Sun Valley: Bald Mountain, Dollar Mountain, and the Village That Harriman Built
Near Sun Valley, Idaho
Sun Valley is one of the smallest incorporated cities in Idaho and one of the most recognized names in American skiing. The village itself is compact, under two thousand permanent residents clustered around a historic lodge, a year-round ice-skating rink, and a cluster of shops and restaurants that make no pretense of being anything other than a resort. What gives it its outsized reputation is the pair of mountains that bracket it and the story of how they came to be a destination at all.
The two mountains tell different stories. Dollar Mountain is the gentle one, a rounded hill with easy slopes suited to beginners and families, where the resort installed the world's first chairlifts when it opened in December of nineteen thirty-six. Bald Mountain, which locals call Baldy, is the other kind entirely.
It rises more than three thousand feet above the valley floor and demands genuine skill from anyone who descends its steeper runs. The vertical rise, the wide-open bowls, and the reliable snow have made Baldy one of the most respected ski mountains in the American West. The community around the resort developed differently from other mountain towns.
Sun Valley was not a mining camp that became a ski resort. It was planned from the start. Averell Harriman, chairman of the Union Pacific Railroad, conceived of it as a destination built to attract wealthy passengers to his trains, and he hired professionals to build and publicize it before a single skier had touched the snow.
The resort opened in December of nineteen thirty-six, nine months after construction began. For decades the Union Pacific operated it as a showplace. The railroad sold the property in nineteen sixty-four after passenger train service to the valley had ended.
Subsequent owners expanded and improved the mountain without fundamentally changing what Harriman had built. The original Sun Valley Lodge still stands, its rooms numbered as they were in nineteen thirty-six, a recognizable anchor of a place that has been reinventing itself for nearly ninety years while remaining, at its center, the same basic vision: a mountain resort built for people who came to play hard in the snow.
