At Long Last, I Have Made My First Acquaintance with the State of Idaho (and Greatly Enjoyed the Experience)

As a young boy living in Jefferson City, Missouri, my contact with the outside world was often the photo essays in Life magazine, to which my family subscribed. And one week, Life did its cover story on Sun Valley, Idaho, which was then the nation's first real ski resort, with newly-invented mechanical lifts. I was fascinated by the resort's glamour and spirit of high adventure, and by the Hollywood movie stars -- Gary Cooper and Claudette Colbert, Norma Shearer and Clark Gable -- who were its heavily-publicized guests. As a pre-teenager, I recall thinking how neat it would be to ski or even see Sun Valley.
For a reason I can't understand, it was not until last week that I was myself able to visit the famed Sun Valley -- or Idaho itself. My daughter Pauline and I were invited to deliver a speech on travel at the Community Library of Ketchum, the picturesque little town of 3,000 residents located only a mile from the Sun Valley resort. Ketchum's Library had been named the winner of last year's nationwide library contest for the best display of Frommer's Travel Guides, and we flew there (no small task, requiring transfer to a small propeller plane in Salt Lake City) to commemorate that feat. It was a fine introduction to another of America's most stellar sights, a heady immersion into the Far West.
Idaho is an enormous and sparsely populated place stretching for nearly 500 miles from south to north. Four fifths of the state is rugged hills and mountains, nearly all of them untouched and undeveloped, with more pure wilderness than in any state other than Alaska.
Vast areas are covered by national forests, of all things, not national parks, as you'd expect, including designated wilderness areas from which mechanical vehicles, including even bicycles, are prohibited. Around Sun Valley are only a handful of highways, very little signage, no billboards; and rumor has it that the category of "forests" rather than "parks" was chosen to permit members of Congress to go hunting there.
Whatever the reason, you are constantly surrounded by pure nature in awesome mountains and valleys to a greater extent than anywhere else you have ever been. And you experience such nature primarily by hiking to elevations where you enjoy spectacular views, but you can also go river rafting, hunting, fishing, and mountain biking (where it's permitted). Pauline, who had flown to Sun Valley a day before I went there, joined a tour guide for a hike into the Sawtooth Mountain area just north of Ketchum, and was regaled by his accounts of joining multiple search-and-rescue teams to aid various impetuous types who had hiked off-trail. In an entire day of hiking, she saw only two other people.
Ketchum is an affluent and picturesque town whose main street is intermittently lined by authentic cowboy-type buildings of the late 1800s, wonderfully preserved. It has, in addition to two impressive bookstores, a great many fashionable shops and art galleries, and several fine restaurants. Many of its residents are out-of-staters owning second or third homes in Ketchum, who come there to enjoy the air (it's like perfume), the fishing and hiking, the winter skiing (both cross-country and downhill), and the giant, well-endowed library at which we spoke. It was typical of Ketchum that champagne and hors d'oeuvres were served after our talk.
Ernest Hemingway lived here at several times of his life, and wrote a portion of For Whom the Bell Tolls in Ketchum in 1940. He also spent the last year of his life as a resident of Ketchum, committed suicide by shooting himself, and is buried in the town cemetery. Pauline and I paid a pilgrimage to his grave, which is covered with tiny bottles of gin and vodka that admirers have placed on the horizontal gravestone as a symbolic tribute to this heavy drinker.
I can't resist pointing out that in the fascinating local history room of the Community Library is a copy of a dossier compiled by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, which had maintained surveillance of Hemingway as a potential subversive (probably because of his support of the loyalists during the Spanish Civil War). Astonishingly for a sheaf of documents fifty years old, some of its references are still redacted. Ask to see it on your own visit to Ketchum.
Another part of the history room is devoted to the creation of the Sun Valley Resort by Averell Harriman, then the main owner and chairman of the Union Pacific Railway. It was he who, after viewing the ski resorts of Austria and Switzerland, determined in the mid-1930s to create a similar attraction in the United States (partly as a means of getting winter visitors onto his railroad passing near Ketchum). He hired a heavy-skiing Austrian count to survey all the Rocky Mountain states to find an appropriate location for an elegant, large, winter resort, and it was through his efforts that Sun Valley was born.
In tomorrow's blog: my own visit to the Sun Valley Resort. (Please be assured that as a facility designed for the 1% and not the 99%, and thus far above my station in life, Sun Valley is not where I stayed; I resided happily instead in a Best Western in Ketchum. But visiting Sun Valley, Idaho, was a fun experience, about which I'll be writing tomorrow).