Shore Lodge, Ponderosa Pines, and McCall's Second Life
Near Mccall, Idaho
The transformation of McCall from logging town to resort did not happen through a single grand gesture but through a series of investments made by people who looked at the lake and the mountains and decided they were worth staying for. After the Second World War, a group of businessmen and physicians from Lewiston, about one hundred fifty miles to the north, concluded that McCall and Payette Lake were ideal for a resort of a particular kind: not the glamour and glitz of Sun Valley, but something more personal and locally rooted. Shore Lodge opened on July third, nineteen forty-eight, on Shellworth Beach along the lake's south shore, and it became the town's social anchor for the next five decades.
The lodge was operated as a private club for some years, reopened to the public in two thousand eight, and remains the most prominent lodging on the lake. Decades after Shore Lodge opened, the state acted to protect the landscape around it. In nineteen seventy-three, a peninsula jutting into the northern portion of Payette Lake was established as Ponderosa State Park, named for the old-growth ponderosa pines that still stand across its trails and slopes.
The park is two miles north of downtown and draws hikers, cyclists, cross-country skiers, and paddlers through every season. The two landmarks together, the lodge on the southern shore and the pine-covered peninsula to the north, gave McCall the shape it needed to become the mountain destination it is today.
