The cold, old days.
It was 23 below zero when we left the gasoline station in Shoshone, Idaho. Our 10-year-old convertible Buick was as cold inside as it was outside. North of Shoshone the ribbon of ice-covered, narrow asphalt dissected the stark lava beds on each side of it.
On the advice of two women we met skiing at Alta, Utah, who had told us of the steaming hot water around swimming pools at Sun Valley, we packed up our trailer and headed that way. We needed to warm our bones.
Later that afternoon we discovered that Ketchum had more gambling casinos than any other type of business on Main Street. In one of the few businesses that were open in the middle of the afternoon, the owner told us that the best place to park our trailer and car in Sun Valley would be in the Challenger Inn parking lot.
Since we didn’t have lift tickets, we put seal-skins on our skis and skinned up River Run. At the top of that run we discovered that they didn’t check lift tickets on the upper two lifts, so we had our first day of many, skiing at Sun Valley at no charge.
Rather than get in trouble with Sun Valley management, Ward Baker and I went to the manager’s office the next day. Pappy Rogers thought we would be the basis for good folklore conversation around the valley (local color) if we just hung around for the winter so he gave us free season tickets. He cautioned us to act like paying customers but we could do anything legal we wanted to do on his property.
Thus, began my 60-year love affair with Sun Valley, Idaho. Ward and I spent that winter skiing seven days a week, swimming in the hot water pools frequently, and in general obeying Pappy Rogers’ orders to behave as though we were living in the Lodge.
We were living in our 8-foot-long, 4-foot-wide teardrop trailer with the outside kitchen, tucked way back in the corner next to the irrigation ditch and only a 50 yard walk from the showers in the skier’s chalet.
In the winter of 1947 you could rent a bunk bed in the skier’s chalet for $2 a night. The Union Pacific Railroad that owned Sun Valley at the time was advertising a Learn-to-Ski Week, which included a train ride from Chicago, three meals a day, six days of ski lessons, seven days of lift tickets and a bed in the skier’s chalet for $83. I don’t think Ward Baker and I spent a total of $83 that entire winter.
That winter of 1947 changed the direction of my life forever. In those days Sun Valley was full of celebrities of every dimension, including but not limited to Gary Cooper, Ernest Hemingway, the Shah of Iran, as well as a number of gangsters who liked the exciting life Sun Valley offered.
As my skiing improved over the winter I gradually discovered that my main motivation in life was my constant search for freedom. I don’t know if I could have put it into words back then, but nowhere that I know of do you have more freedom than when you’re standing at the top of a hill of untracked powder.
In today’s ski world a few people have untracked powder snow runs burned in their brains because of helicopter skiing and snow cat skiing. But it was a simple pleasure that Ward Baker and I got to enjoy every day in Sun Valley in 1947. There were almost no people there.
Today to get untracked snow, some skiers order a breakfast to go and eat it while standing in the chairlift line, freezing to death, an hour and a half or more before the chairlift starts.
I’m grateful to Sun Valley for opening up a whole new world for both Ward and me in 1947 and then again in 1984 when I met my wife on top of Baldy at the Warming Hut. We’ve been inseparable ever since.