SUMMER IN Sun Valley

If Count Felix Schaffgotsch of Austria accomplished anything admirable in his life before or after 1936, my research has revealed no sign of it.

But when you stand atop Bald Mountain and survey the slopes below, the intimate grid of downtown Ketchum and the Sawtooth Mountains all around, you have to admit that 1936 was a good year for the count.

It was then that young Schaffgotsch, a sometime ski instructor hired by Union Pacific Railroad Chairman W. Averell Harriman, found this patch of high, dry, scarcely peopled central Idaho.

This, the count declared, having already spurned Jackson Hole, Aspen and Salt Lake City, was the place. This would be the best spot for America’s first European-style ski resort--and a train-adjacent one, of course. And so Harriman bought a roughly 4,000-acre ranch, bankrolled the invention of the modern chairlift and built and opened this continent’s first destination ski resort--all before 1936 was over. He also persuaded Ernest Hemingway, Gary Cooper and various other celebrities to set the tone for the place by visiting in the resort’s earliest years.

Sixty-four years later, the train doesn’t run here anymore, and the resort has changed hands twice. But it still draws the rich and famous, and these days summer brings more visitors than winter. Earlier this month I joined them, and I liked it more than I expected.

I had been attracted by the valley’s scenery and history, but I was afraid of stodginess and that feeling of being forgotten you sometimes get from a resort in the wrong season. It didn’t help when one Ketchum resident told me the locals’ nickname for the Sun Valley Lodge’s Duchin Room piano bar--”the Wrinkle Room”--and I heard that 65% of the lodge’s summer business consists of corporate retreats and the like.

The ride up 9,150-foot Bald Mountain from the River Run chairlift was enough to halt those worries. As you rise, you see your options spread across the valley: the hikers, the bikers, the anglers in Big Wood River, the skaters (on ice and pavement), the boutique browsers of upscale downtown Ketchum (the valley’s commercial hub), and the prospective home buyers there, who face a median housing cost of about $700,000.

Although swollen by wealthy cabin-building part-timers from Washington and California, the year-round population in the Wood River Valley, including Ketchum, Sun Valley, the condo village of Elkhorn and the towns of Hailey and Bellevue (where many of Sun Valley’s service workers live), is estimated at 15,000.

The resort is owned by the R. Earl Holding family, which also controls Sinclair Oil Corp. and the Little America hotel chain. Harriman, who went on from his railroad post to serve the country as ambassador to the USSR, among other political posts, died in 1986.

Count Schaffgotsch, meanwhile, returned to Austria after his scouting mission and, according to Smithsonian magazine, went on to serve the Third Reich as a soldier, apparently perishing on the Russian front in World War II.

The famous among Sun Valley’s summer population these days include folks like Bruce Willis (who owns several properties in Hailey), Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jamie Lee Curtis and Michael Keaton. But when it comes to riches, they’re outgunned by the scores of top mediacrats and technology barons who have been convened here by investment banker Herbert Allen Jr. each July since 1982. (This year’s Allen-and-company gathering drew Microsoft boss Bill Gates, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos and Oprah Winfrey.)

The rich and famous have plenty of company. Since 1994, says Sun Valley Resort spokesman Jack Sibbach, July and August have consistently surpassed December, January and February as the resort’s busiest months, with occupancy running more than 85%. Since 1998 the resort has been running lifts in summer to carry mountain bikers and sightseers up Bald Mountain. (A snack bar and picnic tables wait on top.)

The resort is roomy, and so is the mountain. Resort statistics show that the ski lifts, which carry about 2,900 skiers a day in winter, carry about 300 people per day in summer, of whom fewer than 50 bring bikes.

I made sure to reserve rooms before arriving, and I saw quite a few “No Vacancy” signs during the weekend, especially in the area’s few old motels like the Ski View Lodge and the Ketchum Korral (both of which offer very rustic rooms and cabins in the $55-to-$90 range, and both of which are up for sale). But I never felt crowded--on the mountain, on town streets or in the shops.

Though it’s possible to fly into Hailey, 12 miles from Sun Valley, I took a slower, more scenic route: I flew into Boise, then steered a rental car through the wide open spaces surrounding Idaho’s highly scenic State Routes 21 and 75, a half-day drive with stops.

After rolling through Ketchum into Sun Valley next door, the first thing I did was check into the Sun Valley Lodge--a comfortable, spacious room for $154 a night.

The lodge, whose 1936 walls are concrete slabs stained and styled to resemble logs, is well appointed. Its 148 rooms are surrounded by all sorts of amenities, from golf course, tennis courts, fancy dining room and casual restaurants to glass-enclosed pools, skeet-shooting setup, bowling alley and opera house (which serves as a movie theater most of the time). The complex also includes six luxury cottages, the 113-room Sun Valley Inn (cheaper than the lodge) and about 600 condominiums, all built since 1965. Most are privately owned, but the lodge rents out more than 100 of them. For a visual trip into the place’s early history (and the shrewdness of its promoters), one need only turn any room’s TV to channel 55, where the 1941 film “Sun Valley Serenade,” featuring John Payne, Glenn Miller, Sonja Henie and plenty of idyllic black-and-white skiing footage, runs nonstop.

On my first morning in the valley, I drove over to the resort’s River Run ski lodge at the base of Bald Mountain, rented a bike, bought a lift ticket ($20 in summer, a fraction of the winter price) and spent several hours bouncing down the mountain on a conveyance called a K2 Disco Monkey.

It had shock absorbers front and back, a sturdy frame and disc brakes. If this sounds fancy, it certainly should; the rental rate was a jaw-dropping $40 a day. My Avis Oldsmobile, which also had shock absorbers and disc brakes, as well as an engine, was, in fact, a dollar cheaper. But it seemed unlikely that the staff would be willing to load the Oldsmobile onto the chairlift, so I sprang for the bike. (At bike shops in Ketchum and Hailey, I saw rates $5 to $8 less for similar two-wheelers.)

There are 28 miles of summer hiking and biking trails on the mountain. I hooked up with a group of locals, and we spent the next three hours covering nearly half of them, a descent that took us from 9,000 feet above sea level to 6,000 feet. We rambled most of the way on dusty, 3-foot-wide trails, sometimes crossing open slopes, more often threading between trees and braking for hairpin turns near the mountain’s base. At the bottom, after 12 miles, I was coated with dust, grinning like an idiot and bleeding only a little bit.

To celebrate our survival, we repaired to the upstairs deck of the Roosevelt Grille, which stands in the center of Ketchum at Sun Valley Road and Main Street. While we dispatched beers and appetizers, the sun slowly sank and the mountains melted into the dark sky. Thanks to Ketchum’s northern location, it doesn’t get fully dark in summer until about 10 p.m.

The morning after the ride, I was less sore than I expected. Which was good, because there was moving and rafting and hiking to be done.

First moving. To sample another lodging and save money, I relocated to the Povey Pensione, a three-guest bed-and-breakfast in Hailey (11 miles down the road from Ketchum) that had a spacious room with private bath, one step down the hall, for $90.

The room was comfortable and the breakfast conversation stimulating, but that 11-mile drive might be tiresome for visitors planning to dine or play each night in Ketchum. To anyone looking for a lodging in Ketchum proper, I’d suggest the River Street Inn, a recently renovated eight-room B&B; with a canoe on the lobby ceiling, a moose head over the fireplace and a hot tub just outside.

For rafting, look northwest (about 90 minutes from Sun Valley up Idaho Route 75) to the hamlet of Stanley and the stretch of the Salmon River just above it. Pressed for time, I took a $67.50 half-day excursion with the River Co. in Stanley--a pleasant, family-friendly float that covered about 12 miles of river in two hours. On the six-point scale that river runners use to grade severity of rapids, this stretch generates nothing more than a few 2s and 3s. (Given more time, I’d have preferred a full-day trip, which includes picnic lunch and costs $87.50 per adult.)

For hiking, a visitor in greater Ketchum finds nearly limitless options. The most striking are in the Sawtooth National Recreation Area, which covers a gorgeous chunk of land between Ketchum and Stanley. There are 40 peaks over 10,000 feet, 300 high mountain lakes and segments of the Salmon, Snake and Payette rivers.

On Sunday I headed that way and pulled off the road 24 miles outside Ketchum at Galena Lodge. In winter, the lodge is a haven for cross-country skiers. In summer, it’s a trail-head resource and lunch spot. On Sundays it serves a $12.50 buffet brunch. I worked up an appetite by heading up a creek-side trail for a few miles. Ahead of me, a young couple strolled in the company of three ecstatic golden retrievers: lots of stick-fetching and splashing in the creek.

With the sun overhead, I retraced my steps to the lodge and tucked into the buffet--good food, blue skies above, a singer-guitarist and bass player on the patio.

In between outdoorsy excursions, Ketchum and Sun Valley serve up plenty of amusements, from the Saturday night ice-skating shows on the rink behind Sun Valley Lodge to arty spots like the 6,000-square-foot Gail Severn Gallery in Ketchum.

At Severn’s gallery I admired a striking set of brightly painted, wall-mounted cubes by Delos Van Earl but was unable to bring them home as a souvenir. They had already sold for $30,000. A few blocks away at the American West Gallery, I liked the 6-foot-high “three-sheet” lithographed poster for “The Man From Death Valley” (1931), but it was priced at $3,200. So goes retail life among the well-heeled of the Wood River Valley.

A few blocks from Ketchum’s shopping streets lies the Ketchum Cemetery, where literary visitors make a pilgrimage. Here, under a pair of tall evergreens, lie Ernest Hemingway and his fourth and last wife, Mary Welsh Hemingway.

Hemingway is another part of Sun Valley’s summer identity. He didn’t like skiing, and when the resort invited him, he chose to come in September 1939. With him he brought a woman not his wife, journalist Martha Gellhorn, who later became his third wife and then his third ex-wife.

His relationship with Sun Valley lasted longer. The town became a retreat where the author fished and wrote. In the late 1950s, Ernest and Mary bought a home in Ketchum. It was there, in 1961, that the 61-year-old author committed suicide. When his widow died in 1986, she left the house to the Nature Conservancy, which occasionally opens it for special events.

“Best of all he loved the fall,” wrote Hemingway six decades ago in a eulogy for a friend from Sun Valley:

The leaves yellow on the cottonwoods

Leaves floating on the trout streams

And above the hills

The high blue windless skies

Now he will be a part of them forever.

That evocation of autumn resonated so deeply that friends and family used the same words on a Hemingway memorial overlooking Trail Creek, about 1 1/2 miles from the Sun Valley Resort.

But as anyone who has hiked past that memorial on a brilliant July afternoon can attest, summer’s not so bad either.

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GUIDEBOOK

Sunny Days in Sun Valley

Getting there: Connecting service from LAX to the airport serving Sun Valley in Hailey is available from Delta and Sky-West (via Salt Lake City) or Alaska Airlines and Horizon (via Boise or Seattle). Delta’s restricted round-trip fares begin at $208, Alaska’s at $218. Nonstop service from LAX to Boise on Alaska begins at $212. It’s a three-hour drive from Boise to Sun Valley on Interstate 84, U.S. Route 20 and State Route 75.

Getting around: The free Ketchum Area Rapid Transit (KART) system runs daily from 7:35 a.m. to midnight.

Where to stay: Summer rates at the sprawling Sun Valley Resort begin at $154 for the lodge and $124 for the inn; condo units range from $139 to $419 nightly. (Rates drop 28% to 45% in fall--Oct. 20 to Dec. 16 this year--and spring.) Telephone (800) 786-8259 or (208) 622-4111, fax (208) 622-2030, Internet https://www.sunvalley.com.

In Hailey, the Povey Pensione is a renovated Victorian B&B; with three rooms on a quiet street; rates $75 to $90. 128 W. Bullion St., tel. (800) 370-4682, Internet https://www.virtualcities.com/ons/id/s/idsc601.htm.

In Ketchum, the River Street Inn has eight rooms and playful Western decor; rates run $125 to $175. 100 River St. West, tel. (888) 746-3611, fax (208) 726-2439, Internet https://www.theriverstreetinn.com.

Sun Valley’s Elkhorn Resort includes 132 hotel rooms and more than 80 condo units at rates from about $120 to $500. Tel. (800) 355-4676, fax (208) 622-3261, Internet https://www.elkhornresort.com.

Where to eat: In Ketchum, the Evergreen Bistro (River Street and First Avenue) offers elegant French/American dishes in a setting of Idaho stonework and old French ad posters, with a big shaded patio in back. My favorite meal was the barbecued Idaho red trout filet with corn chili, black beans and lime yogurt sauce; entrees $21 to $29; local tel. 726-3888. Also in Ketchum, Esta is a great spot for a healthy breakfast or lunch--chipotle tuna melts, green-chili-dusted scallops; entrees up to $13; 180 S. Main St., tel. 726-1668. Or for a cold drink and a warm bite after summer exertions, locals and tourists alike gather on the upstairs deck of the Roosevelt Grille, 280 N. Main St.; entrees $7.25 to $15.75; tel. 726-0051.

For more information: Sun Valley Central Reservations, tel. (800) 634-3347 or (208) 726-3423, fax (208) 726-4533, Internet https://www.visitsunvalley.com or https://www.visitketchum.com.