Happy Valentine’s Day!
Out come the treats from Burdick’s, carefully transported these
thousands of miles so we have some decent chocolate.
Und today, we ski!
There is a little bit of trepidation as we encounter a mountain about
which none of us know anything, save the many historical tid-bits that Bill can
now throw out with abandon, having read much of Wendolyn Spence Holland’s Sun Valley:
An Extraordinary History (1998, Idaho Press).[1] Izzy gets swallowed early into a small scrum
of kids and instructors in the requisite red jackets, for her Bald Mountain
Adventure ski school. Sun Valley
actually has two ski hills, across town from one another: Dollar and Bald mountains. The former is mostly gentle greens, and half-pipes. It is where you go if you are just learning
to ski. It is not where you go if you
are as experienced a skier as Izzy Laskin, who has, already in her short
lifetime, taken the Plunge among other challenging runs. If you are big enough and tough enough, you
ski Baldy (nobody calls it Bald Mountain) with the rest of us. That’s the last
we see of her until 3 p.m. when she appears with her delightfully cheerful
instructor Parker, grinning and sporting all kinds of resort pin bling. More on her later.
When the last place you’ve skied is Cannon Mountain, there
is really nowhere to go but up in terms of resort amenities. But coming next to Sun Valley is like going
through the looking glass. Here at the
River Run base lodge, all is mountain luxe – lots of stone and giant logs, with
just a bit of alpine overlay – the logo for Sun Valley is in a faux German
Gothic script and you do see the occasional edelweiss. There are sturdy little wagons at the
drop-off area, to help transport your gear the two hundred or so feet to the lodge. There are the requisite cheerful resort
ambassadors in their yellow coats, saying good morning and offering to help
with just about anything. There are free
wooden lockers in the base lodge, in which to store your bags. Fires – even some real wood ones – hum away
in the vast rooms, filled with giant heavy chairs and tables (no
seats-attached-to-the-cafeteria-tables that fold up here!). And the bathrooms, the bathrooms! It is like Allred’s, which will mean nothing
to most of you because it is a fancy club/restaurant in Telluride, but we
instantly make that connection. The
bathrooms are huge and private and marbled and quiet and warm and my god, I
could spend all day in there. I hear the
men’s rooms are similarly fab.
I was a little miffed when the instructor who took Izzy in
said, in response to my noting that she’d learned to ski at Telluride, “Well, I
grew up in Colorado and our greens are more like blues, and so on. We’re a little tougher on grading than they
are.” Well that’s a bit much, thought I. Until my screaming legs could barely make it
down blue Can-Can toward the end of the day, that is. You’d have a hard time grading those blues as
blacks, but they are definitely long and punishing. That may say more for the state of my legs
than the trail grading, but I’m sticking with the latter excuse.
As noted, Bill can fill you in on the history of this place,
but in the past 25 years the owners have poured a lot of money into upgrading
the on-mountain experience. Several of
the lodges – the fancy ones – are from the mid-90s, there are a lot of
high-speed lifts, and all that green and blue territory is surely designed to
lure the mid-range skier who might be scared off if it were all black. But we wonder how the Lookout Lodge, which
does not appear to have much of a lookout, came into being because it more
resembles a bunker than anything else.[2]
In fact, we think there are a lot of abandoned – OR ARE THEY
– missile silos around here. And
possibly alien-life observation stations or prisons like on Supergirl. The tops of the lifts here at Sun Valley all
include one or more mysterious-looking shut up buildings. We decide that these are where the aliens are
kept. And that Lookout may be derived
from an ancient Shoshone word for “missile silo.”
Lunch is at the similarly spiffy if very crowded Seattle
Ridge Day Lodge, where Bill and Peter eat baked potatoes larger than their
heads, filled with chili and cheese. No
puny Colorodan spud; this is Idaho! We
wonder why it is called Seattle Ridge, and decide that Seattle might be an
ancient Shoshone word that means Can’t-See-The-Washington-Territory-From-Here.
In the olden days (which is basically any time before my
children were born, according to them), you used to collect pins from ski
areas, and some people would wear them on their hats. Of course, Bill points out, since no one
wears a hat anymore, that is pretty much gone.
But pins remain a thing here at Sun Valley, and Izzy shows up at the end
of the day, displaying several:
1.
Dollar Mountain Ski School (from which she has
graduated, never having set foot there, by dint of being able to be in the
Baldy school).
2.
Bald Mountain Ski School
3.
Sun Valley 80th Anniversary
4.
Sun Valley Rescue Dogs.
Yes! She and her compadres
got to meet a Ski Patrol avalanche rescue dog named Jake. How fun is that?
Speaking of Ski Patrol, Peter notes that their slogan
is: Haulin’ the Fallin’ since 1936.
Among the other nice things about our cozy condo is the hot
tub, just steps from our door. Three of
us turn ourselves to jelly in it, after our ski day. Peter and Bill and I have elk in various
forms for dinner, but we selectively recoil in horror from a dessert menu that
has BOTH coconut cream pie and pineapple upside down cake on it. Izzy just sits there looking pained, fighting
desperately to stay awake.
Of course, we compare things here to Telluride, how could we
not? It takes even longer to get here,
so feels similarly destinational and a bit exotic. But the music at lifts here is nonexistent or
boring, no cool or obscure jams. On the
other hand, the lifties themselves are a much cleaner-cut bunch, and probably
smell a lot better. No dreadlocks here
(until the good snow day, that is, then more locals come out), and no people of
color (not that there were a lot at T-ride), just lots of prosperous-looking
mature white families from the West Coast, and a lot of excellently-skiing older
folk who have obviously retired here.
You could fly here direct in a couple of hours from places like Los
Angeles and Seattle, so that would make this a pretty sweet destination for
them. But where is the character in
that?
Speaking of character, I am sorry to report that Bill and
Peter lost points today for abandoning me early, and for not carrying their own
trail maps. They’ve got some catching up
to do. Izzy earned 10,000 points for
meeting an avi dog.
Ketchum feels sleepy although the restaurants are hopping at
night and we haven’t checked it out during actual daylight so maybe more folks
are out then. But you know, there is
something to be said for not being at quite so high an altitude, like no
headaches, no running out of breath, that sort of thing.
And while there is a crystal store, you do not smell
patchouli anywhere here. This is not a
bad thing, in my opinion.
[1] This enormous coffee table book is probably in every
condo around here. It is certainly in
every store. It is actually quite
interesting, and has lots of fun pictures, although from a technical
standpoint, it is not great history.
Turns out it started as the author’s senior thesis at Yale. Now that is an excellent example of choosing
a thesis topic that fits with your extracurricular interests. I attribute the scholarly laxity work of the
work to Yale, however.
[2] We learn later that the Lookout is part of the Bill
Janss era of ownership. Janss bought the
whole kit and caboodle in the mid-1960s, when Union Pacific was no longer
interested in owning a resort. He
focused on expanding access, and with his real estate background put a lot of
effort into creating condo developments.
They are not unattractive, but apparently the Lookout never turned into
the handsome structure he intended.
Loved the area, doubled the size of the ski mountain, updated
everything, but wasn’t a particularly savvy businessman, so say the locals.
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