🇺🇸 United States · Rocky Mountains
Sun Valley is the first great destination ski resort in the United States, a pioneering complex opened in 1936 in the mountains of central Idaho, in the Wood River valley, next to the historic mining town of Ketchum. The modern chairlift was invented here, Hollywood stars spent their summers and winters here from the 1930s on, and here lived —and here is buried— the writer Ernest Hemingway, deeply in love with these landscapes.
The heart of the skiing is Bald Mountain ('Baldy'), a mountain much loved for its long, perfectly groomed runs and its continuous vertical drop, complemented by little Dollar Mountain, ideal for beginners. The resort as a whole combines the historic Sun Valley Lodge, the lively town of Ketchum and a setting of wild nature, the Sawtooth Mountains, which in summer turn it into a paradise for hiking, cycling and fly fishing.
This guide covers the essentials of Sun Valley with a practical eye: the ski area on Baldy and Dollar Mountain, the town of Ketchum, Hemingway's legacy, the summer activities in the Sawtooths, how to get to this corner of Idaho and where to stay and eat. It is a destination with history, charm and imposing nature, far from the crowds of other resorts.
Sun Valley was born in 1936 when Averell Harriman, president of the Union Pacific railroad, went looking for a place to create the first destination ski resort in the United States, in the style of the Alps, to fill his trains in winter. He chose the valley next to the old mining and ranching town of Ketchum, in Idaho, and there the world's first chairlift was invented. Hollywood glamour and the presence of Ernest Hemingway made the place famous, and it remains one of the most storied resorts in the country. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The state of potatoes and mountains: Nez Perce and Shoshone land, crossed by the pioneers of the Oregon Trail, of silver rushes, wild rivers, deep gorges and the historic ski resort of Sun Valley.
Read the history of Idaho →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
In the winter of 1935, an Austrian count was traveling the American West by train and by car on an unusual mission: to find the perfect mountain on which to invent, from nothing, the country's first great ski center. He was not only looking for snow; he wanted sun, a valley sheltered from the wind and a landscape worthy of the Alps. He ruled out Aspen, he ruled out Lake Tahoe, he ruled out Jackson Hole. And then, in a lost corner of central Idaho, next to a run-down mining town called Ketchum, he found it. A year later, Sun Valley would open in that valley, and with it destination skiing as we know it was born.
Behind that expedition was a cold, brilliant business vision. In the mid-1930s, Averell Harriman, president of the Union Pacific railroad, was looking for a way to increase passenger traffic in winter, when his trains ran half empty. Inspired by the alpine ski resorts of Europe, he came up with the idea of creating the first great destination ski complex in the United States, a luxury place to which high society would travel by train.
Harriman commissioned the Austrian count Felix Schaffgotsch to tour the American West in search of the ideal site: with good snow, sun, spectacular scenery and shelter from the wind. After ruling out several famous places, Schaffgotsch fell for a valley in central Idaho, next to the old mining and ranching town of Ketchum, in the Wood River valley. The complex was built there at top speed, and it opened in December 1936.
To make it easier for skiers to get uphill, the Union Pacific's engineers developed an innovation that would change skiing forever: the chairlift, inspired by the systems used to load bunches of bananas onto ships. The world's first chairlift went into service here, in Sun Valley, in 1936.
From the day it opened, Sun Valley was marketed as a glamorous destination, and the strategy worked. The Union Pacific invited Hollywood stars, who soon turned the resort into their fashionable winter refuge. Figures such as Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Errol Flynn, Marilyn Monroe, Ingrid Bergman and many others passed through the Sun Valley Lodge, and their photographs still decorate the hotel's walls.
The name 'Sun Valley' itself was an advertising invention meant to evoke good weather and attract visitors, far from the cold image that skiing might suggest. The musical film 'Sun Valley Serenade' (1941), with Sonja Henie and the Glenn Miller orchestra, shot at the resort, multiplied its international fame.
In that atmosphere of hunters, fishermen and artists, the writer Ernest Hemingway also washed up. He fell in love with the valley, with its hunting and its fishing, and spent long stretches there; in a room at the Sun Valley Lodge he worked on 'For Whom the Bell Tolls'. In its first decades Sun Valley thus established itself as a meeting point between sport, luxury and culture, laying the foundations of elite skiing in the United States.
Ernest Hemingway's bond with the area became permanent. After years of visits, the writer settled for good in Ketchum, the historic town next to the resort, where he bought a house. There, in July 1961, afflicted by health problems and depression, he took his own life. He is buried in the Ketchum cemetery, today a place of pilgrimage for his admirers, and on the outskirts of town, beside Trail Creek, a simple monument was raised in his memory with an inscription he himself had written for a hunting friend.
Ketchum, which had been born as a mining (lead and silver) and ranching settlement in the 19th century, grew in the shadow of the resort until it became the vital center of the area, with a more authentic and bohemian atmosphere than the luxury of the Sun Valley complex.
Over the decades, Sun Valley has kept its prestige as one of the most storied resorts in the United States, prized for the quality of Baldy, its history and its natural setting, far from the crowds of other destinations. The proximity of the spectacular Sawtooth Mountains has also made it a first-rate summer destination. Today it combines the retro charm of its golden past with world-class skiing and imposing nature, keeping alive the legend of the valley that a railroad decided to turn into the country's first great snow resort.
After nearly three decades under the Union Pacific's wing, Sun Valley changed hands in 1964: the railroad sold the resort for about 3 million dollars to the Janss Investment Company, headed by Bill Janss, an Olympic skier who would later also found the Snowmass resort in Colorado. Under his management, Bald Mountain went through its great modern transformation: the mountain went from 33 to 62 runs, seven new chairlifts were installed and, in 1965, the resort's first double chairlifts opened in the Warm Springs sector, among them the Limelight, with a vertical drop of nearly 670 meters, the largest in the United States at the time.
That expansion coincided with a cultural shift: in the late 1960s, two local skiers, Bobbie Burns and Jim Stelling, began experimenting with acrobatics and jumps on Baldy's Exhibition, Limelight and Lower Holiday runs, laying the groundwork for what would become known as freestyle skiing or 'hot dogging', a discipline that Sun Valley claims as part of its birthright. In 1975, the resort installed snowmaking at Warm Springs over 100 acres up to 2,500 meters of altitude, the highest artificial snow coverage in the world at that moment, key to securing the season in years with little natural snow.
In 1977, Janss sold the resort to the Utah businessman Earl Holding, also the owner of the Sinclair Oil hotel chain and later of Snowbasin. The Holding family still owns Sun Valley today, and under their management the resort has combined the preservation of its historic identity —the original lodge, the retro atmosphere— with continuous investment in modern chairlifts, snowmaking and the renovation of facilities, without losing the storied character that sets it apart from the more crowded ski destinations of the American West.