Go ahead — ask me whatever questions you want,” says Dave, zipping his jacket, clipping his helmet, adjusting his goggles, and settling in for the brisk quad chair commute up to the office in the snowy predawn dark. “I just can’t vouch for the answers before my coffee.”
Dave Schames is a veteran Sun Valley ski patroller, sporting the requisite Rocky Mountain mustache, crow’s feet, and wry smile. I’m one of two non-mustached (but smiling) guests enrolled in today’s Ski Patrol 101 session. And the “office” this morning is the patrol shack at the top of Bald Mountain — aka “Baldy” — Sun Valley Resort’s showpiece ski hill, hulking over the sleepy town of Ketchum, Idaho, in the melting moments before sunrise.
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The slopes are dark and pristine. Not a soul is on the mountain at this hour aside from the patrol crew, a perky trio of patroller dogs in red vests, and a lucky pair of tagalong 101ers gathered near the 9,150-foot rim of what is arguably the oldest destination ski resort in the country — currently draped in several inches of freshly fallen powder with zero tracks.
“So what led you to live in Sun Valley?” I ask my patrol host, realizing, the moment it’s out, that this may be the most self-evident, pre-caffeinated question in the history of alpine journalism given where we’re standing.
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Schames flips me the speechless look I deserve: Really? It’s not obvious enough right now?
He then sweeps a gloved hand across a cloudless panorama of idyllic Idaho, fringed with rugged white ranges everywhere — the Sawtooths, the Boulders, the Pioneers — as the morning’s first pixel of sunlight pokes above a distant peak. Like clockwork, a small crowd of patrollers has gathered outside the shack in the snow alongside us, watching dawn silently unfold from this perfect perch like it’s the very first time.
And there, without a word, is my answer.
What leads anyone to Sun Valley?
That may be obvious enough for generations of discerning outdoor recreationists drawn to one of the continent’s most time-honored all-season mountain resorts. But more than 80 years ago, it all began rather serendipitously in an isolated Idaho valley occupied by lonely ranches, a small mining town, and a Union Pacific Railroad outpost in Ketchum seeing few visitors, let alone unexpected ski resort speculators.
In 1935, as the story goes, Union Pacific’s new railroad chairman, William Averell Harriman, commissioned an Austrian business associate to find the perfect site for the first destination ski resort in the West. A place with the optimal balance of snow, sun, European Alps-rivaling beauty, and (of course) lucrative western rail access for America’s nascent ski-vacation industry.
A painstaking search through Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and California for just the right place proved long and fruitless. Then a random local tip led to a remarkable discovery in the back hills of south-central Idaho.
“I found just the place to put the lodge,” Harriman’s European location scout gushed from Ketchum, bewitched by a sun-dappled, snow-blanketed mountain Eden in the middle of nowhere. “This combines more delightful features than any place I have ever seen in Switzerland, Austria, or the U.S. for a winter resort.”
Cheap ranch land was purchased. Ground was broken. The world’s first chairlift was installed, implementing a basic design derived from (fun fact) banana transport machines in the Central American tropical fruit shipping industry. The name “Sun Valley” was aptly coined (for an area that gets about 300 annual days of sun) by the same New York City publicist behind the marketing of Miami Beach. Less than a year later, the iconic Sun Valley Lodge would open its doors; it would swiftly come to be associated with guest names like Gary Cooper, Claudette Colbert, Lucille Ball, Errol Flynn, and, most markedly, Ernest Hemingway — whose life and times in Sun Valley (a favorite escape and final residence for the writer) are immortalized by a large bronze monument near the resort grounds as well as his headstone in Ketchum Cemetery.
The American West’s first destination ski resort continues to evolve as a premier four-season playground for skiers and golfers, anglers and mountain bikers, artists and music lovers — all now define Sun Valley as diversely as Dollar Mountain’s 22-foot superpipe, Trail Creek’s 18-hole Robert Trent Jones Jr. golf course, and summertime’s free outdoor symphony series and popular writers’ conference. The A-list mystique of the place remains as intact as ever — with Olympians, world-class mountaineers, tech billionaires, and celebrities of all stripes happy to call Sun Valley home or second home.
Push the subject and any Ketchum local might casually mention recently standing behind Clint Eastwood at the grocery checkout (“He was in sweatpants”) or catching Bruce Springsteen belt out a few tunes at Grumpy’s, the local burger-and-beer joint (“He was just hanging out like a regular”). But the real star of the show here, most are quick to add, is the toned-down vibe of the place itself. On the slopes or the fairway, at the latest it bistro or hallowed saloon in Ketchum, and at the resort’s iconic namesake lodge, Sun Valley is resiliently laid-back. And still essentially out there.
“We’re not Aspen or Vail. We’re Idaho,” Schames sums up, ushering his pair of Ski Patrol 101 recruits back out onto the hill after a quick Styrofoam cup of joe and morning meeting with the whole crew in the patrol shack. “Sun Valley has always been its own thing. I mean, where else can you do something like this?”
True enough. Convening on the summit and running the slopes with ski patrollers at daybreak before the hill officially opens is a first for me. It’s not your typical offering at any big American ski resort. But out here in the fortuitous place that launched the whole ski-resort thing, atypical appears to still be the rule.
“We’re a resort town, but, at our core, we’re a community from all walks of life,” says another patroller on the team, clicking on her skis beside me. When I ask what she does here during the warmer months, I find I’m talking to an alfalfa farmer from the fertile valley sprawled below us. “Welcome to the family,” she hollers, gliding off to inspect the slopes before the day’s first skiers arrive. “Come back in the summer. It’s just as beautiful.”
Then it’s our turn to head out. Enough chitchat. Duty, and fresh snow, calls.
“OK, off to work,” Schames says, leading the way across a high ridge toward several empty upper-bowl runs still shaded from the barely risen sun.
The sky is cloudless. The air is comfortably cool and windless. The snow is feather-light and calf-deep. The work is, well ... here’s the thing: If you’re not actually logging long, tough, occasionally hazardous hours as a real ski patroller, but rather tagging along with one and sort of pretending for a couple of hours in these giddy conditions, work is a qualitative word. Combing through more than 2,000 acres and 3,400 vertical feet of untracked mountain on a Sun Valley powder day before everyone else arrives — I can safely report — resembles something more like play.
Officially, I’m supposed to be looking for possible trouble spots. Gates that need dropping. Signs that need fixing. Cornices that need pounding down after a good night of snow. Unofficially, I’m also busy savoring some of the most varied, untracked terrain I’ve ever skied in a single breathless early morning. From the deep steeps of Mayday Bowl to the long cruise of Christmas Ridge. From soft corduroyed groomers named after local Olympic medalists (Gretchen’s Gold, Kristin’s Silver) to a fun little bumpy run called Niagara (where local pranksters, I’m told, once altered the first letter of its sign with a capital V).
“Keep an eye out for practical jokes,” I’m warned. “They do turn up in these parts now and then.”
Threading between runs are portals into nameless glades that wind through some surprisingly woodsy patches for a mountain nicknamed “Baldy.” The moniker seems more fitting for nearby Dollar Mountain, one of the resort’s original ski hills — a solid ivory mound looming over neighboring Sun Valley Village that is now home to beginner runs and a big terrain park.
“When it starts snowing here, people catch powder fever really fast, and it can make our job especially interesting,” says Schames, who first encountered Sun Valley back in the 1970s, when lifts tickets were $12 and “there was a near-riot when they hiked them up to $16.” Sun Valley in the
Source: https://www.cowboysindians.com/2016/12/sun-valley-ski-patrol/