STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK
Bree Vanden Heuvel, Meg Vorm and Elena Vorm couldn’t have picked more appropriate costumes for Saturday’s Ketchum Wide Open.
With highway construction snarling traffic on Highway 75 and Sun Valley Road, they donned bright orange garb that turned them into walking traffic cones with golf clubs.
“Be nice. Slow down. And don’t hit the orange cones,” they chimed in together.
More than 325 guys and gals dressed up as Wonder Bread, Royal Canadian Mounted Police and kings and queens took to the streets of Ketchum for a game of mini-golf designed to pep up town during slack.
The all-in-fun tourney was started at least 38 years ago, although it’s rumored there were games even in the 1970s, said Pete Prekeges of Grumpy’s. The money from this year’s entry fees were divided between the Sawtooth Avalanche Center and Stella’s Fund, which provides underserved animal shelters with food and other necessities.
Meredith Ganz and Jacob Dym waddled between golf holes in scuba diving gear—their first time on the creative links built by bar and restaurant owners.
“I didn’t think we would get such a positive response wearing flippers, but we have,” Ganz said.
While Ganz and Dym trucked up and down stairs and over curbs in flippers, Sabrina Robillard moved from putting green to putting green on rollerskates tucked underneath the colorful costumes she and Chelsea Berriochoa had fashioned in keeping with Chazz in Will Ferrell’s movie “Wedding Crashers.”
She needed a little help from others to steady herself as she tried to keep from shooting off the elevated hole at the Sawtooth Brewery. And Berriochoa had to help her down the incline at The Argyros.
But those little details didn’t seem to faze her.
Eight young women used the Ketchum Wide Open as a chance to celebrate the 40th birthday of Jill Zelaya, a physician assistant at St. Luke’s Clinic. The women—buddies since their college days at Boise State University—donned pie pans with the 40-oz. version of Olde English Beer as bottle tops and tied brown paper bags around their waste to complete the look of a beer bottle.
The Cellar Pub and the new TNT Taproom created courses that ran down the stairs. And Prekeges turned Grumpy’s into the COVID Cabana with plexiglass covered with signs like “No Mask No Drink” creating challenges for the golfers on the green.
“The Cellar Pub was cool, and TNT Taproom was fun—we liked them all,” said Meredith Ganz.