Sun Valley - Page 3
By Reuters | 28 Jan, 2026

The Sun Valley Resort offered the world first chairlift, and remains a legendary ski destination, especially with visitors from California.

It took about a half hour at the spacious ski rental shop to enter myself into the electronic reservation system and get my boots and skis.  I started with the River Run quad chairs to the right instead of the Roundhouse Express Gondola to the left — the only two options from the River Run lodge.  

The walk from the main Sun Valley parking lot to the River Run Lodge and ski area includes a bridge over Big Wood River.  Below: The River Run Lodge restaurant is shown before it becomes extremely crowded during a broad lunch window.  (Tom Kagy Photo)

On my first ride I shared a chair was a highly put-together woman in a powder-blue ski jacket.  She was a lobbyist specializing in helping educational firms navigate federal regulations.  Thus her main home was in Washington DC, a second one was in Chicago, and her third was a condo in Sun Valley. 

Enoteca is one of Ketchum's biggest and most popular dinner restaurants.  (Tom Kagy Photo)

I mentioned my surprise at the price of one of the homes whose listing had been posted on the window of a real estate office we had passed yesterday evening. 

Frenchman's Bend Hot Spring bubble into Warm Springs Creek at a point about a 12-minute drive from Ketchum, providing a few warm rocky pools for those willing to brave 15-degree morning air in a swimsuit.   Below: One of the most memorable sights along the road to Frenchman's Bend is a grove of quaking aspen.  (Tom Kagy Photo)

"Six million for a one-acre place is routine these days," she said dismissively.  She had bought her condo a few years ago for $700,000 when the market was still recovering from the Great Recession.  Today it was worth over twice that, and her friends were regretting not having bought when she did.

The River Run lift feeds into the Lower River Run which is labeled green but contains a few intermediate-level grades.  The snow was mostly provided by the same storm that had hit Jackson Hole four days earlier but still quite skiable.  

The top of River Run lift is a knoll that also holds the lines for the Lookout Express quad chairlift, a much longer lift that takes you up to the peak of Bald Mountain for a mix of green, blue and black runs.  The lines for that lift were perpetually packed but unavoidable as I didn't want to keep repeating River Run or segue over to the Roundhouse Express Gondola.

The top of Lookout Express offered a gloriously sunny 360-degree panorama that included the western view.  The main blue run down the front of Bald Mountain had been pretty well scraped down to a skid-inducing hardness by the earlybird crowd, making for tricky skiing on par with a black diamond run.  The runs to the front left and to the far right — avoiding the near right black diamond runs — were gentler with better snow.  

When I broke for lunch in the early afternoon River Run Lodge was completely packed, without a single empty or even half-empty table.  To avoid the serpentine hot food lines I grabbed a snack at the cashier and found an open table outside the lodge.  A moment later I saw a woman wandering the patio in exasperation with a food tray and told her she was welcome to the table as I would be leaving shortly. 

Like many at Sun Valley that time of year, she and her family were visiting from the LA area.  She was a photographer and her husband was a writer for Rolling Stone magazine.  They embodied the demographic that seemed most attracted to Sun Valley, maybe due to the culturally open sensibility that pervades the area.  

Our conversation turned to the impact of AI and social media in our fields.  She was seeing photo assignments decrease due to generative AI and her husband was having a harder time persuading celebrities to sit for interviews as they were relying more on social media to engage fans while keeping tighter control over their public images.

Finding an open reservation for dinner was as difficult as on earlier evenings.  We finally lucked out with an 8:15 at Enoteca, a big lively modern (in food, not decor) bistro with a high ceiling just two and a half blocks northwest on Main Street.  Idaho trout, panned chicken, vegetarian lasagna and pizza diavola were accompanied by selections from its extensive bar menu.  The tab came to about $75 per person with tip.

For our final morning in Ketchum we planned to experience the hot springs at Frenchman's Bend about five miles west of town, before checking out and heading down to Hailey for our flight.  The idea of stripping down to swimsuits to dip ourselves in warm water in a snowy mountain valley stream seemed extremely uncomfortable in lifht of the anticipated morning air temperature of 15-degrees.  But it also seemed intriguing, purely as a once-in-a-lifetime experience.  

The 12-minute drive on Warm Springs Road wound around the northern slopes of Sun Valley Resort through the snowy wooded foothills of Bald Mountain, past a few ramshackle farmhouses and cabins.  We passed a stretch of flat meadow lined with tall straight quaking aspen which were nearly as magical stripped bare for the winter as they would have been dressed in the green of spring or the gold of autumn.

We parked on the side of the road a couple hundred yards before the hot spring and walked uphill along Warm Spring Creek.  As we reached the spot where the hot spring presumably fed into the stream from tectonically-generated heat, we spotted a father and two young daughters, aged about five and seven, sitting in a small rocky pool in the stream.  The girls' arms were folded across their chest and possibly their teeth were clenched to keep from chattering.  

Watching them from the side of the road overlooking the stream was their mother.  She was bundled up in a thick coat and didn't appear the least interested in joining her family.  It didn't paint an inviting picture for us newcomers who were still considering whether we really wanted to suffer the frigid air to experience warm water flowing in a stream.

Grimly resolved to check off the hot springs experience, we clambered down the icy boulders to the water.  The father advised us that the water temperature varied wildly over short distances.  I stripped to my swimsuit, tiptoed around the stream feeling with my toes temperatures ranging from icy to hot, and settled into a spot that felt like warm bathwater.  The pool wasn't deep enough for full immersion.  I was warm up to my belly button and cold everywhere else.  And my lower body was treated to a constant Neapolitan swirl of warm and cool currents.  It wasn't long before we decided that it was high time to head back to the hotel to change, pack and check out.

Hailey appeared little more than a few blocks along Highway 75.  Yet its population of 9,100 made it a megalopolis compared with Ketchum and Sun Valley, complete with its own newly built Friedman Memorial Airport (SUN).  

It felt early for lunch so we turned off onto W. Bullion St. and crossed Big Wood River to the Carbonate Mountain Trailhead for a short hike and a view of the town and environs.  The weather had warmed considerably since the day before, melting what remained of the snow on the south-facing hills, leaving only brown grass and shrubbery.  It felt like a Southern California trail except maybe 20 degrees cooler.  

Having worked up an appetite we drove the few blocks back to Main St and parked in front of Cafe Della.  We were pleasantly surprised by the menu.  We enjoyed an eclectic, enlightened lunch of egg salad sandwich, vegetable burrito, quiche, squash soup and a green salad with miso mustard dressing.  The perpetual line at the order counter and the patrons filling the eight tables suggested Della was a favorite with locals.  About $30 per person with tip.

Departure of our flight back to LAX was 4:30, leaving us time for a little exploration.  We walked a block west and a couple blocks north to Black Owl Coffee, a cramped place filled with an order line and a dozen laptop loungers.  During another half hour strolling exploration of the town we spotted a boba shop a couple blocks toward the river, more evidence that the area was plugged into the Asian wave washing over pop culture.

After a final half hour exploring the neighboring town of Bellevue and driving up a road into the eastern hills dotted with ranch-style spreads, we topped off the tank on the rental and headed back up toward Hailey for Friedman Memorial Airport.  

The newish low-rise airport with a single runway had the nostalgically somnolent feel of a 1970s third-world airport.  And yet, after we hiked onto the airfield to climb the boarding stairs onto the 4-across United Airlines Embraer 175, we were left twiddling our thumbs a half hour on the taxiway waiting for a couple of other flights to take off.  

As we finally lifted off we enjoyed a final parting panorama of the snowy mountains in twilight.