THE WINTER OF OUR CONTENT

Though it started out as a magnet for tycoons and celebrities, Sun Valley has managed to retain a comfortable, down-to-earth quality few other ski resorts can match.

- DAVID AMSDEN

THE CALM WAS a shock. As we landed in Idaho, I was anticipating the nervy jolt that I’ve come to expect at the beginning of a ski trip: the hiccuping heart rate, the rubbery knees, and, upon first glimpsing the mountains, thoughts of carving through powder at high velocity. But no. Despite arriving in Sun Valley in utopian conditions—some 50 inches of fresh snow, cornflower-blue skies, an incandescent sun—there was something disarming about the alpine landscape. Rather than stoking adrenaline, it soothed.

I figured my girlfriend, Erin, would be able to explain it. A seasoned snowboarder, trail runner, and general high-altitude aficionado, Erin possesses a keen understanding of mountains. She sees nuances others don’t and can articulate them in ways that illuminate. Yet as we rode the shuttle bus from the thimble size airport into Ketchum, the former mining town that Sun Valley is built around, it seemed she too was slipping into a curious torpor.

Her: “It’s just so...white.”

Me: “And so...bright.”

We had, unknowingly, hit on the reason why this remote swathe of south-central Idaho has come to occupy a singular and often overlooked place in American ski culture. Opened in 1936, Sun Valley was the country’s first destination ski resort and the location of the world’s first chairlift. The place was dreamed up in the midst of the Depression by Averell Harriman, then the chairman of the Union Pacific Railroad, as a means of luring passengers onto his train line connecting Chicago and Portland, Oregon. The idea was to create a version of St. Moritz—but built from American gumption in the wilderness.