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Blaine County Recreation District invites the community to join in the free 2023 Wood River Trail Challenge, which runs from January 27 through February 28
To complete the challenge, participants must ski, walk, snowshoe, or snowbike the entire 32 kilometers of the Wood River Trail, from Hulen Meadows in Ketchum to Gannett Road in Bellevue.
Participants may tackle the challenge all at once or break the trail up into sections and complete them between January 27 – February 28. Finishers will need to complete and mail a form to receive a prize from the BCRD.

The Wood River Trail is a 32-kilometer multi-use, year-round path that provides a non-motorized connection between the Wood River Valley communities of Bellevue, Hailey, Ketchum, and Sun Valley. BCRD grooms the Wood River Trail in the winter and provides this resource free for all users. MAP HERE

“I like to think of the winter season as a time for the land itself to rest. Zero human activity, the silence of falling snow in one of the most remote places on earth is enchanting and reflective.” -Tuck Fauntleroy

Fauntleroy’s focus for his Burn series are wildfire affected regions in Yellowstone National Park and Grand Teton National Park. They represent a mixed perspective with some images shot aerially and others shot from the ground. Like much if his other work, the aerial images were captured flying over the territory via small single engine airplanes from an open window for an unobstructed lens.

Burn is timely and relevant in the current environment of climate change and the proliferation of recent fires across the western US and globally. The massive 1988 Yellowstone fires were a wake-up-call and significant warning of destruction and foreshadowing of the cost of climate events. Warming, drought, and the resulting fires have never been more dangerous.

The photographs are careful compositions of positive and negative space while capturing the elegant lines and shapes created by a natural landscape scared by flame. Critical to the series is the the idea of taking something more commonly perceived as unsightly, destructive, negative and making it beautiful, elegant and engaging.

“My work is very emotional by nature. I rely on colors to set the atmosphere and play off of each other like our emotions do inside of us.” -Thai Mainhard

Brazilian born painter Thai Mainhard’s practice harnesses her own raw and immediate need to create. Each abstract painting combines expressive mark making with dense blocks of color exploring the opposing forces that make up our lives. Mainhard encounters human nature, exploring happiness, frustration, surprise, connection, spirituality, and overall thinking processing. Each of her works is emotional; it is a lush expression of her inner jungle. Going through a deep internal process, the artist creates artwork that represents human nature’s fragility and opposes it to the robustness of emotions and feelings.

The Color of Sound explores the relationship between art and synesthetic experience. It features artwork by artists who are synesthetes – who experience synesthesia, the phenomenon by which certain people experience one sense through another – as well as work by artists who, though not synesthetes, seek to create synesthetic experiences for viewers. Synesthesia can take a wide variety of forms (perceiving letters or numbers as colors, for example, or associating a word with a scent or taste), but perception of sound as color or as shape has been particularly powerful for artists who have sought to convey synesthetic experiences. The artwork in the exhibition ranges from paintings, drawings and sculptures inspired by the synesthetic experience of music to film projections and an immersive installation.