Finding New, Remembering Old in Sun Valley

They say you can’t go back and recapture those elusive memories of your youth, and I suppose, as a general premise, that is true, but not entirely.

I had worked here early in the 1950s, a college student and cowboy who spent summers guiding and teaching horseback riding to earn my tuition. The Union Pacific Railroad still owned this famous old resort where Papa Hemingway wrote and movie stars came to play.

This is one of a continuing series on Memorable Vacations that appears from time to time in the Travel section.

This winter, after having been away more than 30 years, I came back with my wife to ski, to seek out some of my old haunts and chase some of those memories.

The place has changed, of course, but even surrounded by acres of those condominiums that seem to grow wild in the once picturesque meadows, it is possible to see the old Sun Valley, the one that opened nearly 50 years ago.

Then it was the nation’s first destination ski resort, a glittering gathering place for the rich and the famous, tucked away in this remote valley between the Pioneer Range and the Sawtooth Mountains, northeast of Boise. Winter and summer, the famous people came here to play, stars such as Gary Cooper and Claudette Colbert skied, ice skated, rode horseback or hunted and fished in streams.

The Sun Valley Lodge and the Challenger Inn are still here, although the latter has had its name changed and the former has become just another hotel, a nice place to stay, but still a notch below what the Union Pacific’s W. Averell Harriman had in mind when he built it back in 1936.

Bustling Resort

Dollar Mountain is still Dollar Mountain, where beginning skiers can feel like experts, and the gold rush town of Ketchum, a mile down the road, has grown from a rustic village in the Wood River Valley to a bustling resort town, albeit one that is less hectic and more orderly than Mammoth Lakes or some of the other big-time ski resorts.

When I worked here Sun Valley’s dining rooms and cocktail lounges were classy places and Ketchum was a bumptious little Western burg, a sheep-ranching town with a dozen noisy saloons full of slot machines and grass widows waiting out their six-week divorces.

Flying into Hailey Airport recently and driving by taxi the 12 miles to Sun Valley, it soon became obvious that time has not stopped; subdivisions and condo projects are all up and down the Wood River Valley and as the taxi approached Ketchum’s outskirts you can see a traffic light and new buildings, a shopping center and motels.

Real estate offerings include an “estate quality” house in Riverwood for $725,000; “the only Wildflower Cottage” condo left on the market, at $625,000; or a four-bedroom, 4,000-square-foot house at the base of Dollar Mountain for only $630,000.

Some things never change, like Bald Mountain. Known simply as “Baldy” and standing 9,150 feet tall, it is still one of the best-kept, most skiable mountains around, for any class of skier. From the top you can look down into Ketchum and Sun Valley far below or see out across the majestic Sawtooth Mountains on the skyline.

Much has changed, and not all of it is a pleasant surprise to someone who comes looking for the old Sun Valley, the one that operated here before pencil pushers began looking at the profit and loss columns and decided that Harriman’s posh resort should begin to make money. That decision was made in the mid-1950s, when the resort’s staffing ratio was still three to one, three employees for every guest.

Hitting the Trail

Back then, when someone like radio personality Arthur Godfrey wanted to go horseback riding at dawn and have breakfast at Trail Creek Lodge, well, by golly, we rolled out early, saddled the horses and hit the trail. When Hemingway wanted to shoot skeet or grouse, or Clark Gable wanted to ski, all they had to do was say the word.

One summer a banker and his family from Salt Lake rented a suite in “the valley” for six weeks and he commuted on weekends. His children took daily riding lessons, learned to ice skate, play tennis and golf. At the end of their stay he came around, handing out $100 tips to the kids’ favorite instructors.

It was the first time I’d seen Ben Franklin’s portrait up close.

Harriman had built the place to attract rail passengers and “the valley” became a delightful three-day train ride from New York’s Grand Central Station. Important guests were met at the station by horse-drawn stages or sleighs, depending on the season. Others rode the bus.

The resort was staffed by famous Austrian ski teachers, European chefs and hotel staff. There were two outdoor heated swimming pools, an ice rink, dog teams for winter sleigh rides, horses for riding in the summer, a golf course, skeet range, and at the resort’s back door, a whole forest wilderness for those who wanted more room.

Back then there was a feeling of friendly camaraderie, a neighborliness among the few hundred guests and the employees who outnumbered them. In the winter the ski instructors were the Austrian gods of the hill; in the summer the cowboys were romantic images of the Old West, frequently called to pose for publicity pictures with stars such as Rhonda Fleming.

That was the Sun Valley that Harriman created in 1936. He was chairman of the railroad’s board of directors and wanted a destination resort to rival the best in the Alps. He chose the Ketchum area because it was on a Union Pacific spur line, tucked away in a sunny valley sheltered by high mountains.

Cover of Life

Named Sun Valley by Steve Hannagan, a high-powered public relations man, the new ski resort--complete with the first chairlift ever built--was on the cover of Life magazine in 1937. Inside was an eight-page layout showing some very rich folks such as the DuPont and Vanderbilt families.

When the railroad sold the resort in 1964, there were beds enough for maybe 500 guests and there were only half a dozen ski lifts. Now the “pillow count” in the Sun Valley-Elk Horn-Ketchum-Warm Springs area is up to nearly 13,000, there are acres of condos, two golf courses, two ice rinks and the ski lifts carry 8,000 to 9,000 skiers on a busy day.

Sun Valley, owned by Little America Hotels & Resorts, is an incorporated city, cheek-by-jowl against the city of Ketchum. And Elkhorn Village is a hotel-condominium complex all to its own.

I had asked our travel agent to book us a studio condominium unit rather than a room in the lodge and, quite by chance, we stayed in the Cottonwood Complex just across the road from the lodge. The wintry view from our tiny veranda was of an icy creek meandering through the woods and of Dollar Mountain just beyond.

But our lodgings were not a part of the Sun Valley-Little America holdings, as it turned out, because the booking had been made through a reservation system other than the one operated by the Sun Valley Co. As it turns out, there is a confusing array of ownerships, services and competing reservations systems.

Our accommodations cost $75 a night. A duplicate unit in the same building booked through the Sun Valley Co. went for $95 a night and the only difference we could tell was that while we made our own beds, the more expensive rate included maid service.

The first afternoon we strolled through Sun Valley village, now crowded with shops and fast-food restaurants, and that night planned dinner at the Ram in the Inn, a place I remembered fondly for its lively Bavarian atmosphere and good food. It was a disappointment. The food was not even average, the service was slow, the atmosphere dull.

Ketchum’s Byways

For the next five days we had delightfully sunny weather to ski Dollar and Baldy and, in the late afternoons, to wander through Ketchum’s byways. We discovered two fine restaurants, the Christiana and Evergreen, and, for the best cut of prime rib ever, try the Pioneer Saloon, a noisy, very enjoyable place.

One holdover from the Harriman days is the free shuttle bus system that moves skiers efficiently and rapidly between Dollar Mountain and the Warm Springs and River Run terminals on Baldy. But these shuttles do not serve Ketchum, as the town and the valley are at odds over tax dollars and competition for vacationing customers.

If you want a ride to the store, or to go into town for dinner, the Ketchum Area Rapid Transit system, called KART, provides half-hour service. It is also free, but its schedules and routing can be confusing and we spent a freezing half hour one evening standing at the wrong stop.

One day we took cross-country lessons from the Sun Valley Nordic Ski School on the valley’s snowy golf course, one of several Nordic centers in the area. And the Sun Valley Co. offers evening sleigh rides out to Trail Creek Lodge for dinner at a cost of $17 for two (plus the cost of the meal).

The “sleighs” however, are not graceful conveyances, but rather are heavy, lumbering sleds carrying 20 or 30 people each. Our moonlight ride in the brisk, sub-zero weather was absolutely wonderful and the food was adequate. But we later found out that for considerably less money we could have ridden a real sleigh and been served a gourmet dinner in a wilderness setting for less money by going to Sawtooth Sleighs. They operate out of the Big Wood Golf Course near Ketchum.

Helicopter Skiing

Like so much of what we saw, the old Sun Valley seems to have been upstaged by enterprising young operators down in the Ketchum area who offer such things as cross-country evening tours out to wood-stove-warmed tents where full-course dinners are served or trekking between Mongolian-style shelters called yurts. And there is helicopter skiing and rides in hot-air balloons.

Movie stars still come to Sun Valley and the bus drivers are quick to point out Clint Eastwood’s house, right up there on the hill among the mansions of the rich, but Sun Valley’s reputation and its ambiance have changed, radically.

The wealthy who own homes here like to call it a “family oriented” resort. To the 2,300 people living in Ketchum it is a place to work or own a business, a ski resort competing with Vail, Aspen and Mammoth for recreation dollars.

Tour operators, leasing Hawaiian Air DC-980s, package ski weeks through April, and Horizon Air offers daily flights into Hailey from Boise and Twin Falls. No longer do Sun Valley’s employees meet guests at the train and escort them through town and into the valley’s laid-back luxury.

Sun Valley is no longer the premier summer and winter resort. That place has faded into the past, its structures hidden amid the condos and the new-wave ski resort hustle and bustle, there to be seen only by the discerning eye, never to be experienced again, except in memories.