Sun Valley
"The mountains here have a Hollywood past and a wilderness heart, and neither has quite let go."
Sun Valley wasn’t on our route until a man at a gas station in Twin Falls told us we’d be fools to skip it, and he was right. We drove up the Wood River valley in the late afternoon, the road climbing gently between hayfields and cottonwoods, the peaks of the Sawtooths and the Pioneers standing clear and sharp on either side. There’s a particular quality to the light here — thin, high-altitude, almost silvery — that photographers and film stars both chased for a reason. By the time we reached the old lodge, its stone walls glowing in the last sun, I understood the gas-station man completely. Some valleys just feel blessed with weather and light, and this is one of them.
The Lodge and the Ghosts of Old Hollywood
The Sun Valley Lodge opened in 1936, invented more or less from nothing by a railroad baron who wanted an American answer to the Alps, and it worked. The walls of the corridors are hung with black-and-white photographs of everyone who came: Gary Cooper, Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, all skiing and laughing and posing in improbable sweaters. Ernest Hemingway finished writing For Whom the Bell Tolls in a room upstairs. We wandered the halls reading the photos like a history book, then had a drink on the terrace as the alpenglow lit up Bald Mountain across the valley. It’s a strange, lovely feeling, standing where all that glamour once stood, with the same mountain going pink behind it.
Bald Mountain in Summer
“Baldy,” as everyone calls it, is the reason skiers worship this place — a mountain of long, consistent, beautifully pitched runs. But we came in summer, and rode the chairlift up through slopes that had traded snow for wildflowers, whole hillsides of lupine and arrowleaf balsamroot rolling away in blue and yellow. At the top the air was cold and the view ran on forever, range behind range, the valley floor a green ribbon far below. We hiked a stretch of ridgeline trail, Lia stopping every few minutes to photograph another cluster of blooms, and ate our sandwiches on a rock with our legs hanging over half of Idaho.
Hemingway’s Ground
Hemingway loved this country and it eventually held him — he’s buried up the road in Ketchum, and there’s a quiet memorial to him along Trail Creek, a simple bust on a stone pedestal in a grove where the water runs cold and clear. We walked out to it one morning and found it empty, just the creek and the cottonwoods and his own words carved into the stone, written for a friend: Best of all he loved the fall… the leaves yellow on the cottonwoods. It’s an unshowy place, easy to miss, and better for it. Lia and I stood there a while listening to the creek, thinking about a man who came to these mountains for the light and the hunting and never really wanted to leave.
Getting There
Sun Valley sits in central Idaho’s Wood River valley, adjoining the town of Ketchum. The Friedman Memorial Airport in Hailey is only about 15 miles south with seasonal flights, though many visitors fly into Boise and make the scenic two-and-a-half-hour drive northeast. A car is useful for exploring the wider Sawtooth country, but the Sun Valley–Ketchum area itself is compact and served by a free local bus. Winter is the classic season for skiers; summer, with its wildflowers, hiking and long clear days, is the quieter secret and my own preference.