STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK
When the 50th annual Zions Boulder Mountain Tour starts Saturday, 215 of the 1,045 racers will be toeing the line at Baker Creek.
They’ll watch as the first few waves of racers who took off from Galena Lodge at 10 a.m. scream by. Then at 11:30 a.m. the air horn will sound and adaptive skiers, children accompanied by their parents and others will be off. Their mission: To ski 15 kilometers to the end of the Harriman Trail across from SNRA headquarters.
Ski Instructor Marc Mast says few people realize that the Half-Boulder, which has become a popular option for some, came about because of challenged athletes.
Mast, who founded Sun Valley Adaptive Sports which later became Higher Ground, said he invited “One-Armed Willie” Stewart, head coach for the U.S. Paralympic Nordic Team, to bring his team to Sun Valley to train in the early 2000s.
They could have the bonus of competing in the Boulder Mountain Tour, a 34-kilometer course stretching from Galena lodge to SNRA headquarters, he told Stewart.
The team came in 2002, and the top Paralympian crossed the finish line in 2 hours and 12 minutes—a little less than an hour behind the able-bodied winners. The coaches liked it so much that they returned. But the next year they didn’t want to do the entire Boulder because the World Championships were three weeks later and they didn’t want to burn out their athletes by taking on such a formidable race.
“I asked Kevin Swigert, who was race director at the time, if we could do 15 kilometers and he agreed. For first few years, that 15K option was limited to the adaptive skiers. Then, as people began asking, ‘Why can’t we do that?’ they opened it up to anyone,” Mast said.
The Half-Boulder was eventually dubbed the Charley Course Half-Boulder in honor of Charley French, who skied the full Boulder Mountain Tour into his 80s and then skied the Half-Boulder a few times in his 90s.
“It gets about 250 racers every year and people love it. And we always have between six and 15 adaptive athletes—athletes using sit skis, single and double amputees, those with spina bifida, the visually impaired,” Mast said.
“I skied with them during the first Half-Boulder, double poling all the way. They went as hard as they could and they loved it,” Mast said.
Last year stand-up skier Dani Aravich, a Boisean who was born without a left forearm, won the Half Boulder in 39.48 minutes. The able-bodied winners finished four and five seconds behind.
Aravich went on to compete at the 2022 Winter Paralympics in Beijing and just this week won a gold medal along with Sun Valley’s Jake Adicoff in the team relay at the Paralympic World Championships in Ostersund, Sweden.
This year the San Diego-based Challenged Athletes Foundation, which has offices in Boise, San Francisco and New York, has brought the largest field of star-studded adaptive skiers set to compete in the Boulder Mountain Tour, including several teenagers with spina bifida.
They will compete for a $4,000 prize purse. And CAF provided travel grants for many of them to take part in the Sun Valley training camp.
Following Saturday’s race, there will be a special surprise presentation at noon at the finish line designed to bring even more physically challenged athletes into the sport.
Mast said he’s proud that physically challenged athletes had a role in creating the formation of the 15K race.
“The crowd is in awe of these guys. They think, ‘They’re doing it. I can, too,’ ” he said. “My goal is to get $10,000 prize money for them. They have a little prize money now but they deserve more.”