Sun Valley, A Resort in the Sagebrush

In nineteen thirty-five, a Union Pacific Railroad vice president named W. Averell Harriman sent an Austrian count named Felix Schaffgotsch on a mission across the American West. The railroad was hemorrhaging passengers to automobiles and wanted an amenity that would fill winter trains. Schaffgotsch rode through Utah, California, Nevada, and Oregon and reported back that none of them had quite the right combination of terrain, sunshine, and reliable snow. He had one more stop to make.

He arrived in the Wood River Valley of south-central Idaho in January of nineteen thirty-six. The basin sat at roughly six thousand feet, ringed by mountains that caught Pacific storms and dried them to a light powder. The town of Ketchum was a quiet mining and ranching backwater. Schaffgotsch sent Harriman a telegram. The place, he wrote, contained more delightful features than any other location he had seen.

Harriman bought the land and brought in ski experts to help lay out the resort. They opened Sun Valley in December of nineteen thirty-six with what may have been the world's first chairlift, a device invented by Union Pacific engineers who adapted the mechanism used to load banana boats. Celebrities and athletes arrived by train within the first season. Ernest Hemingway came to hunt and fish in the autumn of nineteen thirty-nine and ended up living in Ketchum intermittently for the rest of his life. He died there in nineteen sixty-one.

Sun Valley never became a mass-market resort. It remained expensive, deliberately exclusive, a place where billionaires replaced the movie stars of the thirties and forties. Idaho acquired, through Harriman's railroad scheme, a town unlike any other in the state: international in flavor, politically moderate for its surroundings, and built entirely on the proposition that a sagebrush basin in the middle of nowhere could be made desirable by the simple addition of a mountain, a lift, and a very good press agent.