Sun Valley Offers Snow, Hemingway and Cultural Sophistication
By Tom Kagy | 28 Jan, 2026

The drive from Jackson to Ketchum felt like a journey across time and a vast white space to a New West outdoor paradise of snow culture and a profound literary moment.

The drive from Jackson to Ketchum, Ernest Hemingway's final hometown, and the Sun Valley Resort, was a highly anticipated highlight of our snow country trip.  

The small town of Victor was an important powder stop in Idaho after leaving Jackson with bellies sloshing with coffee.  (Tom Kagy Photo)

We began by driving west on Wyoming State Highway 22 over the freshly snow-covered southern Tetons.  The road was still covered with an abundance of snow, mostly packed but icy in patches, requiring caution to avoid spinning out as we didn't have chains.  We were a bit stressed that before we could get over the ridgeline and and begin descending into the high plains of eastern Idaho, we would encounter a chain inspection.  We didn't, to our relief.  As the highway leveled off and became Idaho SH-33 it was well salted and snow free leading into the little highway junction town of Victor.  

The Craters of the Moon National Park offers a welcome opportunity to stretch your legs while enjoying the lava fields above a volcano capable of erupting at any moment.  Below:  Ketchum's Best Western Plus Kentwood Lodge offered comfy, spacious rooms and a location within easy walking distance of Sun Valley Resort's River Run Lodge ski area.  (Tom Kagy Photo)

Our breakfast coffee at Jackson's Inn on the Creek had left us in need of a nose-powdering.  Victor offered a small park public restroom fronted by a shelf giving away several dozen free books—a touching reminder that we had left behind a tourist hub and were firmly inside small-town America.  

The Ketchum Vintage restaurant's Spontaneous Salad was a delightfully seasoned surprise that satisfied our craving for assorted fresh, nutritious veggies for dinner.  (Tom Kagy Photo)

On Victor's outskirts we turned left on SH-31 to cut through the mostly flat Caribou-Targhee National Forest to Swan Valley, before turning right onto broad and well-groomed SH-26 to Idaho Falls.   

The Galena Trail offers Nordic skiers and snowshoers access to 20 miles of scenic trails around Galena Peak.  Below: A sample of the views from the trail.  (Tom Kagy Photo)

In search of lunch we found parking downtown and walked a couple blocks to the Snakebite Restaurant, the only open restaurant at the small center of downtown Idaho Falls.  Unfortunately it had a waiting list.  

We got back in the car to drive across the main bridge across Snake River to Jalisco's Mexican restaurant just west of the main bridge and overlooking Snake River waterfalls.

Jalisco's liveliness attested to the vibrant Latino population in southern Idaho.  

The place was crowded but a window booth had just opened up, allowing us to be seated.  A couple of tables were waiting to be served ahead of us.  The wait staff was friendly and efficient and had us digging into chips and salsa before long.  Our lunches of traditional Mexican dishes like enchiladas, loaded nachos and tacos came in piping hot and in heaping servings we couldn't come close to finishing, along with great salsa fresca. 

After lunch we took the flat open straight Highway 20, then 26, to the town of Arco for some gas and water before cutting southwest on Hwy 26 to the Craters of the Moon National Monument as a good place to stretch our legs and to experience what it's like to walk on a dormant volcano fully capable of erupting again.  It was easily the most recent volcanic activity short of the island of Hawaii or Mount St. Helens. 

The park stretches nearly 50 miles southward and well over 20 miles wide near the north end.  Our schedule allowed us only an hour, putting the main craters out of reach as they were a significant hike away.  

We settled for a mile loop that took us over some black lava flows and a couple of impressive standing blocks that formed aa portal for a section of the walk.  The stark carbon black landscape was proof that this part of Idaho was still undergoing geological activity, with volcanic eruptions having occurred between 2,000 and 15,000 years ago, a heartbeat in geological time.  We left Craters wondering what the next heartbeat might bring.

It was dark by the time we rolled into Ketchum.  The town is often subsumed under the Sun Valley umbrella but Ketchum is bigger, with 3,611 permanent residents while its northeastern neighbor Sun Valley has only 1,771.  What's more, the Sun Valley resort — the only part of the area of much interest of much interest to most wintertime visitors — actually is in Ketchum.  

One possible explanation for this misnomer may be that Sun Valley sounds upbeat while Ketchum remains in the melancholy cast by Hemingway's 1961 suicide.  The more likely reason is that the Dollar Mountain side of the Sun Valley resort—which is actually on the Sun Valley side—opened first, in 1936, and won immediate acclaim for the world's first chairlift, installed by Union Pacific engineer Jim Curran.

By the time the Ketchum side of the resort on Bald Mountain opened for the 1939-40 season with three single-seat chairlifts, the area was already well known as Sun Valley.  And its glam image for having more celebrities per square mile than Malibu (at least during ski season) was firmly established when the likes of Tom Hanks, Clint Eastwood, Jamie Lee Curtis, Demi Moore, Arnold Schwarzeneggar, Bruce Willis and even Mark Zuckerberg bought homes in the area, never mind that half of them are in Ketchum and nearby Hailey.

Celebrities were the farthest thing from our minds as we rolled into Ketchum and checked into the Best Western Plus Kentwood Lodge.   We chose it for being a mere 18-minute walk from Bald Mountain—now the hub of the Sun Valley Resort—and priced reasonably compared with Limelight and the Andorra Villa just across the street.

Topmost on our minds was dinner.  In a sign of the area's draw for the rich and famous—as well as those adjacent in sensibility—we couldn't find a single dinner reservation from among the town's dozen dinner restaurants.  On a Sunday evening.  Persistence ultimately rewarded us with an 8:30 reservation at the Vintage only due to a last-minute cancellation.

The Vintage is probably the smallest restaurant we have dined ever dined in.  The entire dining room had only six tables.  The chef more than made up with the quality of the dishes set upon them, as well as the attentive service.   We were impressed by the surprising variety of quality fresh ingredients and tightly-controlled seasoning on everything from the "spontaneous salad" to cauliflower soup to the red snapper to a dessert named something containing the words "naked stranger".  That was accompanied by a half bottle of good sauvignon blanc and a draft lager for $100 a head, including tip.

The next day we were planning to drive a half-hour north on SH-75 through the Sawtooth National Forest to Galena Lodge to try cross-country skiing.  Before getting in our car we walked three and a half blocks northeast to the Kneadery, easily the town's best-loved breakfast joint.  

Its popularity is partly due to the gargantuan omelettes, pancakes and French toast, and the excellent coffee befitting a cafe.  As much of an attraction is the warm, homey ambience created by the phantasmagoria of mountain and wildlife kitsch covering virtually every square foot of wall space, nook and corner, starting with the rustic log-cabin exterior.  As we entered you're surprised by the roomy interior with maybe 20 big tables filled with happy diners.