11th Annual Astellas Summit For Life

11th Annual Astellas Summit For Life

The 11th Annual Astellas Summit for Life weekend was a huge success.

We started off the weekend with our Wine & Dine event at The Cooking School of Aspen. We had a beautiful dinner with wine pairings from Failla Wines. At the dinner, we had an intimate sit down with our Bounce Back Award Winners Donerik Black and Christopher Nalley. This was a candid conversation with the Award Winners to hear their stories and how organ donation gave them a second chance at life.

After the dinner, we hosted the first Battle of the Chefs with Barclay Dodge and Brian Nelson. The secret ingredients were announced the morning of the event in The Aspen Times. The three ingredients that each chef had to use were: Honey from Colorado Mountain Honey, Duck Confit and something from the gourd family (squash). We had eight judges who judged each dish. The Chefs dishes were judged on these categories: creativity, taste, and presentation. Barclay Dodge won by one point! After the votes were in (tallied multiple times) the entire audience was able to taste each dish.

Saturday night, racers prepared for their race up AJAX, with the start at the base of the Gondola plaza and the finish at the very top, they had a lot of vert to cover. Kathoola spikes were generously provided to our racers.

The race was a huge success! We had 320 racers and 34 teams. There were 79 racers from outside the Roaring Fork Valley, 17 from outside Colorado, 40 volunteers and 61 people touched by organ donation. Along with the racers there were 100 people who did the Ride For Life.