BY KAREN BOSSICK

Tina Cole promises that Friday night’s second annual Homegrown Festival will be beyond exciting.

Not only does it feature local ski stars at work in the mountains but it will feature an exciting new film of Andrew Dunning—the nephew of Sun Valley Olympic kayaker Chris Spelius and son of Susan Spelius Dunning—paddling the churning Class V rapids of the North Fork of the Payette and South Fork of the Salmon rivers.

And it will offer a teaser of 23-year-old Chilean split-border and University of Colorado student Rafael Pease’s new Connections Film “Yugen,” which explores the connection of people to the mountains on five challenging ranges around the world.

The Homegrown Film Festival will be held at 7 p.m. Friday, Jan. 4, at the new Argyros Performing Arts Center in Ketchum.

Tickets are $15 for Blaine County students and $20 for adults, available at Backwoods Mountain Sports and The Elephant’s Perch in Ketchum, Sturtevant’s in Hailey and online at www.theargyros.org.

All of the ticket sales go to the Friends of the Sawtooth Avalanche Center, which prepares forecasts looking at the avalanche risk for a 1,790-square-mile area covering the Sawtooth, Boulder, Smoky, Pioneer and Soldier mountains.

McKenna Peterson will emcee the night, which features films made by local filmmakers and athletes.

Among them: the Stellar Media Crew of Spencer Cordovano, Wyatt Caldwell and Yancy Caldwell. Also, the brother-sister duo of Axel and McKenna Peterson; Karl Fostvedt, who was crowned the King of Corbet’s Couloir, a steep chute in Jackson, Wyo.; Jasper Newton, Olympic snowboarder Chase Josey, Lexi duPont, Banks Gilberti and Jack Strassman.

The festival will also honor Ketchum Nordic and bicycle racer Charley French, who continues to climb to the top of the podium in the 90-and-over category at such competitions as the 2017 Masters World Cup in Klosters, Switzerland, and the 2018 Masters World Cup in Minneapolis.

There’ll be a raffle for a ski pass, and ski gear from festival sponsor Black Diamond Equipment, with the money going to the Avalanche Center. And a limited edition of 50 original hand-pulled serigraphs of Jack Weekes’ poster Big Fatti Couloir in the Sawtooth Mountains will be available for sale at the festival and afterwards at Blue Heron Framing in Hailey.

This year’s festival will be dedicated to the memory of Bryce Newcomb, a professional skier who grew up in the Wood River Valley. Newcomb died last summer from injuries sustained during a fall off a collapsing cornice the previous winter.

For more information, contact Friends of the Sawtooth Avalanche Center at 208-720-3242.