There is That Place at every ski area, usually at the
tippy-top, where they have some specialty that you can’t get anywhere else on
the mountain. (That bean dish in
Telluride, bread pudding at Cannon, and so on).
Here at Sun Valley it is tacos at the Lookout.
The Lookout Restaurant (and Scenic Missile Silo as Peter
likes to call it) at the top of Baldy, where several lifts converge, is where
the old-school hang out, those who don’t need spinach salads with salmon or
duck confit sandwiches for lunch. You
can have tacos or taco salad or maybe some soup, and a cookie, but that is
pretty much it. It is a weirdly
cave-like building with fixed tables and odd-height seats but like most
establishments around Ketchum, its principal decorating theme seems to be
Vintage Sun Valley so you can admire those posters all day long.
At the Lookout, you don’t see so many families with Dad
decked out in the latest technical gear and Mom looking like she does a lot of
yoga in the off-season, but you do see a lot of grandparents in sensible parkas
stopping for a coffee. And lots of ski
patrollers, always a good sign.
This whole place skews older. The ski school instructors are actual
grown-ups, some older than us!, who clearly live here permanently. And while there are bars and theaters and
performance venues, this just doesn’t seem like a place that the String Cheese
Incident would add to their next tour.
We ride up with a fellow from San Francisco who comes here
regularly, partly because his mother has a house here (isn’t that always the
way) and partly because it is good skiing and partly because his daughter is a
competitive figure skater and this is the place to be in the summer if you are
a competitive figure skater. All the top
skaters come here at some point.
In search of laundry detergent and quarters (you have to pay
for the laundry at Horizons 4, which we think is pretty cheap! [1])
Bill and I checked out the original Sun Valley Lodge, the place that put this
otherwise tiny town of sheep ranchers on the map. It is actually about a mile or so outside of
town, in a treeless landscape of mountains, close to the smaller Dollar
Mountain. It is pretty swish, just went
through a major upgrade that spiffed up rooms and added a spa, and based on the
number of happily chattering families it looks to be successful. Back in the day, before World War Two, the
Lodge attracted Hollywood stars and Eastern socialites, and there were many
more skating rinks and people had affairs with their handsome Austrian ski
instructors and famous bands came and played and it was tout la rage. Indeed, there is a hallway lined with black-and-white
photos of the past famous and it is fun to check them out. You can also rent condos there but I think
that nowadays the really famous people have houses discreetly tucked away
around the Valley.
The Big Revelation Department: I have to figure out this mountain by myself
(OK, maybe with some help from Bill and Peter).
I can’t recall really skiing anywhere either without my father, or at
least with his ski wisdom for that area which consisted of advice like where to
park so you had to walk the shortest distance, where to put your boots on,
where the sun is in the morning, where the special tasty treat is, where to eat
lunch, and what the latest thing they were teaching at the ski school is. I never realized how much I relied on that on
other ski adventures. Well, I am almost
50, I guess it is time to grow up.
Dinner tonight at the Sawtooth Club, which while it looks
new has apparently been around for long enough for Ernest Hemingway to drink
there. No less than Hunter S. Thompson
wrote:
… and in the end he came back to
Ketchum, never ceasing to wonder why he hadn’t been killed years earlier in the
midst of violent action on some other part of the globe. Here, at least he had
mountains and a good river below his house; he could live among rugged, non
political people and visit, when he chose to, with a few of his famous friends
who still came up to Sun Valley. He could sit in The Sawtooth Club and
talk with men who felt the same way he did about life, even if they were not so
articulate. In this congenial atmosphere he felt he could get away from the
pressures of a world gone mad and ‘write truly’ about life as he had in the
past.[2]
We just talked with each other, and not so much about life
as about variations on the car service Uber (Tuber, delivers your French fries;
Moober delivers your ice cream or your cows; Poohber delivers your honey;
Zoober, invented by my colleague Brett, which lets you ride around with
pets). I’m not sure what Papa would have
made of that but we thought it was pretty funny.
[1] Our condo is in a complex called Horizons 4. We don’t know where Horizons 1, 2, or 3 are,
nor does the off-duty guest services ambassador with whom I ski one
afternoon. Maybe they were torn down to
make way for 4, says he. Other than the
chintzy laundry situation, it is pretty comfortable.
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