk about anything.”
“It’s not in our culture to go and talk to a therapist. People need to work on asking for help, talking sooner. That’s what I hear most: ‘I wish that I’d known sooner.’” ï
BY KATE HULL
Orange and red-headed Western tanagers with brilliant yellow breasts; mountain bluebirds covered from head to tailfeather in sky-blue; and owls camouflaged by dense forest surroundings— these winged wonders living among us are thrilling to spot in the wild.
Birdwatching is for those with both a curiosity about the natural world, as well as a keen ability to observe. And the Wood River Valley is ripe with opportunity to view a wide variety of birds in their natural habitat. As nascent birdwatchers soon discover, there is, as well, a community of people in the valley willing to share their avian knowledge.
Brian Sturges and Gary Stitzinger are two of the most (if not the most) active bird watchers in the region. These two friends are not only deeply ensconced in the greater Sun Valley area birdwatching community but have also traveled from coast to coast (and in many cases abroad) to add to their expansive “Life List” of birds they have seen in the wild.
A public servant most of his life, Stitzinger got his start observing birds during slow moments fighting wildland fires in Montana, Alaska, and in Yellowstone National Park. In the early 1970s, he found his way to Ketchum where he worked for nearly 30 years as a volunteer firefighter while also running the 911 dispatch center and ski patrolling on Bald Mountain.
“When I was working in Yellowstone, I started to try and see the things that were making noises in the trees,” Stitzinger said. “I developed ‘warbler neck,’ as they say, from looking straight up into binoculars into a tree to find out what is making the noise. When I came here, I met Brian. I can blame him on the ‘disease’ of birding. Once you start, you can’t stop.”
Sturges, after graduating from San Diego State University with a biology degree, made his way to Sun Valley around the same time.
“Every morning (at school), I would drive by the mouth of the San Diego River in Mission Valley, and there were a bunch of birds. I was frustrated that I was about to graduate with a degree in biology, but I didn’t know the name of any of those birds.” He took an ornithology class his senior year, and the hobby became almost second nature.
During his early days in the Wood River Valley, Sturges helped with the Christmas Bird Count the year Wood River Valley placed second in a competition for the most American Dippers (an aquatic songbird) spotted during a count. After that experience, he was hooked. The following year he took over the reins of the event and became entrenched in the birding community, leading Saturday morning bird counts and hosting classes.
“When you go birding, it is like a big scavenger hunt,” Sturges noted. “People get really serious about bird identification, but all you are doing is bird watching. You can do it on so many levels. It is a connection between you and nature. You go out and you see the habitat; you see trees, flowers, and birds that all have adapted to the habitat, and it makes you one with them.”
For birdwatching neophytes, getting involved is as simple as finding a friend—even better if they are an experienced birdwatcher—and hitting a trail with binoculars in hand and a field guide (either in print or on your smart phone).
“There is a robust birding community,” Sturges offered. “There are opportunities to go; you just have to keep your ears and eyes open.” Sturges recommends joining a Facebook community like the Idaho Birding Group, a great beginner’s group to help identify birds and find birding connections. Next, download an app to help identify and track your finds. Merlin Bird ID and eBird, both mobile apps by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, are two favorites that allow one to track a Life List digitally. Sturges and
Stitzinger, however, still prefer an analog system: simply writing down their finds.
New birdwatchers will need a pair of good binoculars. “I always tell people to buy the best pair you can afford,” Sturges said, “and that may be a $50 pair or a $2,500 pair.”
There are several websites for finding the right binoculars, but his favorite is the binoculars and gear guide on Cornell University’s bird website: All About Birds (allaboutbirds.org).
The Wood River Valley, like many mountain towns in the West, is home to a varied number of crowd-pleasing birds: raptors, hummingbirds, varieties of owls, Trumpeter swans, and more.
Silver Creek Nature Preserve is home to some 150 species of birds in the 900 acres along Silver Creek that The Nature Conservancy manages. Hit the trails and look for Sandhill cranes, ring-necked ducks, longbilled curlews, and belted kingfishers.
Spanning 124 acres, the Draper Wood River Preserve in Hailey offers beautiful trails in a habitat for songbirds, raptors, and sometimes more unexpected species.
Idaho is a destination for birding beyond the appeal of Mountain West species. Nearby, Twin Falls is home to the Cassia Crossbill, first recognized as a species in 2017. A nonmigratory bird, it stays put in Twin Falls all year, eating lodgepole pinecone seeds and attracting bird watchers from across the globe. “It is found in the South Hills below Twin Falls,” Sturges said, “and evolved in the absence of squirrels.” Look for its large bill and orange-red and brown body, as captured in detail by photographer Craig W. Benkman.
About an hour and a half away from Sun Valley sits the Camas Prairie Centennial Marsh Wildlife Management Area in Hill City, a favorite day-trip birding excursion. Its high-prairie wetlands are a hotbed for waterfowl and other water-based birds. Make plans for a spring or summer trip to explore the region that’s known as “duck heaven.” Late-May offers the added treat of the vibrant purple Camas Lily blooms.
Birding can be as big of an adventure as a cross-country trip to see the coveted Great Kiskadee in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, or as simple as observing a dark-eyed junco while out on the trail or exploring your own backyard. Look for Hummingbirds coming to a feeder or drinking nectar from flowers at the Sawtooth Botanical Gardens. Set out on your favorite hike and stop to listen for birds nearby—a great way to begin adding sightings to your own Life List.
“If you are paying attention, you can see a lot from feeders from peoples’ houses,” Stitzinger said. “Be aware and make some friends; that usually helps. They will pass the word on about what’s out there and isn’t.”
For Sturges, what makes birding special is the ability to notice changes in the season as birds come and go. “I have lived here for so long; it would really be unusual to see a bird I have never seen before,” he said. “But it thrills me to see them come back.” Sturges’ favorites are the owl species.
Sometimes you get lucky and spot something rare. Stitzinger recalls a friend who saw a Siberian Accentor in the Wood River Valley in 1997. “It showed up on her porch on one of her feeders. She wasn’t so much of a birder then, but that was a bird that put the Wood River Valley on the map as far as being a destination to see a rare bird.
“It is definitely a sport for the curious. I am always thinking, ‘I wonder what is out there? If I went down to Silver Creek, would I see different birds than what I am seeing at my feeder, or if I went down to the Snake River in the wintertime,’” Sturges noted. “It is a wondering of what’s out there and discovery of what is.”
There are jokes about birdwatching becoming a hobby as we age, but really, it might just be a hobby that takes hold when we are willing to slow down and look for the winged creatures living in this stunning mountain landscape. And maybe that kind of wisdom does come with age. ï
Passionate
BY MARK DEE
Grab a map of the Wood River Valley, and you’ll see State Highway 75 and the Wood River Trail cut up the low trench like an asphalt aorta—the only real option for a cyclist looking to eat up miles on pavement. Look closer, and you’ll notice a network of east-west capillaries that feed the dales and drainages as they tip towards the Big Wood River. These roads are rustic, occasionally rough, and ideal for riders with wider tires, lower gears and an itch to see what’s around the next corner.
No wonder gravel biking is ascendant in this part of Idaho: Its ideal arena was already written on the land. Idaho maintains almost 16,000 miles of unpaved local roads, according
to state records—and that’s before you get into the federal routes run by the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, which administer more than two-thirds of the acreage statewide.
“The places you can get to on a gravel bike around here are just amazing,” said Jason Dykhouse, co-owner and bike shop manager at The Elephant’s Perch in Ketchum. These days, most of Dykhouse’s road clients have “seen the light” and gotten out on gravel, particularly since the pandemic. Last year, his shop sold more gravel bikes than traditional, non-electric mountain bikes for the first time, and it isn’t slowing down.
“It’s huge—and it is just getting bigger.”
He gets the appeal. Roadies will find gravel bikes more comfortable, thanks to their upright riding position and wider tires, which run at a lower pressure to take some of the sting out of harsh terrain. Mountain bikers will find them lighter, faster and overall simpler to use than their typical suspended rides. Dykhouse loves his on smooth singletrack, and around here there’s plenty of that.
In other words, a gravel bike makes rough roads fun and boring trails exciting. That combo makes gravel an intriguing discipline for cyclists on either end of the spectrum, whether you typically ride in spandex or cargo shorts.
Katie Asselin-Gerry started on the road before trying mountain biking 10 years ago. Now, the Hailey resident mostly reaches for her gravel bike, competing in races across the country.
“It’s a great equalizer—the middle ground between road cycling and mountain biking,” she said. Gravel riding “bridges the gap,” she noted, and it has made her a better cyclist overall.
“It’s gaining traction as its own sport, but the gravel bike in some form has always
existed,” she said. Look at an old-school mountain bike: To her, a modern gravel bike takes the same concept and adds modern technology. Pricier bikes have more bells and whistles, but as long as you find something with adequate tire clearance, “you don’t have to spend a ton to get out there,” Dykhouse said.
“You can start small—any biking kit works,” said Maria Beattie, a Ketchum gravel enthusiast. “If you have a bike, a helmet and a Camelback, you’re good to go.”
Beattie rode the roads for years, but it was limiting. She stopped riding State Highway 75 because mounting traffic made excursions “a bit scary.” (Dykhouse says that’s an understatement; near his house south of Bellevue, it’s “terrifying.”) She began taking the side roads, linking them together to find places she would have otherwise never seen. On a gravel bike, any dirt road is an option, she said, “as long as they stay public.”
“There are so many opportunities for great rides,” she said. “When you want to get away from people, gravel is the way to go.” ï
Dykhouse lives near the Lincoln County line, making his favorite something of a backyard ride. He recommends parking on State Highway 75 and heading west on Spud Patch Road until it turns into Picabo Desert Road. That path winds along back side of the Picabo Hills before hitting Cuttoff Road and heading north to town. He likes to grab lunch at the Picabo Angler and then head home the way he came, avoiding pavement. If you don’t mind sharing the roadway with cars, you can head east on U.S. Highway 20 as it tracks Silver Creek to make it a loop. All in all, that route covers around 30 miles with 1,500 feet of elevation baked in.
Given her choice, you’ll find Asselin-Gerry in Copper Basin, the scenic—and sparsely travelled—ravine carved by the East Fork of the Big Lost River. “It’s genuine Idaho back there,” she says. There are a number of ways to ride it, too. The easiest: Drive up Trail Creek Road and park near where it intersects Wild Horse Creek Road. Then, get on your bike and follow your bliss, sticking along the main stem or exploring the gravel roads that trace Wildhorse or Star Hope creeks back towards the looming Pioneers. By Star Hope, you can also ride the loop that forms the turnaround of the Baked Potato gravel race, the main event of Rebecca’s Private Idaho, Rusch’s annual gravel festival. If you’re feeling ambitious—and in serious shape—you can recreate the route by biking in from town: a 102-mile ride that climbs and descends 6,220 feet.
With so much gravel centered on Ketchum, Hailey and Bellevue, you don’t even need a car to find a great ride. That’s one thing Beattie loves about the ride from her home in Ketchum to Dollarhide Summit. Just take the bike path out Warm Springs Road. Soon, the asphalt turns to gravel and you’re on a straight shot to Dollarhide, following Warm Springs Creek at nearly every turn. If you do it all, it’s about a 50-mile ride with 3,000 feet of climbing that gets steeper near the turnaround. But as an out-and-back, you can stop anytime, making it an incredibly accessible introduction to unpaved riding. Our recommendation: Go until you hit Frenchman’s Hot Springs which is about halfway, have a soak and head back.
BY MARK DEE
Endurance all-star Rebecca Rusch has logged more miles on a bike than just about anyone on Earth. But when she isn’t riding, the multi-time world champion and 2022 inductee to the Gravel Cycling Hall of Fame makes her home in Smiley Creek. Her love of local terrain inspired Rusch to start Rebecca’s Private Idaho (RPI), a four-day stage race and general cycling festival, in 2013. Since, RPI has become one of the nation’s premier gravel events. We talked with Rusch to get a few tips on getting started, her view of the sport’s growth, and what makes the Sun Valley area heaven for gravel grinders worldwide.
WHAT’S THE APPEAL OF GRAVEL RIDING, COMPARED TO ROAD OR MOUNTAIN BIKING?
Gravel riding lives in this beautiful in-between space—it’s the freedom of the road with the soul of the trail. There’s less traffic, more solitude, and a real sense of exploration. You don’t have to pick between speed or scenery, structure or spontaneity. Gravel gives you both. It invites curiosity. You can just roll out and see where the dirt leads you.
WHAT MAKES THIS PART OF IDAHO A GOOD FIT?
This terrain is raw, rugged, and real. The gravel around Ketchum and Sun Valley connects mining roads, ranch land, and wide-open
wilderness. It’s remote and challenging, but also incredibly welcoming. You get the feeling that you’re riding through history with the incredible landscapes that surrounds our areas.
HOW DOES THE POPULARITY NOW COMPARE TO WHEN YOU STARTED?
When I first started riding gravel, people didn’t really have a name for it—it was just what you did when the pavement ended. There wasn’t a category, or a crowd. It’s been incredible to watch this discipline grow. Now? It’s exploded. But the heart of it hasn’t changed. It’s still about inclusivity, community, personal challenge, and discovery.
WHEN DID YOU REALIZE THAT GRAVEL RIDING WAS SPECIAL— YOUR “A-HA” MOMENT?
My first year at Unbound (a major gravel race in Kansas), I was more or less forced to go race by my sponsors at the time. I didn’t want to; I was a mountain biker, not a roadie. But once I got out there and felt the freedom and adventure, I knew there was something I was missing out on.
After that I came back and began to explore our area in a different way, on gravel. It opened up a whole new world of exploration by dirt. I could go for miles and hours discovering new areas in our own backyard. This is actually
what inspired me to create Rebecca’s Private Idaho 13 years ago. If they could do it in Kansas, I knew it would be that much more incredible here in Idaho!
DO BEGINNERS NEED ANY SPECIAL SKILL OR GEAR?
A sense of adventure is number one! Gravel riding is inclusive and welcoming for all levels, especially beginners. You can have any type of bike that is meant for dirt, you don’t have to start with the fanciest gravel bike out there. The most important thing for all beginner cyclists in this area is to be prepared and safe. If you are going out on a solo ride, make sure someone knows where you are riding and carry a device that can message out on satellite. Along with that, having the basic gear to get you out of most situations is key. That means a light jacket for unpredictable mountain weather, water and snacks, and your basic bike tools: hand pump, tube, multi-tool, and know how to use them! Gravel is incredibly inclusive. You just need to be willing to get a little dusty and have some fun. The road— gravel or not—will teach you the rest.
BY PATTI MURPHY
Looking for somewhere strange and fascinating to go for a day trip? How about visiting the Moon without leaving Earth?
Less than an hour’s drive from the Wood River Valley sits the surreal Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve, where one might temporarily imagine they’ve landed on the lunar surface. It’s a place of lava flows, volcanic cinder cones, dark caves, and eerie quiet.
journeys across Southern Idaho, as evidenced by unearthed archaeological artifacts, including pottery, arrowheads, and tools dating back 12,000 to 14,000 years.
May through November, depending on snow conditions. All sites are available on a firstcome, first-served basis.
Visitors can take a leisurely drive through the lava fields on the 9-mile Loop Road, then may choose to climb to the summits of cinder cones and explore the cool underground lava tube caves.
The landscape of Craters of the Moon was formed through eight major eruptions over the past 15,000 years, the most recent one occurring about 2,000 years ago. Lava spewed from the Great Rift, a series of deep cracks that stretch 52 miles on Idaho’s Snake River Plain. Over the millennia, the lava field grew to cover 618 square miles. The Great Rift is the deepest land-based open volcanic rift in the world and one of the longest volcanic rifts in the Continental United States.
For thousands of years, the indigenous Shoshone-Bannock people traversed the lava flows during their annual hunting and fishing
The site was little known to the public until the 1920s when Boisean Robert Limbert completed a 17-day, 80-mile journey through the volcanic wilderness and published an account of his grueling expedition titled “Among the Craters of the Moon” in National Geographic magazine. It was Limbert who urged then-President Calvin Coolidge to protect the extraordinary area. Coolidge issued a 1924 proclamation establishing Craters of the Moon National Monument and wrote, “This area contains many curious and unusual phenomena of great educational value, and has a weird and scenic landscape peculiar to itself.”
The Robert Limbert Visitor Center at Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve is a key starting point where one can get food and drinks, books, souvenirs, maps, use restrooms, and obtain free permits required for cave exploration. Right near the visitor center is the Lava Flow Campground, a 42-site campground accessible by automobile from
The Blue Dragon lava flow is one of the most striking and visually unique lava flows in Craters of the Moon. Known for its iridescent, bluish sheen, it’s a type of pāhoehoe lava (a smooth, ropy basaltic lava), which can change appearance under certain lighting conditions.
Enjoy a short stroll through cinder beds and the native vegetation of Devils Orchard trail. This paved half-mile trail is wheelchair accessible and takes visitors through an area of cinder beds scattered with lava fragments.
Cinder cones and spatter cones are highlights of the park. Cinder cones are prominent hills formed from piles of volcanic cinders and ash ejected during eruptions. A short but steep hike up Inferno Cone rewards visitors with panoramic views in all directions.
Spatter cones are smaller volcanoes formed when molten lava blobs are thrown a short distance into the air and fall back to Earth, melding together. The Spatter Cones area and the Snow Cone Trail provide excellent opportunities to view these features.
Two lava tube caves are open to the public: Indian Tunnel and Dewdrop. Indian Tunnel is over 30 feet high, 50 feet wide, and approximately 800 feet long. It’s well-lit through natural skylights. On the ceiling are lava stalactites formed as the river of lava pulled away from the ceiling, and molten material began to drip from the hot ceiling. Dewdrop is smaller and is more of a short chamber than a passageway. It’s pitch dark inside, and visitors are advised to bring a reliable light source. Both caves require a permit to enter, which is available free of charge at the visitor center.
When to visit the park depends on what you want to do. In spring and fall, the weather is milder, crowds are smaller, and the wildflowers are in bloom. Summer brings daytime temperatures that usually exceed 80°F, and the surface of the dark lava rocks can reach up to 170°F. However, the nights cool down and allow for spectacular stargazing in one of the darkest areas of the Continental U.S. Each summer, the park offers evening astronomy
TOP: A visitor takes in Indian Tunnel, which is over 30 feet high, 50 feet wide, and approximately 800 feet long. BOTTOM (left to right): A spatter cone with Big Cinder Butte to its right; Peak blooming time for lava flowers is early June; Fissures running toward The Watchman and The Sentinel, two prominent cinder cones in the area.
programs and constellation tours. Star Parties are held each summer and fall, during which volunteers from the Pocatello Astronomical Society and others provide telescopes and skyviewing expertise.
Mike Shipman, owner of Blue Planet Photography in Nampa, has spent time in the park shooting photos of both the landscape and the cosmos, such as the Andromeda Galaxy, Orion Nebula, and the Milky Way, along with other celestial objects.
“It’s a great landscape for photography. It’s very stark. It’s not the grand landscapes you’d see at Yosemite or Yellowstone or some of the other national parks, but the lava forms all kinds of fascinating shapes, and there are so many desert plants just exploding with color,” he said.
“The main reason I go there is to shoot astrophotography,” he said. “The sky is very dark, with no light pollution.” While Shipman uses advanced imaging techniques and equipment in his work, he noted that the dark conditions make many celestial views visible simply through binoculars, a camera, or the naked eye.
Speaking of stargazing, on August 22, 1969, the Apollo 14 astronauts—Alan Shepard, Edgar Mitchell, Joe Engle, and Eugene
Cernan—traveled to Craters of the Moon to learn more about volcanic geology in preparation for their trip to the Moon in 1971. Because the lunar surface is covered by volcanic material, a visit to Craters of the Moon helped the astronauts become familiar with the geologic characteristics of the rock and soil specimens they would collect during their moon flight. Since only a limited amount of material could be brought back to Earth, the men learned to look for the most scientifically valuable samples.
From November to April, the scenic Loop Road is closed to vehicles and groomed for cross-country skiing and snowshoeing. The park offers ranger-led snowshoe hikes that last about two hours, or visitors may go out on their own. The open slopes of the cinder cones scattered along the scenic Loop Road offer a unique skiing opportunity, as well. No matter how one wants to spend time in Craters of the Moon, it is, as President Coolidge described, “of great educational value and a weird and scenic landscape peculiar to itself.” And it’s in our own backyard. ï
Blaine County’s Mental Well-Being Initiative Seeks Solutions to a Community-Wide Issue
BY ADAM TANOUS
Despite the cliché, big ideas don’t always come to us in a Eureka moment. Sometimes it takes a confluence of events, a steady accretion of data, to crystallize a path forward out of a problem.
For Megan Tanous, Chief Development Officer for the St. Luke’s Wood River Foundation (disclosure: Tanous is the author’s spouse), that confluence came in the fall of 2022. A close friend with young children had recently lost her husband in a biking accident, and Tanous witnessed firsthand and could understand on a personal level the vulnerability of children to traumatic events. At the same time, physician colleagues at the St. Luke’s Wood River Medical Center—family practice and E.R. doctors alike—had been relaying to her that they needed help in handling the increasing influx of behavioral health cases, particularly coming out of the COVID pandemic. The Emergency Room had long been the de facto crisis center for mental health issues, but such cases, Tanous points out, are very resource heavy. An E.R. isn’t really a sustainable model for addressing the problem.
Then there was a movie screening of Ken Burns’ film, “Hiding in Plain Sight.” Tanous was seated next to Tyler Norris, a community health and development consultant. After the film, the two started talking about what a solution to a wave of mental health concerns might look like.
For years, a number of nonprofit organizations—the Crisis Hotline, the 5B Suicide Prevention Alliance, St. Luke’s Center for Community Health, The Hunger Coalition, and others—had been independently working to provide solutions for those they encountered. But the epiphany Tanous and Norris had was that a long-term solution had to take a collaborative approach; it was too big of a problem for any one entity to solve alone. They would have to create an “integrated ecosystem of mental well-being services and programs,” Tanous explained.
Every three years, tax-exempt hospitals must conduct what is called a Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA). It is a systemized process of engaging community members, identifying health care needs, and determining and prioritizing solutions to fill those needs. The CHNA for Blaine County considers a broad range of factors that affect community
health, including housing concerns, employment, and access to health care. This is what is known as a “Social Determinants of Health” framework.
“During my entire career at St. Luke’s, in every cycle of the CHNA, mental health has popped up as one of the top needs for the community,” Tanous noted.
In the most recent CHNA (2023), the findings pointed to three priorities: access to healthrelated services; addressing mental well-being, including suicide and substance abuse issues; and the high cost of living, including housing, childcare, and early learning.
Access to health care and oral health care is affected by several factors: long waits for appointments, difficulty in paying for services, and little or no insurance for health care services. The Hispanic/Latino population in Blaine County is disproportionately uninsured compared to the rest of the state. Nearly 48% of the uninsured in Blaine County are Hispanic/ Latino. Language and cultural barriers can also play a role in inhibiting access.
The second key finding—mental well-being concerns—cited, in particular, difficulty in accessing affordable mental health care and treatment for substance abuse. Blaine County has a shortage in mental health professionals, with only 247 professionals per 100,000 people compared to the statewide ratio of 308 per 100,000.
What’s more, according to the South Central Public Health District’s 2023 Suicide Prevention Gap and Needs Analysis, Idaho has one of the higher death-from-suicide rates in the nation. Over the years 2018-2022, the aggregate average death-by-suicide rate for the state was 24 per 100,000 people. The average for Public Health District 5, which includes Blaine County, was even higher—26.5 deaths-by-suicide per 100,000 people. Both are significantly higher than the national rate, which hovers around 14 per 100,000.
Survey data showed that community members were specifically concerned about substance abuse, access to substance abuse treatments, stigmas associated with such treatments, and the connection between substance abuse and mental health. Survey respondents stressed that the two were commonly linked and so had to be solved in tandem.
Finally, the assessment found that the high cost of living in the county is adding to stress on families. The county has experienced rapid growth without the commensurate growth in housing, which, naturally, drives up the costs of both renting and home ownership. Survey respondents indicated that high housing costs directly affected their ability to meet other household expenses, such as those for dependent care, food, and health care.
Perhaps most alarming to those working on this effort was what children were saying about their mental health. In an ongoing, 5-year study conducted by Boise State University’s Communities for Youth in partnership with St. Luke’s Wood River, children in grades 6 through 12 were surveyed about stress in their lives, sleep habits, feelings of social isolation, and depression as evaluated with the well-established “PHQ-9” clinical scale. Across all grades (6-12), more than 30% of girls reported feelings of “moderate to severe depression.” The range for boys was between 12% and 20%. In every grade, girls showed higher rates of depression than did boys. Survey results from eighth graders were the most concerning: 45% of girls and 20% of boys reported feelings of moderate to severe depression.
The St. Luke’s Wood River Foundation—having committed $100,000 in 2022 to explore the problem—proceeded to do extensive asset mapping: interviewing key leaders in local organizations such as the Crisis Hotline. St. Luke’s Center for Community Health, 5B Suicide Prevention Alliance, The Hunger Coalition, among others, to determine the gaps in services. In addition, the Foundation formed a convening committee of thought leaders to advance solutions. Representatives from organizations across the valley—St. Luke’s Center for Community Health, St. Luke’s Wood River Foundation, Blaine County Sheriff’s Office, St.
“During my entire career at St. Luke’s, in every cycle of the CHNA, mental health has popped up as one of the top needs for the community”
M EGAN TANOUS CHIEF DEVELOPMENT OFFICER, ST. LUKE’S WOOD RIVER FOUNDATION
Aggregate average (2018 - 2022) death-by-suicide rate per 100,000 people.
Average rate for students in grades 6-12
30% of girls
Average rate for students in grade 8
“It is overwhelmingly clear—from community health assessments, rising emergency department admissions, physician concerns, and community feedback—that addressing mental well-being is an urgent priority. We at the St. Luke’s Wood River Foundation feel a deep responsibility to sustain this work.”
— PE TE SMITH BOARD PRESIDENT, ST. LUKE’S WOOD RIVER FOUNDATION
Luke’s Health System, Blaine County Recreation District The Hunger Coalition, and others— began working together to develop solutions to the problem. Jenna Vagias, an experienced leader in the nonprofit educational world, was tapped to be director of what has become the Blaine County Well-Being Initiative, or MWBI.
Earlier this year, the St. Luke’s Wood River Foundation stepped up their commitment to the project with a $4.43 million donation. Foundation Board President Pete Smith said at the announcement: “It is overwhelmingly clear—from community health assessments, rising emergency department admissions, physician concerns, and community feedback—that addressing mental well-being is an urgent priority. We at the St. Luke’s Wood River Foundation feel a deep responsibility to sustain this work.”
The MWBI, led by Vagias, is a collaborative effort that stretches across 50 pledged partners, organizations from healthcare, local government, business, and religions. By structuring the effort horizontally in this way, Vagias and her team hope to have a presence at all community touch points. Simultaneously, the solutions the MWBI has identified in its strategic plan attack the problem in a vertical fashion: from prevention and education to treatment access and capacity, to crisis response, and finally a long-term infrastructure to provide ongoing support and care for the community.
First and foremost is prevention. “How do we create an environment that is protective?” said Vagias. In particular, this means building community-wide events and opportunities for people to connect. Vagias and her team are engaging businesses and other local organizations to build a “teen-welcoming” environment, which includes developing spaces up and down the valley to facilitate community engagement at all levels.
Second, the MWBI is focused on community education, with an eye toward developing resiliency and healthy communication skills. As Vagias put it, “How do I show up for others?” The effort will target key leaders in the county, including teachers, coaches, and first responders. There will also be free speaker series, films, and other events to facilitate conversations about mental health, addiction, and seeking help.
A third goal of the MWBI is to increase access to and capacity for mental health treatment. Through philanthropic giving, the Foundation has expanded counseling services offered at the St. Luke’s Center for Community Health. In addition, the initiative has put in place a Spanish language virtual mental health coaching program called Sanarai. As Vagias said, this fills a “gaping hole” in the spectrum of behavioral services available in the county.
The group is also looking at innovative ways to increase behavioral health services in the private sector. Much of this work is focused on ways to lower financial barriers for patients, primarily through assisting with the complex web of insurance billing.
All of this early work by the MWBI, Tanous noted, was a “catalyst for the St. Luke’s Health System investing in a locum adult psychiatrist.” Subsequently, the health system also hired a permanent adult psychiatrist, Dr. Chris Doxey. And this fall, St. Luke’s will bring on a child psychiatrist in Dr. Katie Quayle. As Michelle Ross, Administrator of Behavioral Health for the St. Luke’s Health System noted, “This is the first time this community will have a dedicated child and adolescent psychiatrist.”
Quayle, who was a pediatrician in the Wood River Valley from 2018 to 2022, said she “would often see kids struggle with mental health. They might even be diagnosed, but they weren’t doing well.” Quayle felt that there was a gap in her training, and so she decided to pursue an accelerated three-year fellowship and residency in child and adult psychiatry through University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center. “It changed how I view patients, changed how I approach family and health,” Quayle said. She recognizes that there are some universal issues for children, such as the effects of social media and screens, but that there are some challenges unique to rural communities like Blaine County. These include a higher risk for gun danger, as well as the greater stigma that mental health issues can have in small communities.
Unfortunately, prevention, education, and treatment do not catch everyone struggling with mental health. Some will and do fall through the system and reach a crisis point. What then?
Perhaps surprisingly, one of the key players in the MWBI is the recently elected Blaine County Sheriff Morgan Ballis. Ballis recognized early on that his team of law enforcement officers would need to be a part of the solution.
“When we look at a crisis response model, there’s three general areas that we look at: it’s someone to call, someone to come, and somewhere to go,” Ballis explained. “The call part has already been addressed and has been addressed for a while. Of course, you can call 911 (Blaine County Dispatch). And then there’s 988 (the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline launched in 2022) and the Crisis Hotline (a local support group).”
As far as the “someone to come” part, “There has always been someone to come; that’s been primarily law enforcement and fire EMS,” Ballis noted. “And what we recognize is that we need to train those first responders to better recognize underlying mental health issues, concurrent issues that have to do with substance use and diagnosed psychiatric conditions. We need to better understand how to support those individuals.”
To this end, Ballis has enlisted Detective Carrie Taylor to provide Crisis Intervention Training, which is open to all law enforcement agencies and medical first responders in the county. The goal, Ballis said, is to “help those first responders to not necessarily show up and be able to diagnose someone, but to recognize—based off a person’s actions, by what they’re saying, their physical state—that there is something else going on that is likely contributing to the situation.”
The long-term goal of the MWBI is to establish a mobile response team. The model the team is looking at would pair a law enforcement officer with a behavioral health clinician. So, in appropriate situations, county dispatch (911) or even 988 dispatchers could send this team to respond and hopefully defuse the issue. What’s more, the clinician would be able to follow up after the crisis to establish a care plan for the individual in crisis.
The idea is to ensure that the “somewhere to go” is the right place for that individual. In the past, the default has always been the county jail or the hospital ER. While the ER team does what they can to treat these patients, they are not equipped to follow up days, weeks, or months later with treatment plans, services, and other resources. And clearly, jail is not a place for treating behavioral health issues.
The last piece of the MWBI strategic plan is to build the infrastructure to sustain long term solutions to the mental health problems in the county. This entails establishing a nonprofit organization to coordinate all of these efforts and provide consistent communications to promote the available services.
Yale professor and psychologist Dr. Laurie Santos studies, among other things, the science of “happiness.” She first coined the phrase the “G.I. Joe Fallacy,” referring to the 1980s television show that ended each episode with the tagline: “Now you know. And knowing is half the battle.” What Santos discovered is that “knowing” is not half the battle in overcoming certain biases and problems, particularly when it comes to behavior. Recognition of a problem is a single step in a long series of steps to “rewire ourselves,” that is, to change behaviors and habits that will help us be happier. The same is true when trying to achieve a population-level impact on mental well-being. The stakeholders in the Mental Well-Being Initiative have identified the behavioral health issues the community faces. But moving beyond the “knowing,” they have begun the hard work: parsing the complex issues and integrating solutions across organizations and socio-economic groups.
“Over the last 25 years, the community, through its generosity of time and money, has built a remarkable medical center,” Foundation leader Tanous said. “As it happened, the focus was on physical health. What we’ve learned as a community is that mental health is integral not only to our physical health, but also to our overall well-being. This is our challenge, but it’s one being taken on by a lot of committed and talented folks. I have no doubt we’ll get there.” ï
“This is the first time this community will have a dedicated child and adolescent psychiatrist.”
— M ICHELLE ROSS ADMINISTRATOR OF BEHAVIORAL HEALTH, ST. LUKE’S HEALTH SYSTEM
BY ADAM TANOUS
Laurie Santos is the Chandrika and Ranjan Tandon Professor of Psychology at Yale University and a recent speaker at the St. Luke’s Wood River Foundation’s annual Speaker Series. The central research question Santos focuses on is: What makes the human mind unique? As she puts it, she explores the topic “by studying the cognitive capacities of non-human animals. By comparing the cognitive abilities of non-human animals to those of humans, we can determine which domains of knowledge are unique to the human mind.”
One area of Santos’ research concerns the science of happiness: what does and does not make us happy. To wit, Santos teaches a class at Yale known as Psych 157, Psychology and the Good Life. With one in four Yale students taking the class, it is the most popular class in Yale’s 323-year history.
This summer I had a conversation with Santos about her class and her “happiness” work. Our discussion follows. (It has been edited for length and clarity.)
I’d
like to go back to basics: How do you define, and measure, happiness when you’re doing these studies?
LS: In terms of the definition of happiness, I think this is a very controversial question, right? We would probably define happiness in lots of different ways. I’ll explain how social scientists have tended to define happiness, which is that they think of happiness as having these two parts: being happy in your life and being happy with your life. So, being happy in your life is the fact that you have a decent ratio of positive to negative emotions. You feel some joy, some laughter, and you have a decent ratio of those positive emotions to things like sadness and anxiety and anger. It doesn’t mean you have no negative emotions, but, really, you want the ratio to be pretty good. That’s kind of being happy in your life.
Being happy with your life is the idea that you have a sense of meaning and purpose. You feel satisfied with how your life is going. This is often talked about as how you think your life is going. The cognitive and the affective parts are the two parts. But being happy with your life is the answer to the question, all things considered, how satisfied are you with your life? If you say, ‘10 out of 10, I’m satisfied with my life,’ then you’re happy with your life. And I like this definition because you can see cases where these two parts of happiness might separate.
You also ask the different question, which is how we measure that. And I wish there was a really good ‘happiness thermometer’ that I could put in your mouth, and it would give me a little digital reading of your positive emotions and how satisfied you are with your life. That’s just not how happiness works.
The main way we measure happiness is to ask people. When I joined this field, I was a little bit worried about that. It sounds like a silly Internet quiz, but, you know, there’s a whole field of what’s called psychometrics that’s gone out and done really detailed studies of measures of happiness and found that they tend to correlate with things like if I did a detailed machine learning of your posts on social media to look at the emotions that are in them, or if I did detailed interviews with friends and family members about how your life is going. These really simple questions, things like, ‘one out of 10, how satisfied are you with your life?’ They actually map onto the kinds of things we care about. And so, it is true that all we do is ask people if they’re happy, but in some ways, that’s getting at something that seems to be a valid measure of how you’re feeling.
AT: Do you think that happiness is a human decision, or, at least, on some level?
LS: Yeah, I guess the way I often think about happiness is that it’s a choice in some sense. It’s a skill that you can build up over time. I think one of the things we get wrong when it comes to happiness is that we seek it in the wrong things. We go after money, we go after a promotion at work, and we’re not going after the things that really matter for happiness, which are things like social connection, changing your mindset, and so on. I guess in some ways you could frame it as a decision, right? It’s a decision to learn the kinds of things that really matter for your happiness and to put those things into effect. Does that mean that everybody can decide to be 100 out of 100 on a ‘happiness scale?’ Probably not. You know, there’s some heritable aspects to our happiness, which means it’ll be trickier for some people than others to put this stuff into practice. But I think there’s something that everyone can do to feel a little bit better if you’re not feeling so good right now.
AT: I know you have a background in evolutionary psychology. Do you think that happiness is an advantage when it comes to natural selection?
LS: Yes, it’s an interesting question. What we know now is that happiness seems to be an advantage when it comes to our performance, right? People haven’t studied as much performance in terms of reproductive success, which is what natural selection is looking at. But even in terms of performance at work, researchers find that happier individuals come up with more innovative solutions; happier teams at work wind up performing better. And there’s also evidence that companies that have on average happier workers wind up earning more in terms of their stock prices. They’re actually making more money. And so, lots of examples showing that feeling happy is correlated with higher performance. Whether that matters for evolution, it’s not clear.
If anything, it seems like what evolution is built for is to make us survive and reproduce. And that might mean that natural selection really focused on things like negative emotions. It wants us to be afraid. It wants us to be angry when our resources are violated and so on. And that might be why we’re so built to have what’s often called the negativity
“Being happy with your life is the idea that you have a sense of meaning and purpose. You feel satisfied with how your life is going.”
bias, right, where we are out looking for threats and looking for things. There’s not as much advantage to taking things slowly and savoring things. So, it’s a little tricky.
I also think another thing that we know is that the kinds of things that tend to make us happy were often easier to get back in the evolutionary day, right? So, take a big one that I talk about a lot, social connection. Pretty much every available study of happy people suggests that happy people are more social. They’re close with friends and family members. If you look at the situations and communities in which humans evolved, that was easy, right? We were around close bands of people and friends and family members all the time. I think it’s only in the strange modern world that we have to start worrying about being inside all the time, on our screens, and not connecting with as many people as we should.
So, it’s not necessarily that happiness was an evolutionary advantage. If anything, being kind of really ‘cravey’ and upset and worried about threats and things kind of keeps you protected. It helps you survive.
AT: In your previous talks and in your class, you talk about our interest in following the money, essentially.
And how when people reach this salary plateau of $75,000 their life doesn’t really get better past that. If that’s true, why do people pursue money and status so fervently, and all these things that over time seem not to be doing us any good?
LS: I think we get a lot wrong when it comes to happiness. I think we just really don’t have good theories about the kinds of things that make us happy. And I think money is a big one. So many of us think that more money will make us happy and, as you noted, it’s complicated. You know, if you’re living at the poverty line, for sure, more money will make you happy, it’ll make you a lot happier. I think the inference just doesn’t continue. And I think that’s part of where the misconception comes from. There was a time when I was a young grad student. I wasn’t making much money. And I thought, ‘When I make more money as a professor, I’ll be happier.’ And, at the time I think I was going from something like $25,000 or $30,000 when I was a grad student. And I was like, ‘more money, yeah, that worked.’ But it doesn’t keep working. And so, I think that’s kind of where we go wrong. I think this can really lead people astray.
On one of my podcast episodes, I interviewed this guy Clay Cockrell, who’s a mental health professional for the incredibly wealthy. And he talks a lot about how his clients often say things like, ‘Well, you know, I can stop, I’ll be good, I’ll be happy when I earn, you know, $500 million.’ Then I get to $500 million. It’s like, ‘Well, now I need a billion.’ The carrot just always moves, and you think, ‘Well, just a little bit more and I’ll be happier.’ But the research shows it doesn’t work that way.
AT: I’m wondering if you have, or people you know have, studied the effect of the natural world on happiness levels.
LS: One of the reasons that being in the natural world is so positive for our happiness is that it often induces a complex but interesting emotion when it comes to happiness, which is awe. Awe is an interesting emotion because it’s not purely positive. Some of these majestic seascapes can make you feel, you know, small. You’re looking at the geology of the world, like a huge mountain, you’re like, ‘I feel tiny, right?’ So, it’s not purely positive. It can make you feel small and make you question big things. It’s a disarming emotion in some ways. But studies show that it’s incredibly important for our happiness. And one of the surprising things that happens when you experience awe, whether that’s through nature or through beautiful music or art or even seeing the moral actions of others, is that awe makes you feel more connected. Dacher Keltner, who’s a professor at U.C. Berkeley, does these studies where he brings people to a beautiful place, and you look at it, and it brings his awe. And then he has you do this simple thing: ‘If this circle was you and this circle was all the people you love in your community, how much overlap would there be?’ So, they do this little survey, and what you find is that when you’re in a moment of experience of awe you put those circles overlapping much more together. It is like you think you and your community are much closer than you would, say, if I took you to some other tourist attraction— the Mall of America or something like that.
happy. It’s helped me overcome my misconceptions. I give myself the survey sometimes, and I’m usually about a point happier on a happiness scale than I was before starting this research. And that’s really what the effect is. The happiness expert Dan Harris, the journalist, has a book called “10% Happier.” And I like the title of that book a lot because most of the surveys suggests that’s what you can do. You can bump up your happiness about 10% by engaging in better behavior and better mindsets. And so, I’ve been able to achieve that 10%. ï
AT: One last question: Has your research affected you, your personal happiness?
LS: Yeah, for sure. I think it’s made me happier. It’s made me busier, certainly. It has given me so many more opportunities for which I’m grateful. But then that comes with often having to say no to some of those because, if not, I get too time famished. So, I have to pay attention to that. But, no, overall, I think it’s taught me the strategies that work for making you
“Pretty much every available study of happy people suggests that happy people are more social. They’re close with friends and family members.”
Leadership Means ‘Getting Your Hands Dirty’
BY MARK DEE
Growing up, the closest thing Morgan Ballis had to a sport was running from the cops.
He isn’t proud of those days as a self-described latchkey kid roaming free-range in Tucson, Arizona. But tracing it back, his life changed the day he wasn’t fast enough to outrun his troubles. An arrest put the retired Marine Infantry Platoon Sergeant, school safety consultant and Hailey School Resource Officer on a path to his newest and highest role: Blaine County Sheriff. Voters elected Ballis in a November landslide, choosing the 39-year-old Democrat with nearly three-to-one support.
As a teenager, the county’s new top cop was on the other side of law enforcement. At 16, Ballis and a crew of boys stole a wallet from a Jeep, an offense that carried a felony burglary charge. Ballis went into a diversion program—sort of a youth probation.
“So, what do you want to do after high school?” his diversion officer asked in their first meeting.
Ballis is the son of a military father. As a kid, he and his brother would save up cash and rollerblade down to a used bookstore to buy documentaries about World War II. In the raw years after 9/11, he’d considered every branch, and knew which one he’d choose. He said he planned to join the Marines.
“You will never join my Marine Corps,” the older soldier replied.
“Of course, that lit a fire under my ass,” Ballis says now. “I’m the type of guy, if you tell me I can’t do something, that’s gonna be my motivation to go out there and do it.”
That officer, along with a Marine recruiter, mentored Ballis through graduation and into the Corps.
Ballis spent 11 years in the Marines, from 2004 until 2015. He was deployed into combat twice, both times in Ramadi, Iraq, first as an automatic weapon gunner and then as an infantry squad leader. The months in Ramadi were “very kinetic,” he says—an operational euphemism for violent in the extreme.
“I mean, almost daily firefights,” he recalls. In the years that followed graduation, five of Ballis’ classmates from the Mountain View High School class of 2004 died fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, a rate unmatched by any other school in the country, according to reports at the time.
After combat, Ballis came home to other jobs in the Corps. He excelled in softer roles, counseling families of the recently deployed and recruiting new Marines. He learned how to talk to people without falling back on rank.
“My status, my awards, none of those things mattered,” he said. “It’s really where I think I truly embraced the idea of empathy, learning about people and what they were doing.”
That outlook was soon tested. On Jan. 8, 2011, Ballis’ mother went to buy dinner at a Safeway near her home in Tucson. Out front, Congresswoman Gabby Giffords was greeting constituents. Ballis’ mother stopped to talk as a gunman opened fire. She wasn’t hit, but the man she was speaking to was. She put pressure on his leg, staunching his femoral artery while paramedics came. Giffords was shot in the head. The man Ballis’ mother saved was Ron Barber, who went on to represent the district in Congress as Giffords convalesced.
The shooting touched Morgan Ballis at an unsettled time. He was starting a family. And he had an idea for a company, one that would train police in military firearm tactics to handle mass shootings like the one at Safeway. A few years later, as his son was entering school, Ballis was in line for another deployment overseas. He was more than halfway to his pension. A superior gave him a choice: Take the deployment or leave the Marines.
“I was like, you know what, being a good dad isn’t about bringing home a paycheck, it’s about being present,” he said. “That’s when I made the decision to transition out.”
As a civilian, Ballis decided to study the academic side of active shooter responses. He earned a bachelor’s degree, then a master’s, and is working towards a Ph.D. (His dissertation looks at how school resource officers in Idaho uptake active shooter protocols.) His expertise made him a vocal member of the Wood River Middle School PTA, and his involvement helped get him a job with the Hailey Police Department as a school resource officer, or SRO. That, in turn, set him up for a run at sheriff—and a campaign that took a deep emotional toll.
In February 2024, Desi Ballis, Morgan’s wife, was pregnant with their third child. They’d already chosen a name, should it be a boy: Tucker Finn. But the 20-week ultrasound came back abnormal. Tucker’s development had veered off course, and he was almost certain to die before delivery. If they waited too long, Desi might, too. The Ballises are a devout couple, and the diagnosis that Desi would need an abortion to protect her life hit hard. So did Idaho’s laws: Under the state’s strict ban, she’d have to travel to Utah for care. They drove the 10-hour round trip to Salt Lake City for an abortion.
In the days that followed, Ballis found himself looking to God for answers. Two weeks before the candidate filing deadline, someone he never met approached him and asked if he’d ever consider running for Sheriff—as a Democrat. Ballis had been a lifelong Republican, raised by a conservative family with a strong Christian faith. But the direction of the Idaho GOP gave him pause, and he’d registered as an Independent when he relocated. The experience with Tucker had caused a disconnect between himself and the Republican party. For the first time in his life, he identified more with the Democrats around him. So, in “the darkest time of our lives,” Ballis switched allegiances, and entered politics.
“I felt like God was giving me a not-so-gentle nudge,” he said.
Fully staffed, the Blaine County Sheriff’s Office is about the size of a Marine platoon. Parachuting in to take the lead hasn’t been a problem, Ballis said. You dive in, get information and ideas from the people on the ground, and come up with systems that fit. He calls it “service leadership”: “Your job is to actually get your hands dirty, get out there and serve.”
“It’s a huge leap, to go from being an SRO with three years’ experience to the Sheriff running the lead agency in the county,” he said. “For me, it’s about being humble to understand that I’m here, I truly believe, by the grace of God, and that I want to have a positive impact during this time.” ï
BY LINDSAY BOEGER
Jenna Vagias has always been a problem solver, bringing a collaborative and solution-oriented mindset to her years of work with nonprofit organizations. Still, it wasn’t until August 2023 that she embarked on a role that would unite the threads of her professional and personal journeys into a meaningful mission. As director of the Blaine County Mental Well-Being Initiative, Vagias is at the helm of an audacious effort that reimagines how mental well-being is conceived and nurtured—a mission that requires problem-solving in spades.
Vagias’s collaborative spirit shone on the turf at Plymouth State University, where she spent four years on the varsity field hockey squad and majored in exercise science and health. Playing sports reinforced for her the power of teamwork and offered lessons that would prove invaluable throughout her career. After graduation, Vagias worked as an athletic trainer and coach while teaching anatomy and physiology, using skills honed on the field to connect with students and athletes.
She then pursued a master’s degree in education administration and specialized in outdoor education to help others find belonging and strength through physical movement and connection to the outdoors. “For me, physical health and a love of the outdoors have always been intricately connected,” Vagias said. “I’ve always wanted to share those passions with others.” She did just that in her next role as athletic director at a private boarding school, building community within teams of coaches and students and deepening her belief in movement as a tool for well-being.
During a National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) course in the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming, she met a kindred spirit in her husband, Wade. They spent a month rock climbing and backpacking together, bonding over their commitment to outdoor adventure and connection. As Wade pursued a career with the National Park Service, Vagias found and thrived in diverse roles across the country that aligned with her focus on health.
While her husband earned his Ph.D. at Clemson University, Vagias was a coordinator and instructor in the university’s outdoor program. She taught rock climbing, backpacking, and other classes while overseeing program administration and safety protocols. The role blended her organizational leadership skills with her continued desire to connect young people to the outdoors, setting the stage for her later work in community wellness.
Wade’s next role brought the couple to Yellowstone National Park, this time with their young daughter, Brooke, in tow. Vagias spent four years as a program manager with Yellowstone Forever, an experiential field-based educational organization. There, she deepened her understanding of the transformative power of outdoor learning as she oversaw immersive, field-based programs and found yet another way to share her love of the outdoors with others.
Following Wade’s appointment as superintendent of several sites in Idaho, the family relocated to the Wood River Valley, where Vagias was soon hired as Director of Recreation at the Blaine County Recreation District (BCRD). This position placed her at the heart of community wellness programming during some of the most challenging times in recent memory.
“The COVID-19 pandemic tested every aspect of community resilience,” Vagias recalled. “At the BCRD, we were on the front lines of figuring out how to provide essential services when traditional support systems collapsed. When schools shut down, the BCRD continued to operate its daycare while navigating the unprecedented challenges of pandemic response.” For Vagias, this period highlighted the fragility and strength of community support systems and proved to be a valuable experience for her current role.
A prevailing sense of uncertainty and prolonged isolation due to the pandemic also brought concerns about mental wellness to the forefront for many people. As a mother, it was even more top of mind for Vagias, who said that parenthood helped her become more aware of the complexity of the human experience.
“When I was younger, I was so focused on physical health,” she noted. “I struggled with depression in my teens and 20s but hadn’t yet learned to prioritize or focus on my mental and emotional well-being. My evolution and journey are personal, but by no means do I think they’re unique.”
In 2023, Vagias found herself at a crossroads, reflecting on her experiences and wondering what the second half of her professional life should look like. She knew she wanted to support the community’s nonprofits in some capacity, using her administrative talents and community-building skills in service of something larger than herself. What happened next felt almost spiritual in its timing.
“I didn’t know exactly what this theoretical job would be,” she recalled, “but it was almost as if I manifested the ad the St. Luke’s Wood River Foundation put in the paper. They were looking for a part-time contractor to lead a collaborative community effort in mental health. The role seemed like a way to bring together my professional and personal experiences and help drive meaningful change through collaboration.”
It’s also been a way to give back to the community that Vagias and her family love. “I think I’m doing exactly what I should be doing,” she said. “I’m passionate about this work and am immensely grateful I can help my community while raising my daughter in a place that values movement, nature, and mental health.”ï
BY LINDSAY BOEGER
When Dr. Katie Quayle and her husband, Forrest, moved to Hailey in 2018, they immediately realized it would be a wonderful place to raise a family. And as the sole practicing pediatrician at St. Luke’s Wood River for nearly four years, Quayle certainly received her fair share of on-the-job training.
“Working in this small, tight-knit community was incredibly gratifying,” Quayle recalled. “We had our daughter in 2020, at the onset of the COVID19 pandemic, and I felt so supported as I tried to put all my training into effect to parent Liv. But I also saw firsthand how young people in the valley were struggling with mental health and psychiatric needs, and that there weren’t enough resources to meet that demand.”
A graduate of Williams College and the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Quayle had long been interested in child psychiatry but ultimately decided to focus on traditional pediatrics. She did her residency at the University of Utah and then worked at Southridge Pediatrics in Riverton, Utah, before moving to Idaho. Throughout those years, Quayle’s conviction that she needed to take an active role in caring for kids’ mental and emotional health in addition to their physical health never wavered.
“I’ve always tried to get to know each child individually,” Quayle said. “There are so many factors that contribute to a person’s health, and I feel it’s my responsibility to learn about all those elements so I can care for the whole child. The pandemic was such a hard time for so many people, and I leaned heavily on my St. Luke’s behavioral health colleagues for guidance. But I knew I wanted to learn more so I could provide better care.”
In 2022, she was accepted into the Post Pediatric Portal Program at University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center. As one of only two fellows that year, Quayle embarked on a three-year accelerated training program in general and child/adolescent psychiatry to gain the specialized training she so desired. While it was clearly the right step for her career, it also meant trading the great outdoors for a more urban environment and moving halfway across the country with Liv and her 6-month-old baby brother, Wilder.
“We loved this valley, and it was tough to leave, especially for a city where we didn’t know anyone and at a time when we needed a lot of support,” Quayle recalled. “But we all adjusted, and, despite our connection to these mountains, Cleveland became a special place to us in its own way.
Now that I’ve completed this program, I know I will approach patients differently and am incredibly grateful for the opportunity I had to be a part of it.”
Don’t let her modesty fool you. The program was rigorous and intense, with lots of time with patients and supervision by attendings in the field. All the while, she hoped to return to Idaho and pick back up with patients and families she’d come to know during her tenure here. So when Quayle learned from Katie Schneider, M.D., a family medicine practitioner at St. Luke’s Wood River, that there was an opening in child and adolescent psychiatry and behavioral health, she was overjoyed.
“Forrest and I came out for my interview, and it felt like coming home,” she said. “We really missed it here, and it instantly felt right when we returned.”
Quayle will join the St. Luke’s Wood River behavioral health team in October and is eager to bring much-needed mental health support to the community.
“The Wood River Valley is such a special place,” she noted, “and I was thrilled to learn about all the work being done through the Mental WellBeing Initiative. Being a medical provider in a small community can be intense, but it’s such a draw to practice in a place where people act when they see a need or an area where there’s room for improvement. I’m excited to contribute to this work in any way possible.”
She admitted that being away from relatives in Massachusetts and Maine is hard, but she and her husband are convinced this is the right choice for their family. As part of her psychiatric work, Quayle has seen the effects of screens and time indoors on mental health, so she is hopeful that the move back to Idaho will help them all be more “outdoors oriented” and present in the world.
In August, they dusted off their hiking gear and made the trek back from Cleveland so the kids, now 5 and 3, could get settled before the school year. Liv entered kindergarten, while Wilder, who has recently started biking, is eager to test the trails here.
“The kids are only little for a short time,” Quayle said. “We’re so excited to raise them in the outdoors and expose them to this way of life. And I’m equally excited to serve the valley’s kids again and have the chance to make a real impact.” ï
WORDS BY HAYDEN SEDER PHOTOS BY GABE BORDER
Uniquely positioned with vistas of Baldy, Dollar, Proctor, and the Pioneer Mountains, Greg Dunfield’s home on Sun Peak Drive in the White Clouds subdivision of Sun Valley seamlessly blurs the distinction between indoor and outdoor living. This architectural masterpiece provides Dunfield a multifunctional space that can adapt to his changing needs throughout the year.
While Dunfield has a 30-year career as a real estate developer, this was his first time building a cleansheet custom home. He partnered with local architecture firm Michael Doty & Associates and builder Conrad Brothers to make his dream home a reality.
Working with his team of Doty, Paul Conrad, and Ben Young, of Ben Young Landscape Architects (BYLA), Dunfield spent almost two years planning the home before breaking ground in June 2020. “I had the luxury of taking my time with it versus having a predetermined timeline or rushing,” he noted.
Dunfield picked the home’s lot in the White Clouds subdivision of Sun Valley for its views of the peaks in the area, as well as for its great sunlight during the winter months. Another vision for the house, which is located on a sloping hillside, was to integrate it with the surrounding landscape and to create a multilevel indoor-outdoor living experience.
ARCHITECT
MICHAEL DOTY
INTERIOR DESIGNER
JEN HOEY | SUEDE STUDIO
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT
BEN YOUNG LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT
LANDSCAPE INSTALLATION
NATIVE LANDSCAPING
BUILDER
CONRAD BROTHERS
Michael Doty’s design leverages the spectacular vistas from the site.
‘‘We wanted to balance the house and site it such that it looks more connected with the property.”
—MICHAEL DOTY, ARCHITECT
“We wanted to all work together to have the house work with the site rather than coming in and leveling a big pad off,” Doty explained. “We wanted to balance the house and site it such that it looks more connected with the property.”
The resulting 7,094-square-foot, four-bedroom, 5.5-bathroom house, despite being spread over three floors, has the feel of an intimate home due to the malleable nature of the living spaces. On the ground floor is the main entry, a junior primary suite, a seethrough entry that allows one to see the outdoor court
on the other side, a mudroom (complete with ski lockers), a powder room, laundry and mechanical rooms, and an oversized two-car garage. Upstairs is the primary bedroom suite and bathroom, living room, office, kitchen and pantry, dining room, and powder room. On the lower level is a den, small kitchen and dining nook, and two secondary bedrooms with en-suite bathrooms.
The home was designed so that each level of the house can be closed off from the others using sliding pocket doors. This design feature affords both privacy
and independence for those staying in each area, as well as provides a more intimate feel to the home when other sections of the house are not occupied. Whether Dunfield’s two sons are staying in the lower level, friends are in the junior suite on the ground floor, or he’s in town solo, the home can transform to meet his needs.
The home also has a secondary, high-clearance garage designed to house a Sprinter van. The roof of the garage is a living green roof of native grass that connects to the terrace surrounding the second
floor living room of the house. The living roof was planned to make the building look more natural and to create visual continuity between the hillside views and the home. “The green roof is kind of like having an infinity-edge swimming pool that looks at the ocean,” explained Doty. “It’s like an infinity-edge roof, where you look out across to more grass of the golf course and Dollar Mountain.”
With a theme of bringing the outdoors in and vice versa, the outdoor spaces of the home were a particular focus for Dunfield. These spaces incorporate two
fireplaces, a water feature, a pool, and a redwood hot tub. The dining room has bi-fold doors that open onto the terrace, allowing for easy entertaining and outdoor dining. The living room, on the second floor, has numerous floor-to-ceiling windows to take advantage of the mountain views and sun exposure.
To complement the intentionality and detail that went into planning the construction of the home itself, Dunfield worked with Jen Hoey and Abbey Mayhew of Suede Studio on the interior design, creating what Hoey describes as Dunfield’s “Pacific Northwest style—clean lines, hard materials, and masculine.” Layering color in rugs and textiles softened this
masculine look, resulting in rich tones and a textural, organic vibe to the home.
Dunfield is a part-time resident of the area, living in Seattle most of the year with his two high-schoolaged sons. He envisions spending more time in his Sun Valley oasis as the years go by.
“I feel like there’s still more to explore,” he offered. “The house still surprises me—when I finally use a certain room or outdoor patio or visit in a different season. There’s still more to experience and explore.” ï
THE DETAILS
CUSTOM STEELWORK
MINDBENDER
APPLIANCES
MOUNTAIN LAND DESIGN
CONCRETE WORK
SKIP MERRICK CONSTRUCTION
MASONRY STONEWORKS
HARDWARE
ROCKY MOUNTAIN HARDWARE
DOORS + CABINETRY:
KETCHUM CUSTOM WOODWORKS
WINDOWS: GLASSMASTERS
FIREPLACES:
FIREPLACE OUTFITTERS
Carla Buffington Wilcox and husband Jeff Wilcox wanted to build a home that told their story—from the bronze statue of five sheep in the front courtyard and the towering New Guinea bisj poles in the entryway to landscaping meant to mimic an apple orchard, “This house tells the story of us,” Carla said.
The couple’s approximately 9,000-square-foot contemporary ranch home sits tucked away in the Gimlet area of the Wood River Valley on a 3-acre lot, with sweeping 360-views of old cottonwood trees, stunning hillsides, and Bald Mountain. The home is a feat in architectural design from firm Farmer Payne Architects.
“We were minimalist on the architecture so we could highlight the eclectic nature of the artwork and sculptures from across the world,” noted Scott Payne, principal architect.
The result is a home that blends livability and comfort with gallerylike attention to detail. Welcoming natural light pours into every space.
“We have traveled a lot,” Carla mentioned. “We don’t have art, we have artifacts.”
A stone pathway leads to the entrance of the home between two barn gables. There, floor to ceiling windows welcome visitors to take in the first sight: the towering bijs poles carved from a single nutmeg tree by the Asmat people of New Guinea to honor the dead in funeral ceremonies.
ARCHITECTS
FARMER PAYNE ARCHITECTS
INTERIOR DESIGNER
SARAH LATHAM | L INTERIORS
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE
DEAN HERNANDEZ | GARDENSPACE DESIGN
Down the hall, spears and blowguns from New Guinea hang on the wall. In the yard, a vintage blue gas pump holds court, turning the onceutilized pump into a piece of artwork. “It’s varied and surprising as you go from room to room,” Payne said.
Carla comes naturally by her self-described eclectic style; her mother bought and sold collectibles. Jeff’s father was both a mystery writer and furniture and lamp maker. They both values pieces that hold meaning— be it a painting, sculpture, or handwoven textiles displayed on the walls.
“Pretty much everything in our home has a story behind it,” Carla
said. When it came time for interior design, the couple worked with Sarah Latham of L Interiors to curate spaces to complement their existing collection. “I told her not to buy anything for the walls,” Carla noted. “I didn’t want art to just fill the space. I would rather have a blank wall and fill it with something I find and love later.”
Carla and Jeff wanted the home to feel livable and cozy while still offering ample space for their family to visit and to casually entertain. While the building envelope kept them from building a single-story home, Payne and team pivoted to create the two connected spaces: one
THE DETAILS
ENGINEERS
RIVERSTONE | GALENA ENGINEERING
HARDWARE
ROCKY MOUNTAIN HARDWARE
WINDOWS + DOORS: GLEETWOOD WINDOWS & DOORS
GREEN BUILDING FEATURES GREENWORKS
‘‘The biggest comment I get from guests is that the house is so homey.”
—CARLA BUFFINGTON WILCOX
meant to be a primary living space and the other to welcome overflow in the form of visitors and more room to entertain.
“The main wing has all of the kitchen, dining, living, and public space,” Payne explained. “And the other side is more utility driven. It is garages, their offices, their mudroom, the catchall. The guest wing is on the second floor above the space.”
“The biggest comment I get from guests is that the house is so homey,” Carla said.
The stunning surroundings are framed by floor-to-ceiling windows that bring the outside in. A serene main bathroom is glassed in on two sides and uses soft hues in the design, evoking an outdoor oasis.
Each room is a canvas for the couple’s aesthetic taste. Carla, alongside Latham, added pops of color throughout the house, like enameled lava stone countertops in the kitchen and a trio of vintage runners for the stairs.
Payne and team used a palette of natural materials for the build. “It turned into this agrarian-style where you have these two barn-like pavilions that we molded into a more contemporary style architecture,” Payne noted. “We created this look of a home in the meadow with a corrugated metal roof that exudes old-school tin Idaho barn.”
The landscaping—by Dean Hernandez of Gardenspace Design—was designed to extend the agrarian theme. “We have a bunch of flowering apple trees that are lined up by color. It really looks like we are in the middle of an orchard,” Carla said.
“You can see that rhythm throughout his design,” Payne added.
The home features exposed heavy timber, a corrugated metal roof, and is clad in dark shou sugi ban siding, combining a functional and aesthetically pleasing touch. “The siding is a Japanese technique of treating wood,” Payne explained. “They burn it, and it becomes decay resistant, insect resistant, and very sustainable and functional.” An artwork in and of itself, the exterior style pays homage to the artwork inside, Payne continued: “The wood rises from the ashes, in a way.”
“There is a lot of wood throughout and heavy timber, but we also used steel paneling,” Payne said. This juxtaposition of durable materials and natural materials created the contemporary-meets-Old-World look Scott and his team were drawn to.
“It was great to work with clients that gave us the freedom to do what we do best,” Payne said. “They let us push the design beyond their expectation level.”
WORDS BY HAYDEN SEDER PHOTOS BY TIM BROWN
Adesigner of numerous spec homes in the Wood River Valley had been eyeing a lot near the top of Juniper Road in Sun Valley for close to 30 years. When it became available and his daughter and her husband purchased it, he set about designing a dream home for them, their three grown children, and one grandchild.
The 6,840-square-foot multi-story home on 2.5 acres is intentionally unassuming, partly built into the hillside in such a way so as to offer privacy, a low profile, and lovely natural light year-round. “We didn’t want it to be a crazy statement house,” noted the home’s owner
Building into the hillside also afforded spectacular views of the mountains to the north from the first level, which includes a large great room with dining, living, and family rooms, kitchen, and a dining nook— an important element that allows the owners to gather multiple generations in one shared space. Also on the main level is an entryway with skylight above and a small art gallery, deck, powder room, mudroom, pantry, and the master bedroom and bath. Connected to the main floor is a three-car garage. The lower level houses a game room, bunkroom that sleeps four, office, three bedrooms with en-suite bathrooms, and a lower deck with a hot tub and seating area.
The home is a true familial labor of love. When it came to the actual design of the home, creating enough space for the owners’ current family as well as the prospect of more children coming along, was paramount. “We wanted it large enough for everybody but not to feel overwhelming,” said the owners. Though they live full-time in Seattle, they’ve had a home in the Sun Valley area for the last 28 years. They decided to build their dream home with the notion of hopefully moving to the area full time.
The final product was very much a collaborative effort by the owner’s father, 92, as designer, local architect Mark Gasenica, and builder Dan Young of Young Construction.
One of the more unique elements of the design is a series of exposed steel beams that run through the home, visible both on the exterior and interior.
ARCHITECTS
MARK GASENICA
INTERIOR DESIGNER
OWNER DESIGNED, WITH WHITNEY
GEYER | LUNA COLLAB INTERIORS
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE
KURT EGGERS
BUILDER
DAN YOUNG | YOUNG CONSTRUCTION
“It ended up being an extremely gratifying, collaborative effort throughout the entire process,” said Gasenica of the planning. “He (the father) was very knowledgeable of the site, and he had a concept of what he wanted the property to look like for his daughter and her husband.”
One of the more unique elements of the design is a series of exposed steel beams that run through the home, visible both on the exterior and interior. The steel beams contrast with reclaimed wooden beams running the opposite direction, sourced from Idaho Glulam out of Carey. The mixing of more contemporary elements with warmer ones is a consistent theme throughout the home: from concrete floors overlaid with custom, brightly colored rugs to the marble island in the kitchen lit
from above by golden lighting fixtures and below by floor underlighting.
This subtle mixing of elements to achieve a mountain contemporary look was created by Whitney Geyer of Luna Collab Interiors, who worked with the owners to pick out the elements that make the home both unique and welcoming, from custom furniture to lighting elements that make the home seem to glow at night. “It’s very contemporary, but comfortable—not cold,” said the owner. “I started with wanting a monochromatic look, and then I started to bring in pops of color with the area rugs and some pieces of furniture.”
The home gracefully incorporates the natural surroundings with floor-to-ceiling windows, large decks, a 6-foot-by-12-foot window behind
THE DETAILS
CUSTOM WOODWORK
SCOTT TAYLOR | TAYLOR
WOODWORKS
HARDWARE
ROCKY MOUNTAIN HARDWARE
STRUCTURAL ENGINEER: DAVID BOYTER
AUDIO
AUDIO INNOVATIONS
WOOD BEAMS
IDAHO GLULAM
A crystal halo chandelier brings elegance and texture to the neutral tones in the primary suite and a floating glass orb chandelier adds a touch of buoyancy over the tub.
the floating staircase, and sliding doors in the dining room area, which, when opened, create a 12-foot-wide breezeway to the deck. “We tried to get as much open feel as we could, to bring the outdoors in,” said Gasenica.
Landscape architect Kurt Eggers worked carefully with the existing landscape around the home to leave much of the natural vegetation, which was important to the owners.
Sadly, the owner’s father passed away before being able to see the home’s completion in December 2024, a project he referred to as his “swan song.”
“Even though he was 92, my dad had the vision,” said the owner. Ultimately, this home on Juniper Road became a lovely tribute, the vision of a man whose multiple-generational family will enjoy for years to come. ï
ARCHITECT
ANDERSON ARCHITECTURE
BUILDER
BASHISTA CONSTRUCTION CORP
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT
ROB KING | LANDWORK STUDIO
LANDSCAPE INSTALLATION
ALL SEASON’S LANDSCAPING
Nestled on two acres among a thicket of fir and aspen trees, a classic early modern home celebrates the beauty that emerges when a simple, clean palette meets extraordinary artwork. The result? A stunning, open-floorplan, single-story home with lovely light, both natural and fixed, and precision in every nook and cranny.
The house is a two-bedroom, four-bathroom single-story home with just over 6,000 square feet of livable space, and an attached guest house, a 1,202-square-foot garage, and a nearly 900-square-foot basement, with clean lines, large-scale windows, and an open floorplan meant for entertaining. The home also boasts two large private offices and an in-home theater. The owners, who wish to remain anonymous, worked with Josh Glick of Bashista Construction and architects Pete and Kristin Anderson of Anderson Architecture to craft a space that is both comfortable and cozy, with room to effortlessly welcome guests in the kitchen, dining, and living room spaces.
The Andersons are known for their attention to detail and innovative lighting design. The pair say they love to collaborate with clients and care deeply about bringing their visions and hopes to life alongside the contractor and team. “Pete and I are both licensed architects and have been in practice together for 23 years,” Kristin said.
As Pete explained, the exterior comprises a palette of four materials: horizontal cedar wood siding, a traditional stucco, limestone, and metal on the roof lines.
A limestone pathway welcomes guests to the front entry where a wooden door is flanked by floor-to-ceiling windows. The limestone continues into the home, blending the exterior and interior spaces. While the home has a flat roof, team Anderson added interest to the skyline by elevating the ceiling heights in different rooms, giving hierarchy to each space.
“We created cozier 9-foot ceilings alongside the 6-foot-wide hallways at the entryway, and each of the ceilings pops up when you get to an important space,” Pete noted. “When you are looking at the house from the front, we reflected those ceiling heights in the same way. It is a horizontal play on the elevation.”
For instance, Kristin continued, the master bedroom, the offices, and the dining room are all 11-foot ceilings. “The hallways, which are the gallery spaces, are 9 feet tall, and the great room is 14 feet. It creates a sense of it levitating there.”
“The openness and the flow stand out with this home,” Glick of Bashista Construction offered. “The owners wanted it to be designed around entertaining and comfort, and it definitely feels very comforting in all the spaces, from the color palettes to the finishes. It really creates a sense of calm.”
The interiors and finishes focus on neutral tones and expert precision that evoke warmth from room to room. The floor is a clear oak with no knots or defects, which creates a clean finish. The windows are all trimless, meaning the drywall directly adjoins the windows.
“Everything is clean and minimal; it is really crisp,” Pete said. “You feel it in the kitchen,” Kristin continued. “The interior is very calm because it is clean and precise.”
“And the effects of having windows go to the ceilings means there are no shadows above the window,” Pete added. “The light is captured across the ceiling in a really nice way.”
Lighting was a crucial piece for both utilizing the remarkable natural light the lot provides and for displaying the owners’ impressive collection of artwork, which was an anchoring element of the design.
“The house in a way is a blank canvas for the art,” Pete explained. “The lighting for the art is really special and well-done. Pieces occupy the gallery walls in such a way that it doesn’t matter what the art is, it becomes a real focal point.”
The 6-foot-wide hallways double as an art gallery with gridded alcoves that are each filled with notable pieces—all individually lit— from their collection. “It really is like living in an art gallery,” Pete said. “They have plein air paintings from the 1920s and some really beautiful pieces.”
An office space showcases a collection of sports memorabilia—from footballs and baseballs to hats—while another gallery hall houses sculptures and an abstract expressionist painting on the wall.
When asked about the process of crafting this home, all parties expressed that the success was due in part to the collaboration.
“We have done a lot of jobs with Pete and Kristin, so we each know how or what each brings to the table to create a seamless house construction,” Glick said. “That is what you are always shooting for.”
“Josh is such an amazing builder and working with him is wonderful because we always trusted him to follow our drawings and to care so much about all these details we put in, no matter what,” Kristin added.
Experienced collaborators, combined with a great vision from the owners, helped this contemporary home become a timeless testament to precision. ï
THE DETAILS
CUSTOM SLAB DOORS
VIEWPOINT WINDOWS & DOORS
WINDOWS
LOWEN | VIEWPOINT WINDOWS & DOORS
CABINETRY
COTTONWOOD CABINETS
+ CUSTOM MILLWORK
HARDWARE
EMTEK MONDERN DESIGNERS SERIES
FIREPLACES
FIREPLACE OUTFITTERS
Textures, patterns and shapes are all the rage when it comes to tile choices for the home. Choosing bold colors and designs for your bathroom tile allows for a unique and personal feel versus the spa-like atmosphere of more neutral choices.
1. Allison Paige Design
Floor tile laid in a herringbone pattern alongside a stone masonry wall and reclaimed wood marry with a grasscloth wallpaper in a symphony of pattern and texture in this Sun Valley entryway.
2. Lloyd Construction
Backlit quartzite counter and an “invisible” sink add drama and pattern to a primary bath—as well as something unexpected.
3. Studio Boden
A black and white theme is given bold visual interest through cross-shaped tile accents that bring an Old World feel to a contemporary application.
4. Suede Studio
This custom design features a frameless mirror expertly cut into a striking hexagonal shape, adding a distinctive touch to the space. To elevate the aesthetic, a statementmaking oversized sconce was paired with thoughtfullyselected backsplash tile, creating a perfect blend of form and function.
5. Studio Boden
Zellige tile which uses a traditional technique, including hand-molding natural clay and hand-dipping into rich glazes— was used in a matte finish for this bar backsplash to create an organic texture and pattern.
6. Suede Studio
Using a darker grout color helped tie in the various plumbing fixture and lighting finishes in this bathroom— elevating this hand-glazed white subway tile effect beyond the everyday.
Blown glass light fixtures are both functional and decorative, adding illumination and character to a room. Because the possibilities are endless in terms of design, these light fixtures create an element of modern artistry, and can be a statement piece in any space.
1. and 2. Ombre Dipped Glass in Rich Colors
Nicole Snyder of Nicole Snyder Interiors uses hand blown glass with various combinations of colors and finishes for a truly custom effect. Tracy Glover Studios Enoki (1) and Teardrop (2) pendants.
3. Organic Glass Forms
This handblown glass sphere from Bocci is layered with shapes to add interest and diffuse light. Courtesy Carmen Finegan.
4. Patterns and Lines
Adding texture or lines to handblown glass can create visual interest as seen in the Tracey Glover Studio tourmaline trumpet pendant sourced by Nicole Snyder Interiors.
5. Shells and Organic Shapes
The Crystal Shell pendant features a clam-shell shape with wavy edges and fused “icy” glass. This stunning pendant sourced by Nicole Snyder can be customized into a multi-drop chandelier in all shapes and sizes from Shakuff.
6. Handblown Shapes to Mix and Match
This single raw porcelain pendant from Bocci, sourced by architect Carmen Finegan, attaches to a single canopy and is available in multiple custom configurations.
7. Colorful Glass Twin Sconces
This handcrafted Czech glass sconce brings a pop of color to the walls and glows beautifully when lit. Like art for your walls that has a secondary function of lighting a space. Comerford Collection sourced by Allison Paige Design.
8. Handblown Tree of Light
16.5 is a tree-like installation from Bocci featuring five pendants and a modular stainless-steel armature system, all in low-voltage electricity. From Carmen Finegan Architects.
Brianna Untener Founder, Principal Designer
917-426-3617
IG: briannascottinteriors www.briannascottinteriors.com
At the intersection of livable luxury and boundary-pushing creativity sits Brianna Scott Interiors, a full-service design firm redefining the art of home. Known for crafting deeply personalized, elevated interiors that balance timeless detail with thoughtful functionality.
Led by founding designer Brianna Untener, the firm brings a fresh, artistic perspective to each project—whether designing sleek high-rises in Manhattan, refined Hamptons retreats, or cozy Sun Valley chalets. Drawing on formative time spent in Florence’s fashion district, Brianna fuses a fashion flair with modern livability, resulting in spaces that feel both effortless and fresh.
The firm’s reach extends across the country from the city skyline of Manhattan to the mountains of Sun Valley where Brianna and her team seamlessly adapt their vision to vastly different landscapes.
Urban projects reflect tailored sophistication and spatial ingenuity, while mountain homes lean into texture, warmth, and quiet luxury.
Known for her editorial eye and meticulous detail, Brianna has garnered attention from publications like Architectural Digest, House Beautiful, and Homes & Gardens. Yet beyond the press, it’s her collaborative spirit and unmatched dedication that set her apart. Her firm takes on only a select number of clients each year—ensuring each project receives the highest level of care, customization, and craftsmanship.
Whether sourcing locally, internationally, or designing bespoke pieces in-house, Brianna Scott Interiors delivers interior environments that are as inviting as they are striking. For those who crave more than the expected, this is interior design at its most refined—where every space tells a story, and every detail is by design.
“Effective use of color is one of the best ways to create spaces that are both sophisticated and inviting. Warm earthy and jewel tones are trending as are shades of brown like chestnut and espresso. Muted, dusty hues add complexity and neutrals like beige, taupe and ivory are replacing stark white.
Heather McGregor Owner, Creative Director
9 East Bullion Street
Hailey, ID 83333
208-721-1380
www.redeuxdecor.com
Founded in 2014 by owner & creative director, Heather McGregor, Redeux Interiors is a full-service interior design firm based in Hailey, Idaho. They are best known for creating functional interiors tailored to clients with active lifestyles, specializing in spaces that are both beautiful and built for real life. Redeux Interiors blends timeless design principles with eclectic, modern influences—offering services from new construction and full-scale renovations to in-home design consultations.
Every project is approached with creativity, collaboration, and a deep understanding of how great design can enhance everyday living. Most importantly, they approach projects with a sense of humor. In an industry where style, transparency, and positive working relationships are essential, a good sense of humor helps navigate the project with less stress!
In addition to design services, Redeux Interiors also operates a brick-and-mortar retail space that showcases an ever-evolving collection of home furnishings, vintage finds, artwork, and accessories. The store reflects the firm’s signature aesthetic: a harmonious mix of old and new, refined and unique, bold and understated. Come visit them in Hailey to find your next design inspiration!
“Love this adorable shop, and most of all love Heather’s eye for amazing pieces that don’t break the bank!! She has fabulous pillows and comfy custom couches and chairs. And is a great overall designer. She helped us from start to finish and we love the feel of our new apartment - furnished by Redeux! We recommend using Heather for any project big or small - she’s perfection all around!”
— Happy Ketchum Client
1. Redeux Interiors
Saturated cabinets in a deep, ocean blue pair well with a playful fish themed pattern flooring.
2. Studio Boden
A citrine chair in the corner of the guest room is a fun pop of color in an otherwise neutral space.
3. Nicole Snyder Interiors
Texture and pattern in bright corals and burnt orange create a focal point and area of respite in a window corner.
4. Nicole Snyder Interiors
The bright pop of soothing, springtime green tones are echoed in the stool and roman shade of this welcoming and joyful primary bath.
5. Redeux Interiors
Saturated green cabinets in a rich sage or olive color make a statement in any kitchen and bring the palette of the Idaho hillsides indoors.
6. Brianna Scott Interiors
Pattern will instantly add life and a little bit of fun to any space, especially in a bedroom or an unexpected location. Layering different shades within the same palette and playing with pattern or texture helps bring it all together.
Sarah Latham Principal, LEED AP
760 N. Washington Ave, Suite 101
Ketchum, ID 83340
208-928-6366
www.linteriors.co
After meeting her husband and moving to Sun Valley in 2006, Sarah Latham fell in love with the mountain lifestyle and hasn’t looked back. Her foundation in design—the result of working with San Francisco’s Fisher Weisman, Lake Tahoe’s Bentley Interior Designs, and RLB Architectura for ten years—continues to support her expertise and innovation. When Sarah’s not closely collaborating with studio clients, she spends her free time outdoors. From biking to running, skiing, and gardening, Sarah is constantly immersing herself in the place she calls home and drawing on its inspirations.
L Interiors is an award winning design studio known for their attention to detail on every level of design. Whether it is a residential or commercial project, L Interiors produces a custom design suited to each owner’s individual needs. Specializing in ground up design from conception to installation, large remodels and furnishings, L Interiors is suited to completely elevate any design project. Contact L Interiors via their website and start a discussion on your project needs.
“With a passionate force of designers, our staff knows how to integrate traditional and modern styles to create the perfect blend for each project. We take value in getting to know our clients individually to better understand how best to create the function and aesthetic that will exceed their expectations in design.”
— Sarah Latham, Principal, LEED AP
Rugs are the literal foundation of your room with neutrals softening a space and patterns brightening. Choosing chunky, shaggy rugs with high piles will make your living areas cozy and calm while bold colors and patterns or a more vintage design can enhance overall ambience and add character and style.
The bold, geometric pattern of this rug by Merida Studio serves as an anchor to the room and echoes shapes of the architectural elements and mountains seen from every window.
Rosemary Spiller (left)
Lead Designer
Erika Blank (center)
Lead Designer
Killarney Loufek (right)
Project Manager
511 East Avenue, 2A Ketchum, ID 83340
208-538-1919
www.studioboden.com
Studio Boden was born from a shared passion: the belief that homes should tell the stories of the people who live in them. The founders of Studio Boden worked together at a local design firm, collaborating daily and discovering a creative rhythm that inspired them to launch their own boutique studio, a place where thoughtful design, personal connection, and attention to detail could flourish.
We are intentionally selective about the projects we take on, we keep our studio small and work one-on-one with clients, allowing us to prioritize quality over quantity and ensure every detail is thoughtfully executed. Each home we design is a collaboration, not just with our clients, but with architects, builders, craftsmen, and landscape designers. Building these relationships allows us to create the best possible home for every client. Our work reflects our clients’ personalities, lifestyles, and aspirations, not a signature “look” imposed by us. No matter the client’s personal style, our goal is the same: to create spaces that feel effortless, lived-in, and completely authentic.
Our process is designed to be flexible and accessible, whether clients are local or across the country. Through open communication, curated ideas, and a thoughtful mix of remote and in-person collaboration, we ensure every project feels seamless and personal.
At Studio Boden, design is more than aesthetics, it’s about creating homes that feel comfortable, and lived-in. We don’t just make beautiful spaces; we craft homes that truly feel like home.
2. Suede Studio
This unique rug from SHIIR Holburn features whip-stitched leather patches over flatwoven silk, creating a bold play of geometry and texture. The pattern and heaxagon shapes echo the organic shapes of the entry light fixture to create a cohesive design.
3. Red Door Home + Design
Ivory wool and cotton hand-knotted COI-02 rug by Amber Lewis x Loloi, blends whimsical texture with artisanal craftsmanship, adding layers of subtle pattern and softness to this primary bedroom.
Swivel chairs are fun, functional and flexible, and can be the perfect piece in an open concept home. They are chic and cozy and make it easy to watch TV, chat with family and friends, and take in the view!
1. Unexpected Texture
Jen Hoey of Suede Studio selected the ruching details on this Kimberly Denman swivel armchair to add richness and texture to the room.
2. Swiveling for Two
A top-seller, the Four Hands CHLOE Media Lounger swivel chair from Red Door Home + Design, blends style and functionality. Its U-shaped design offers a wide, spacious seat for ultimate comfort.
3. Rich Velvet Color
Tufted velvet swivel barrel chair in rich rust adds a stylish pop of color to any space. Available through Redeux Interiors.
4. Vintage Finds
Swivel chairs are the ultimate blend between comfort, style and function. This vintage swivel chair sourced by Brianna Scott Interiors offers a unique and cocooning shape.
5. Smaller Profiles
Swivel chairs come in all sizes and can fit in tighter areas if needed. This swivel Mesa Occasional Chair from Holly Hunt, courtesy of L Interiors, is a perfect blend of a petite shape with big function.
6. Modern Shapes
A pop of yellow on this swivel chair and pillow accentuates the art in this modern guest bedroom and continues the design aesthetic seamlessly.
Troy Jensen Owner
141 Citation Way, Suite #4
Hailey, ID 83333
208-928-6064
407 E. 320 S Jerome, ID 83338
208-324-6634
classic-stoneworks.com
We are proud of our heritage and our service to customers since 2005. Today we have become Southern Idaho’s first choice in quality custom stone design, fabrication and installation. At Classic Stoneworks, we handle every step of the custom stoneworking process in house. We manage everything including the design, fabrication, delivery, and installation of your custom stone —from marble, granite, quartzite, quartz and special order stone. What does this mean for you? It means you don’t have to worry about trying to coordinate between designers, fabricators, construction crews, and warranty agents. You get to enjoy a stress-free process from beginning to end.
Start by selecting your exact slab or remnant at our warehouse or online. Then, work closely with a programmer to draft up the perfect design for your home. Finally, enjoy a stress-free delivery and installation process performed by our own expert technicians. Take the stress out of your custom stone projects with Classic Stoneworks.
“We recently had the pleasure of working with Classic Stoneworks for our pantry remodel, and they exceeded our expectations every step of the way. Their warehouse is beautiful and offers many options … I always love looking at the smaller details of their warehouse like the granite business card holders. If you’re in the market for new granite, I highly recommend Classic Stoneworks.”
— John Burg
Troy Jensen Owner
141 Citation Way, Suite #4
Hailey, ID 83333
208-928-6064
407 E. 320 S Jerome, ID 83338
208-324-6634
classic-stoneworks.com
We are proud of our heritage and our service to customers since 2005. Today we have become Southern Idaho’s first choice in quality custom stone design, fabrication and installation. At Classic Stoneworks, we handle every step of the custom stoneworking process in house. We manage everything including the design, fabrication, delivery, and installation of your custom stone —from marble, granite, quartzite, quartz and special order stone. What does this mean for you? It means you don’t have to worry about trying to coordinate between designers, fabricators, construction crews, and warranty agents. You get to enjoy a stress-free process from beginning to end.
Start by selecting your exact slab or remnant at our warehouse or online. Then, work closely with a programmer to draft up the perfect design for your home. Finally, enjoy a stress-free delivery and installation process performed by our own expert technicians. Take the stress out of your custom stone projects with Classic Stoneworks.
“We recently had the pleasure of working with Classic Stoneworks for our pantry remodel, and they exceeded our expectations every step of the way. Their warehouse is beautiful and offers many options … I always love looking at the smaller details of their warehouse like the granite business card holders. If you’re in the market for new granite, I highly recommend Classic Stoneworks.”
— John Burg
From cabinet pulls to door handles to larger fixtures and accents, bronze is a timeless and classic choice. Bronze is sophisticated, luxurious, versatile and durable making it an ideal choice for any home.
1. Modern Shapes
Jen Hoey of Suede Studio complemented the clean, minimalist design and rustic wood cabinetry of this bathroom vanity with bold bronze color. Rocky Mountain Hardware, Pivot Cabinet Knob finish: Silicon Bronze Dark Lustre.
2. Bronze Panels
The bronze accents on the kitchen hood and cabinets, as well as the finish on the counter stools, drive home the modern elements in this contemporary kitchen designed by Studio Boden.
3. Warm Bronze Tones
The warmth and natural patina of the silicon bronze brushed finish fixtures in this kitchen from Suede Studio complement the natural wood and stone. Hardware and fixtures from Rocky Mountain Hardware.
BY LAURIE SAMMIS
Arrested movement captured in stone. The flash of form. Gestural lines suggesting flight and the expanse of flowing motion conveyed through the simple sweep of a wing. These are all elements of artist Jane Rosen’s body of work— compositional stories in glass, stone and drawn form inspired by the birds, horses, dogs, deer, hawks and ravens she encountered in nature.
Sadly, Rosen passed away earlier this year, in Northern California, leaving behind a community of students, collaborators, and collectors who honor her work for its quiet presence and clarity, and understand Rosen’s unique ability to capture the stories of the natural world with an immediacy and reverence that claim our focus, our attention and a sublime and sacred devotion to the nature of seeing.
The body of Rosen’s work is filled with an homage to nature, imbued with both the wonder and simplicity of curves and lines, and an almost otherworldly or holy interpretation of the language of science. Her marble and limestone sculpture, blown glass pieces, and drawings and prints are reductive in nature, demonstrating restraint while also capturing the abundance of nature and the flash of
form and musculature, the very essence of an animal’s spirit and lifeform.
Most of her forms are pictured at rest but carry a stillness that contains all possible movement: birds perched or standing, watching and vigilant, but infused with an alertness and readiness to spring into immediate action. Each piece contains this charged duality: both detachment and an immediacy that demands our attention. Lines drop like the beat of a wing, misty washes become atmosphere, and glass arrests the graceful attention of a perched goshawk in a medium that captures light and reflects the expanse of sky.
“I suspect I switch between levels of abstraction and figuration—by starting with the study of a form—a pinecone, for example—until I understand its formation and know the thing well,” Rosen stated in a journal excerpt from her book “Dual Nature.” “These drawings are often more realistic until I can understand them well enough to reduce them to their essence. Pinecone petals—they are called cone scales—look like bird beaks.”
Born in New York City in 1950, Rosen attended New York University, continuing her studies at the Art Students League where she trained in the classical drawing lineage of Robert Beverly Hale and developed a
fascination with Leonardo da Vinci and other great Renaissance masters. Rosen spent her formative years living and working in the SoHo of 1970s New York City. Her commitment to experimentation and melding of presumably opposing concepts began during this time, and her work often combined Renaissance technique and ways of seeing with Eastern philosophy, Egyptian forms, and elements of Minimalism.
Rosen’s work carries an unusual mix of precision and wonder, elements that the artist carried forward into all areas of her life. “Art is a way to ask questions about what one wishes to understand,” said Rosen, who also taught art for nearly five decades at a
number of institutions, including the School of Visual Arts in New York, U.C. Berkeley, Stanford, and U.C. Davis. As a teacher, she emphasized the importance of perception over performance and encouraged her students to experience drawing and sculpture as practices in awareness rather than displays of skills.
After two decades in the New York art world, Rosen made a single, and fateful, visit to a rural property in San Gregorio in Northern California, where a profound experience with the natural world—more specifically, with a red-tailed hawk—prompted her to leave Manhattan to live on a windswept ranch high above the Pacific Ocean. Here, the natural world of owls, foxes, ravens,
‘‘ Art is a way to ask questions about what one wishes to understand.”
—JANE ROSEN
horses, falcons and hawks became her daily companions and, eventually, central subjects.
In the prose and journal excerpts of her self-published book, “Dual Nature,” Rosen provides a glimpse into her lifelong “love of where nature, science and art meet.” She speaks of animals as teachers, their “natural intelligence” a counterpoint to human chatter. For Rosen, watching a kestrel hunt or an owl listen was a lesson in attention and form. Her desire was to heighten perception and trim away noise until only the essential remained.
Sometimes to capture the essence of a form, Rosen would only watch the shadow of it—trying to truly SEE without looking directly, but feeling where the form existed and how it moved. She often described teaching and drawing as “seeing through touch,” a method that asked the hand and eye to move as one and reflected her belief that seeing had nothing to do with the eyes. In her mind, it was a way of rejecting symbols of the traditional “seen” form and the expected shape of things and relying instead on gesture to capture the essence of a being.
In this way her work conjures the mystical, capturing the spirit of a thing in simple economies of line and shape. Her blown glass birds and animals appear to be waiting and watching, telling stories of the natural world through forms that carry a monkish-like stillness and mystical detachment.
Her blown glass pieces include bits of stone dust or fragments of line drawings, becoming compositions that both reflect and absorb light simultaneously, like the moving of light across the still form of a perched bird resting in a tree.
In a journal excerpt from “Dual Nature,” Rosen recounts her collaboration with master glassblower Ross Richmond, when the two had spent “…hours and days doing drawings with chips of glass that we bake and then roll onto hot glass for the glass birds to contain actual drawings fused into their translucent surfaces. It is a time rich with new explorations of how nature can be the story to be told through the history of the language of art. I have always felt that if people saw what I see in nature, in the animals around me, and in the trees, that they would not destroy them. It is my hope that this story can be heard.” ï
BY CRISTY SELLAS
The rainstorm started just as I pulled up to The Burrow and found manager and teacher Kalie Stier and her 4-month-old Hadley inside—cozy and dry and surrounded by art. Stier didn’t tell her two older daughters that she was coming to the studio, otherwise she would have had all three girls in tow. The older two are savvy enough to know that they should jump on any opportunity to hang out at The Burrow—and what kid (or adult) wouldn’t?
The shelves are packed with every imaginable medium and surface for art: paintbrushes and paint, watercolors, chalk, felt tip markers, crayons, glitter, beads, fabric, scissors, glue, charcoal, pencils, paper, canvas, and on and on. It’s an artist’s little Heaven. The name, The Burrow, is apt because the space is inviting and comfortable, a haven for creativity and joy.
Kïrsten Rommes, founder and owner of The Burrow, opened the space in January 2024. With degrees in visual art and elementary education, as well as years of experience teaching at an arts preschool in Seattle, Rommes brings knowledge and innovative enthusiasm to The Burrow. She has two daughters of her own; Kaija is 6, and Tara is 3. Rommes knew from day one of being a mother that she wanted her girls’ natural inclination toward creating art to be nurtured, and not just at home. She realized that what she wanted for them didn’t exist in the Wood River Valley—a refuge that was both a play space and an art school, an alternative or supplement to the many sports and other outdoor activities available for kids and adults in the area.
So, where there was no art school, Rommes created one in the Williams Building on
West River Street at 2nd Avenue in Ketchum. Opening the door from a regular hallway into The Burrow feels like entering the Land of Oz, where everything changes from black and white to color. The space is a sanctuary dedicated to curiosity and inspiration. For a child already interested in art, it’s beyond Heaven. But even for the less artistically inclined, The Burrow opens its arms to everyone and allows all children and adults to shine, build confidence, and find their inner Picasso or Matisse.
Rommes has allowed The Burrow to grow and change organically by basing the camps and class times on the needs and desires of the community. She is always mindful of families’ busy schedules and the various local coaches’ and teachers’ practice times, whether for ballet or soccer.
If you don’t have the supplies or the space, or you don’t have it in you to face the clean-up on a rainy or snowy day, The Burrow’s open studio time can offer parents an hour or two of respite and give kids an opportunity to unleash their imaginations and let their artistic talents flourish. The kids have access to everything without being led on a specific project or assignment. It’s their time to find the materials they need to truly express themselves.
Rommes has gathered a talented collective of teachers to impart passion and artistic knowledge to all their students, whether toddlers or grown-ups.
Kalie Mauldin, a watercolor artist and photographer, manages the studio and teaches classes. She studied art at Westmont College and believes that we can all discover who we are through art.
Renee DeBaun is a third-generation artist— her mom and grandmother were wildly creative, and Renee grew up surrounded by individuals expressing themselves through everything from painting to quilting to doily making.
Hayley Vanbragt can’t remember a time when she wasn’t creating art. She made and sold hemp necklaces as a child and gifted her mother with hand-crafted beaded barrettes and eventually ran her own bespoke jewelry company.
Ainsley Nelson hails from Whidbey Island and has always considered creativity to be a guiding force in her life. Her favorite mediums are acrylic painting, ceramics and ink drawing, but she welcomes inspiration in all its forms.
The most popular age groups are the Kit and Fox classes—not surprisingly as those kids (ages 3-8) tend to have boundless energy and enthusiasm and may not be fully committed to organized sports.
The Hoglet sessions are “Mommy and me” style classes, which are casual and offered on Friday mornings. Moms and their babies can drop in, work on an art project, and chat with other moms.
With some of the older groups, Rommes and the other instructors have been able to key in on the tweens’ and teens’ interests in comic book characters and graphic novels and guide them in creating their own characters and heroes in that style.
Summertime offerings include “camps” that run for two hours a day for four days. This summer, The Burrow has hosted Kit Dino
Rainbow Camp, and even a Squishmallow Workshop where kids can bring their favorite plush pals to life!
Rommes has done a masterful job of making just about every party or class iteration available to artists of all ages! Guest creatives can arrange private art classes, birthday parties, and adult sip and paint parties. The team at The Burrow will even come to you and create an “in-home art studio” style party for birthdays or any occasion.
Once school starts, The Burrow will go back to after-school sessions, which are eight-weeks long—one hour per week—and are themed by the medium used (watercolors, for example) or another nature-based art project. For the most part, the clientele in the valley are not city kids who need more outdoor time. These normally very active kids and adults appreciate the slower pace and quiet of the art process in The Burrow.
Rommes and her team are committed to growing and adapting as the needs of the community change. Soon to come to The Burrow is a twice-monthly Parents Night Out when parents can drop off kids for four hours. While mom and dad enjoy a leisurely dinner and drinks, the kids have the chance to express themselves artistically, make friends, and even enjoy pizza and a movie!
Rommes believes that “Art makes children powerful,” and she has given them the space to tap into that power and build confidence and self-esteem.ï
The Burrow offers drop-ins, full sessions, camps, special events, class packs, appointments, open studio time, and parties.
Each age group is named after a burrowing creature:
Hoglet class—ages 1-3
Kit Class—ages 3-5
Fox Class—ages 5-8
Badger class—8-11
Marten class—ages 12-14
Wolf Class—ages 15-17
And the Owl Class—age 18 and older!
Broschofsky Galleries presents “Western Pop: Icons & Irony,” open SeptemberDecember, featuring works by Rudi Broschofsky, Billy Schenck, and Andy Warhol. Uniting bold color, satire, and Western iconography, the show explores how Pop Art reimagines cowboy mythos and American nostalgia. From Broschofsky’s layered prints to Schenck’s cinematic cowboy scenes and Warhol’s iconic twists on Americana, “Western Pop” bridges contemporary and classic.
Fall 2025, Gail Severn Gallery features Joseph Rossano’s graphite works on repurposed wood panels and hand-blown glass fish from the traveling exhibition “Salmon School”; Jun Kaneko’s bold ceramic dangos; Theodore Waddell’s textured paintings of horses, cattle and sheep; and David DeVillier’s inventive mixed-media works. Looking ahead to 2026, the gallery will present solo exhibitions by Tom Hammick, known for dreamlike woodblock prints; Michael Gregory, whose paintings explore the nostalgic Americana imagery; Berkeley Hoerr, whose vibrant works reflect personal memory and place; and a tribute to the late Jane Rosen, celebrating her enduring legacy in sculpture and painting. Check our website for new exhibitions: www.gailseverngallery.com
Thai Mainhard, “Paradise”
Born in Brazil and based in Hawaii, painter Thai Mainhard is naturally drawn to the rich patterns and textures of the jungle. Painting is an instinctive extension of Mainhard’s being. Her newest body of work explores colorful botanicals and their vessels. In each painting tension rises as she captures
the rich textures, vibrant colors, and lush patterns that makeup each emotionally rich abstracted composition. An intuitive painter, Mainhard is connected to each brush stroke, each slash of paint, and each composition. Beginning inwardly, her process employs sensation over concept, making each mark a lived moment and each painting an extension of herself.
Introducing Stephen Wilkes
In his series “Day to Night,” photographer Stephen Wilkes redefines the boundaries of photographic storytelling by collapsing time into a single, visually immersive experience. From a fixed point, Wilkes photographs a location for up to 36 hours, documenting the ever-shifting rhythm of light, movement, and life within a specific location. The result is a collection of up to 2,000 images, which he meticulously narrows down to 20-100. Through a careful compositional process, the selections become a singular image, inviting us to experience what Wilkes did in 36 hours of photography.
Frances McCormack - Collage
Frances McCormack’s lush botanical abstractions reflect a freedom of expression honed through years of artistic practice. In 2019, she turned to collage, a medium that allowed her to work on a smaller scale. This shift required a change in approach, as collage demands patience—a quality McCormack
muses she wishes she had learned earlier. The process involves a meticulous search for perfect details, whether from a drawing, photograph, or instruction manual. Though smaller in scale, McCormack’s collages carry the same energy as her large-scale paintings, referencing the natural world through the lens of the marvelous. These works are structured organically, like the walled gardens and spaces she has sought out for inspiration.
This fall, the gallery features three artists whose work explores nature, movement, and meaning. Veronica Busch captures the spirit of horses and landscapes through striking photography shaped by her global travels and equestrian insight. Cliff Graham has blended visual art with decades of nonprofit and humanitarian work, having shaped over 85 community spaces. His recent piece, “Afterglow,” is a sculpture of Baldy and has been added to the warmly received Sun Valley Eclipse print. Ketchum-based photographer James Bourret brings a modern, abstract eye to the natural world. A former architect, he crafts richly detailed, minimalist images using medium format photography and archival techniques rooted in traditional darkroom practice.
“Sun Valley, 2025” by Emma Webster, at OCHI Gallery, oil on linen, 60 in. x 84 in. Photo by Marten Elder. Courtesy of the Artist and White Cube.
Graham | Afterglow A legacy piece in
Edition of 50 (variable) — each uniquely finished | 17” × 32”
Commissioned sizes available
Artist/Designer: Cliff Graham
Artisan: Chris O’Rourke
Kristina Foley: August 26 - October 12
Since the domestication of sheep over 10,000 years ago, felt making has evolved as an art form centering on both utility and beauty. Foley honors this millennia-old relationship between human and animal by celebrating the natural qualities of wool, infusing each piece with the essence of the animal without compromising on ethics. Her practice is shaped by a deeply personal sense of place and unwavering commitment to sustainability.
The transparency of her artistic process emphasizes the authenticity of the materials she uses. Foley shares a commitment to animal friendly design and chooses local and Responsible Wool Standard certified wools for their renewable, biodegradable and enduring qualities.
Jeff Juhlin: August 26 - October 12
Jeff Juhlin is primarily known for his mixed media landscape-based abstractions.
“My work seeks to reflect a sense of stillness, space and the visual history of time evident in the Western landscape. In this environment, time often reveals itself in the form of rock strata created by erosion, wind and water both building up over eons of time and wearing away by the elements in a continuous process. Both process and materiality are always important components in my work. Typically, I reveal layers of translucent strata composed of pigmented wax, oil, paper, cold wax and other media that are built up and worn away in the storied layers of the creative process.”
Douglas Aagard: September
Utah landscape painter Douglas Aagard is known for his bold use of color, texture and light. His subjects are as varied as the Utah landscape itself, consisting of farmland scenes, maple trees bursting with color, and mountain peaks. The gallery will also feature a selection of new work from our other gallery artists.
Caleb Meyer: December
Artist Reception: Friday, December 26, 5 – 7:30pm
Caleb Meyer was born in Hailey, Idaho. As a child, he enjoyed all types of art, but it was not until a painting class in college that he discovered a passion for oil painting. After graduation from Boise State University in 2006, Meyer began an apprenticeship with nationally recognized oil painter Robert Moore. Meyer compares his time with Moore’s studio to the laying of a strong foundation. He is now an accomplished artist in his own right, with paintings in prominent public and private collections. The gallery will also feature a selection of new work from our other gallery artists.
“Armed and Dangerous” by Rudi Broschofsky, at Broschofsky Galleries, spray paint on panel, 72 in. x 36 in.
“Lesser Flamingoes, Lake Bogoria, Kenya” by Stephen Wilkes, at Gilman Contemporary, archival pigment print, 34 in. x 64 in., edition of 15.
OCHI is pleased to present a group exhibition featuring works by Emma Webster, Vija Celmins, Cooper Cox, Beaux Mendes, Dike Blair, and others. The exhibition will be on view from November 21, 2025 - January 10, 2026, and gathers artists who build, replicate, or invent landscapes. Moving between natural and psychological scenes, their works map the dissonance between beauty and fabrication, memory and invention. Visit ochigallery.com for more information about programming and events during the run of the exhibition.
Sun Valley Contemporary Gallery has a new home! We’ve recently moved into our beautiful new location at 360 East Ave. and are thrilled to continue showcasing bold, contemporary work from leading Canadian and international artists. This fall, we’re featuring exciting new arrivals from Hunt Slonem, Isabelle van Zeijl, and Jane Waterous, alongside fan favorites like Aaron Hazel and Russell Young. Looking ahead, we’re planning a major event in December with a power duo Cristina Mittermeier and Paul Nicklen; stay tuned for more details. Stop by the new space and discover what’s fresh this season!
“Mending Across Borders & Boundaries,” July 11 – November 8
The exhibition uses the idea of mending— both metaphorical and literal — to consider multiple questions. What is it to live in two cultures or between two cultures post-migration? How can migration be both a moment of rupture and one of healing? What is the possibility of repairing landscapes and environments harmed by human activity? Participating artists include Maria De Los Angeles, Guadalupe Maravilla, Ishi Glinsky, Arleene Correa Valencia, Nazafarin Lotfi, and Elisa Harkins. ï
Severn Art Services offers custom archival framing, featuring vintage and contemporary frames for fine art, mirrors, and three dimensional objects of all sizes ... Art Storage, shipping and advisory services for artwork valuations, appraisals, conservation and restoration
... Professional services for indoor and outdoor art installations
Local endurance athlete, world champion, Emmy Award winner and motivational speaker Rebecca Rush has been on a lifelong journey of resilience and leadership. She has spent over 30 years chasing “firsts”—podiums, PRs, championship titles, and never-before-imagined adventures that have challenged and shaped her personally and professionally. But this image of her during the Rebecca’s Private Idaho gravel race perfectly captures the joy she feels in sharing her passion for sport and the enduring lessons she has learned along the way with others. Some of these she has broken down into equations: risk = reward, passion = payoff, give = get, less = more, movement = medicine.
