Sun, Snow & Literary History At The Legendary Sun Valley Ski Resort
This luxury ski resort is steeped in rich history and Hemingway lore.
With Sun Valley Resort hosting the Audi FIS Ski World Cup Finals this spring, it’s a hot time to book a trip to America’s first original luxury ski resort. Cradled by mountains and spoiled with views, it’s the closest thing to the Swiss Alps on this side of the Atlantic. The adjacent town of Ketchum is a sporting village that’ll have you re-thinking your retirement plans, especially if you’re a Hemingway fan. Locals joke that they’re citizens of their own tiny nation here: “What’s the best part about Ketchum?” asked the owner of the Silver Creek fly shop in downtown Ketchum. “Drive ten miles in any direction and you can be in Idaho.”
Fondue & Rosé At Roundhouse
The fondue pot steamed, the bottle of French Rosé sweated on ice, and the fragrance of truffle fries filled our noses. Our view was a wall of windows onto the surrounding ski slopes and mountains beyond. On our other side, the dining room wrapped around a massive stone wood-burning fireplace, with ancient timber rafters and antler chandeliers overhead. Across from me and my wife at the table sat our ski instructor, Art Galloway, a warm-hearted veteran guide who got the Sun Valley bug over a decade ago and moved here from Washington State. Sitting there sipping wine in the circa-1939 mountaintop lodge, dipping baguette chunks into melty cheese, it hit me that I was having a Sun Valley moment. Something that could only happen here.
Ski resorts, even the fancy ones, can bleed together after a while. But there is only one lunch at the Roundhouse. It’s an experience you can’t get anywhere else. Sun Valley may have gotten its start emulating the Alps, but it’s truly its own species now. Roundhouse has a singular character, but the lodges all over the mountain are insanely nice. The bathrooms—always a balloon-popping moment at any ski resort—are like the bathrooms in the lobbies of five-star hotels. Because it’s not within a day’s drive of a major city, the crowd on the mountain consists of annual visitors and season-pass-holding locals. People know each other by name here, it is truly all-ages, and there isn’t that commuter mountain feeling of transience. To come here is to feel like you’re joining a community, not just dipping into a scene.
They say a green here is like a blue everywhere else, and I’m competent enough on skis to confirm that it’s a challenging mountain. The new Seattle Ridge Chairlift just opened a few months ago and opens up more intermediate terrain. If you’re a speed demon, there’s plenty of vertical here, and Sun Valley’s smaller Dollar Mountain is where you can take your kids to learn to ski.
Searching For Hemingway
Snow was falling on the Ketchum Cemetery, muting our footsteps and giving our mission a sense of something holy. I was there to find Ernest Hemingway’s final resting place, but all the stones were flat and covered with snow. Finding his headstone, I realized, could take hours. So, I appealed to my intuition. I had once seen a picture of his and Mary Welsh Hemingway’s gravesites, so I knew they were near trees. I gave up on the idea of a trial-and-error search and just walked over to where I felt the stones would be, wiped away the snow and there was his name.
I was visiting Hemingway’s house in Key West when I met my wife. On our honeymoon, we paid a visit to his apartment in the Latin Quarter of Paris. Nine years and two kids later, visiting the place that he lived, worked, and died, felt like another stich in a thread that has woven through our marriage.
Walking through the streets of Ketchum, it’s easy to feel why it stuck in Hemingway’s mind. He first visited in 1939, and he returned to live here 20 years later when Castro took over Cuba and he needed a new home base. Ketchum is a town I would visit even if I didn’t ski. For that matter, I would even stay at the Sun Valley Lodge without skiing. America’s ski towns have been homogenized by money, and while Ketchum is not immune to that by any means, it still has a spirit that is uniquely its own: fly shops, art galleries, frontier watering holes like The Pioneer Saloon and the Sawtooth Club, and newer spots like the Warfield Distillery and Brewery, where we spent an afternoon tasting, or Italian wine bar Enoteca, where we strolled in sans reservation for our first night’s dinner.
The Railroad Baron & The Austrian Count
The history of Sun Valley is worth a digression, if not a movie script. Back in the early 1930s, the Great Depression had hit the railroads hard, because people weren’t buying train tickets like they used to. The chairman of the Union Pacific Railroad, W. Averell Harriman, had an idea to get wealthy passengers to buy more train tickets—give them something remote and exclusive that only a train could take them too. A luxury ski resort that could rival the world-famous resorts in the Swiss Alps, but which didn’t exist in America at that time.
Enter Count Felix von Schaffgotsch, a young banker with Austrian royal blood who met Harriman and his brother while working at the New York bank they owned in the early thirties. The Count regaled them with tales of the grand ski resorts of Austria and Switzerland. A few years later, Harriman hired The Count to go on a tour of the American West in search of a site for a ski resort that would be “St. Moritz in America.”
The Count had to find a place that was close to Union Pacific tracks, but also far enough from a city that it wouldn’t be overrun by commuters in cars. It had to be a valley with lots of sun, but also plenty of snow—though not too much. And not just any snow, but nice, dry powder.
Everywhere The Count went was a disappointment. The Pacific Northwest was too wet, Park City was too close to a major city, and Jackson Hole was too far from the tracks. The Count had nearly given up when Ketchum was suggested off-hand. At the time, Ketchum was an all-but-abandoned former lead and silver mining boom town. Originally named Leadville, it was later named after a local trapper with the fitting surname of Ketchum. And what Ketchum caught in 1936 was an Austrian Count who showed up on a bus with his strange skinny European skis, asking for a cab in a town that didn’t even have one. When he saw a nearby valley that was then a ranch, he declared the end of his search. Eleven months after his visit, the Sun Valley Lodge opened its doors in December of 1936. Not only was it the first destination ski resort in the country, but it had the world’s first chairlift, which was invented by a Union Pacific engineer. Modern chairlifts still use elements of his original design to this day.
The Count stocked the resort with ski instructors imported from Austria. Hollywood celebrities were taken in by The Count’s regal bonafides as he shifted into a celebrity ambassador role, and it was amidst this wave of Hollywood who’s who in the ’30s that Hemingway first came to Sun Valley.
Hemingway came to the Sun Valley Lodge in 1939 with Martha Gellhorn, and while there’s a Hemingway Suite in his honor, it was a different accommodation, room 206, where he and Martha Gellhorn stayed, and where he’s said to have worked on For Whom the Bell Tolls. In the lodge today, you can still feel the history. Black and white photographs line the hallways like friendly ghosts. Rooms are luxurious and cozy with views from every window.
The Rail Baron and The Count had built something special together, but their native countries were on a collision course that would put them on opposite sides of World War II. When Britain and France went to war with Germany 1939, The Count was in Europe. Harriman, who was going into politics in a big way, cordially disinvited The Count from returning to Sun Valley the next season in a stinging telegram. The two men would never speak again. The count became a Wehrmacht cavalry officer and was killed on the Russian front in 1942. At the exact same time, Harriman, now the US Ambassador to Britain, was in Moscow alongside Winston Churchill at a meeting with Joseph Stalin. Back in Sun Valley, the FBI arrested three of the Austrian ski school instructors and the lodge was converted into a Naval Convalescent hospital for the next four years until returning to civilian duty as a ski resort after the war.
For history buffs, the Community Library in Ketchum has a large Hemingway collection, and it’s a modern building with a fireplace and giant windows onto the mountains surrounding the town. Building regulations have prevented development on the mountains that surround Ketchum, so instead of staring up at houses, everyone gets a stunning mountain view—a nice legacy of wise decisions in the past. I went into the library’s basement and got a rare chance to look at some of Hemingway’s letters, one of his knives, and some of his leather hunting satchels. Nearby is the Wood River Museum of History and Culture, where you can walk through a timeline of Ketchum and Sun Valley history, including Hemingway’s foot locker and typewriter.
Wining & Dining
A quick glance at the wine and cheese sections of the local grocery stores tells you the local palate is on point. In Sun Valley Village, breakfast at the Austrian-inspired Konditorei before a quick ride to the base of the Mount Baldy became a daily ritual. At the fine-dining restaurant The Ram, we cooked local Wagyu steak on a hot stone at the table, spread caviar on toast points, and cut into a Kurobuta Schnitzel in a nod to the Old World. Back at the lodge, the wood-paneled lobby bar, the Duchin Lounge, was always popping off at night with an après-ski crowd. For us, the in-room fireplace always lured us to our lodging early.
Fly Fishing In The Snow
There’s more to do than ski in Sun Valley. I took a morning off the slopes to go fly fishing on the Big Wood River with Silver Creek Outfitters. I had a cool guide named Jake who took me to a driveway of someone’s luxury log cabin whom he had an arrangement with, where we parked his Land Cruiser, put on our waders and tied on our flies. It was a strange feeling wearing waders in the snow, but fishing for trout on a stretch of private water surrounded by snow was a bucket-list afternoon.
Hemingway’s Last Supper
On our last night, after dinner at a jarringly good Asian street food restaurant called Rickshaw, we strolled through Ketchum with a vague idea of stopping for a drink at Michel’s Christiania, the A-Frame restaurant where Hemingway ate his last meal. We walked in and there were two open barstools at the tiny bar tucked into a corner. The other patrons had the barstool gravity of regulars, and the bartender was an old hand who gave gratis half-drink refills—a barman from the era when they were meant to be social creatures and not tincture tinkerers. We chatted with two 60-something ski school instructors who treated the bar like their private clubhouse. To them, the old Sun Valley is fading away. But to our eyes, the spirit is still strong here. Against all odds, it’s still its own place in a time when that’s a hard thing to be. It’s been nine months since I visited, and I can’t get Sun Valley out of my head. Even if takes an extra flight to get there, I can’t wait to go back.
Ninety years ago, the remoteness of Sun Valley was a ploy to sell train tickets. What they didn’t know was that when the trains were long gone, that isolation would serve the far more lasting purpose of protecting the individuality of the place from the onslaught of time. For Sun Valley, the remoteness isn’t the problem. It’s the secret.
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