Sun Valley, ID 2/16/2013

[Tony Crocker]

I drove to Sun Valley from Las Vegas Friday, arriving at the end of the Diamond Dogs' (Liz' NYC ski club) ski week. We skied Saturday, for the first couple of hours with Karl Weatherly, a photographer who has lived in Sun Valley for 20 years. I met Karl in NASJA and we skied together at White Grizzly last season.

We did not heed the local advice to get on the hill at opening bell for smoothest condition of the relatively steep groomers, starting up from River Run at 10AM. The week had been very quiet according to Liz and was much busier Saturday at the start of the holiday weekend. This translated to occasional liftlines of 5-10 people and moderate skier traffic on popular runs. It was a blue sky day with no wind and highs maybe mid-30's. The early week had been colder. Overview of the River Run/Frenchman's side from the Sun Valley Lodge road.

Sun Valley got a lot of early snow but only 3 inches since Jan. 10. So the excellent condition of the groomers is testimony to the intense maintenance that I detailed at the NASJA annual meeting in 2010. viewtopic.php?f=3&t=8842 The overnight grooming is pool table smooth for early morning high speed cruising and some runs had what the locals call "gunpowder" from overnight snowmaking, which in-season is done at 8-10% water content as opposed to base building manmade in the early season.

Most visitors start out along College from the top or make their way to Seattle Ridge. So Karl started us down Limelight, freshly groomed Friday night though Liz said not some of the other days earlier this week. Back up top we spent the next hour skiing the Frenchman's lift runs Janss Pass, Graduate/Undergraduate and Can Can.

This area is relatively underutilized on busy days and we were moving along briskly at Karl's pace. A normal Sun Valley ski day for him is 20K vertical between 9 and 11AM. Our final runs with Karl were on Greyhawk and Hemingway, fastest I've skied since my collision at Mammoth in 2008. No worries here, as these runs had very few people. Karl went home at noon after we had skied 15,700 in an hour and 45 minutes with him.

Liz had commented on the mogul runs being of very good quality, so we tried Picabo's Street.

She was right. The snow was consistent grippable chalk with no hard patches. Spacing of moguls was excellent, no doubt due to the relatively long carving skis most popular here. We also noticed an unusually low fraction of snowboarders maybe in the 10% range. Sun Valley does not have a terrain park on its main mountain Baldy; it's over at Dollar Mountain.

The Warm Springs side of Baldy is nearly all north facing, so snow preservation was excellent despite so little recent snow. Now were ready to move to the "sunny" side of Sun Valley, skiing down Christmas Ridge, which faces SE and was nicely sun softened.

Seattle Ridge is in the background. We took one quick cruiser there and joined the Diamond Dogs for lunch at 1PM.

After lunch it was time to sample Sun Valley's bowls, viewed here from Seattle Ridge.

The main exposure is east but they all are a bit concave with skier's right more NE exposed and skier's left more SE. Below tree line they funnel into fairly tight bumps for the bottom quarter of the 1,600 vertical. During my first trip here in 1983 there was a 100 inch base and some new snow, great skiing though a lot of work back then for me. 3 years ago with NASJA no one skied the bowls due to thin cover and refrozen surfaces.

But today the bowls were in prime form. We first skied Mayday, choosing the skier's left side in good corn snow.

The tight bumps on lower Mayday.

Next up was Easter Bowl. Skier's right had a long fall line of chalk, almost as smooth as Mammoth's upper runs.

The bumps in lower Easter were fairly easy to negotiate, with a choice of very soft, moderately soft or packed powder skier's left, center or right respectively.

Then we went up Seattle Ridge to ski Liz' favorite trail from earlier in the week, Fire Trail.

Snow stays good in here with no sun. The cut run is bumpy but there's obvious powder potential in the spaced trees to the side.

Down to Cold Springs, then up via Christmas for our last top to bottom run. When we arrived near the Roundhouse, I commented that since Liz seemed to enjoy Sun Valley's moguls, she really shouldn't depart without skiing Exhibition.

Snow and mogul spacing were still outstanding even though it's on the River Run side. The double fall line is partially NE facing and shaded. By March Exhibition gets direct morning sun and probably needs to be more carefully timed for the best conditions.

We got down to River Run at 3:30, having skied 31,800 vertical in 4 1/2 of the 7 hours Sun Valley's lifts are open. We had a couple of apres ski drinks at the base and enjoyed the bluegrass band Whitewater Ramble.

The final Diamond Dogs' dinner was at the Sun Valley Lodge dining room.

A great start to our month long road trip, ending with Iron Blosam week at Snowbird.

 

[jamesdeluxe]

Great report. And we don't have to wait four days for the photos to be added! =D>

The lodges at Snowbasin are more or less replicas of those at Sun Valley, correct?

 

[kingslug]

The ex got back 2 weeks ago from there..had a great time..

 

[Tony Crocker]

The lodges at Snowbasin are more or less replicas of those at Sun Valley, correct?

Including the bathrooms. :lol:

 

[rfarren]

I've been to Sun Valley twice, both times around xmas. Once it was almost entirely man made snow, and the other the whole mountain was open. I wonder, wouldn't Sun Valley be better to visit in March when it starts to warm up? I mean, you're not likely to get powder there...

 

[Tony Crocker]

I wonder, wouldn't Sun Valley be better to visit in March when it starts to warm up? I mean, you're not likely to get powder there...

Not necessarily. NASJA meeting in March 2010 was cloudy with flurries. No one was skiing ungroomed as it was all refrozen. Sun Valley is at least half north facing; nearly all of that retains a packed powder surface in February. Bump runs and NE aspects of the bowls were good despite little new snow in over a month.

 

[snowave]

Sun Valley, ID February 14-18th

Just took a trip to SV this past week. It's about a 6 hr drive from my house near McCall. If I were to do a full report, it would be almost identical to TonyC's in terms of timing (week before Presidents week), snow conditions (no substantial snow since early January) and crowd levels (low to moderate until Friday)... plus, I don't take very exciting pictures. However, as a boarder, along with my intermediate level skier wife, we would be inclined to call some of the snow conditions closer to hard pack vs chalky. They did make snow Tuesday - Thursday on many of the groomed runs, which is almost entirely what we skied all week.

As a first timer to SV, I had high expectations based on some friends that really loved the place for its "steep fall line runs". I won't argue with the steep part, as there is not much about SV that isn't steep. A nice chuckle was the "greens" at Seattle Ridge. These runs (pictured in TonyC's report, albeit from a perspective that doesn't make them look as steep as they are) would be a solid blue at any other resort, and perhaps even a black at a conservative resort. However, they were the best collection of less steep, groomed runs on the mountain, and probably the most consistent snow on the entire mountain until they got ripped apart in the afternoons from the heavier traffic, as this was also the busiest area of the mountain all week (which wasn't bad at all until Friday on this holiday weekend). They made snow on these runs several nights, which made for nice PP conditions until around noon, when they would become scraped off and choppy.

Everything off piste was bumped out and very "firm". The exception was some of the SE facing bowls that did soften slightly on a few days, and there were a handful of people in the afternoons doing runs through the bumps. None of them looked like they were having all that much fun, as most appeared to have puckered cheeks and grimaces, along with a lot of stopping. The more northerly bumped runs looked slightly more "chalky" as some would say, but I rarely saw anyone coming down them all week except a wayward snowboarder that had the look of death in his eyes.

I was surprised at the number of (sometimes) long cat tracks criss-crossing the mountain. Often times needed just to transition from one run to another and/or to get back to a preferred chair lift. I was also not thrilled with the big "gully runs" that ran out to the bottom chairs. The better groomed runs I found such as Lower Picaboo, Flying Squirrel and Graduate off Frenchman's chair weren't bad... (again, steeper blues that would probably be blacks at most other areas). I also enjoyed a couple of the shorter groomers off the Greyhawk Chair in the Warm Springs area. College was a very nice ridge run with a mostly mellow pitch, but also had most of the traffic on the mountain as well.

We did go over to Dollar Mtn (mainly at the wife's request) for a few hours one day, and actually had a nice time. Sure, only 600 ft vertical, but the snow conditions were much better and the HSQ made the short runs more tolerable. People were actually nice there, vs at Baldy where I don't think I saw a smile or a hi from anyone all week.

Overall, I didn't hate the Baldy, but maybe I just had too high of expectations. If this area got more reliable snow, it would likely be an excellent mountain. But even with snowmaking on many runs, I can't see conditions being all that much better unless you hit it during a favorable (southerly) storm cycle or do your 2 hrs at opening to get the best conditions on the snowmaking runs.

Town, etc.

We went to the hot springs down warm creek canyon, and although it was busy, was a nice experience.

Sun Valley Lodge was about what I expected. Some great history there, for sure.

Ketchum was another disappointment. For a town that is the basis of the evolution of the ski resort, it seemed disjointed and as if it had a personality disorder. It just didn't seem like it knew what it was, or wanted to be. Shooping/stores were fragmented throughout town and boring (unless of course you like the upscale area for the celebrities).

Our dining out every night was a relative disappointment as well, with the exception of the sushi restaurant (sushi on second), which while slow... had great fish at a reasonable price. The Ketchum Grill was a cozy old home, but my meatloaf dinner was dry and not very flavorful (supposedly a local favorite dish). Wife was happy with here seafood lemon fettuccini. The Sawtooth Club has a fun downstairs, but we got stuck in a corner upstairs with poor service and our meals were very mediocre. The cellar pub was OK, but nothing special. 2/4 on our afternoon coffee shop runs were respectable (1 being starbucks... worth going into even if you don't order anything as it's very unique).

Despite my fairly negative review here, we actually had a pretty good time. Yes, I was disappointed in many aspects of the trip, but the skiing wasn't really THAT bad (all things considered), and once I got used to the mountain layout, it was a little more toleratble. We also had a great condo close to the river run base, which was probably the best part of the trip.

Will Sun Valley be among my list of favorite ski areas/towns? No, and I probably won't be back for skiing/riding... but probably for a fall colors trip as the valley and surrounding area has many aspen groves.

 

[jamesdeluxe]

Thanks for the detailed report. LOL, "chalky" is one of those descriptors that's difficult to pin down as it varies from person to person, and seems to often be used to describe windsift.

 

[snowave]

Chalky to me is forgiving-hardpack... ... conditions that I can (generally) still get an edge on, but it's not something I'm gonna bomb and have a bunch of confidence laying down turns on.

Personally, I feel like the idea of windsift is more like blown-in soft snow onto a harder surface... pretty different from chalky, but I could see the two kinda going together a little, also.

Doesn't TonyC have a trademark on "windsift"?

 

[jamesdeluxe]

Doesn't TonyC have a trademark on "windsift"?

Windsift is the closest that Mammoth gets to powder.

 

[Sbooker]

I've posted this before I believe.

I'll never return to Sun Valley. I was there with my family for three days in early January 2017. It didn't stop snowing. There were very few skiers on the hill and every run was in fresh snow. Perhaps the best skiing we've done anywhere. We loved the town of Ketchum. The only slight negative was having our departure flight cancelled due to too much snow so we needed a middle of the night taxi ride to Boise to get make our LA flight back to Australia. (Travel insurance picked up that tab).

I understand Sun Valley is not known for high snowfall. I will not put these memories in jeopardy.

 

[Tony Crocker]

Chalky is natural snow that has packed by skiers or wind but with no melt/freeze characteristics. That's why it's generally easy to get an edge on. There is of course still some variability. If soft and smooth relative to steepness yes it can be skied rather similarly to groomed snow. Sometimes it's quite firm from windpacking (what we at Mammoth refer to as "tight chalk"), and yes if you get that on a steep run you ski it quite defensively because you'll go for a long ride if you screw up.

I've heard some people refer to windsift as "sugar snow," but windsift is more descriptive IMHO of the loose snow deposited on leeward slopes by wind. As noted in my recent TR, Castle Mt. not Mammoth seems to have the most frequent and consistent windsift. That is mainly due to more consistent wind direction at Castle, but Castle's skier density about 10% of Mammoth's probably plays a role as well.

 

[snowave]

I was asked by Chris Steiner to choose what mountain to ski under the theoretical best case scenario of 2 feet new and no lift lines. He expected his favorite mountain Jackson Hole to be an obvious answer. I said Sun Valley due to the consistent long fall lines with a comprehensive high speed lift system to deliver maximum vertical. Jackson has ideal powder terrain but its lift system is not nearly as efficient.

I'd actually not argue that, although only if there was a solid base underneath that 2 feet of fresh snow. I imagine when they get a good S/SW storm cycle it would be a phenomenal mountain off piste.

 

[jamesdeluxe]

we needed a middle of the night taxi ride to Boise to get make our LA flight back to Australia. (Travel insurance picked up that tab).

That reminds me of my visit to the Maritime Alps of France in 2016. My car had an oil leak and died an hour from the last stop, Val d'Allos. The rental company paid for a taxi to take me from there to the Nice airport. Instead of negotiating a flat price, the driver had the meter running -- if I remember correctly, it ended up more than 300 euros! Was very pleasant; I was able to view the beautiful scenery going by without worrying about keeping my eye on the road!

 

[Tony Crocker]

Instead of negotiating a flat price, the driver had the meter running

That's what happened when my Alaska Airlines flight in 2006 failed to make its connection in Seattle to get me to Kamloops, where I was being picked up by Mike Wiegele the next morning. That was their only Kamloops flight, so they sent me to Kelowna and paid for a taxi that was about $200CDN.

The return flight also missed its connection, resulting in my return to LAX at a much later hour than I had been schedule to arrive in Burbank. I wrote a letter which resulted in a voucher I used to ski Mt. Bachelor the following spring.

 

[Sbooker]

That reminds me of my visit to the Maritime Alps of France in 2016. My car had an oil leak and died an hour from the last stop, Val d'Allos. The rental company paid for a taxi to take me from there to the Nice airport. Instead of negotiating a flat price, the driver had the meter running -- if I remember correctly, it ended up more than 300 euros! Was very pleasant; I was able to view the beautiful scenery going by without worrying about keeping my eye on the road!

View attachment 30968

While we're on break down stories I recall a debacle of a situation when our rental blew a seal as we were driving through Death Valley. Luckily it was early April (we had been in Mammoth for a few days - it snowed 3 feet the night we got there). Anyway we limped through to Furnace Creek. We contacted the rental car company by phone and the nice lady encouraged us to drive through to Vegas even though the car had no oil in it. "It should be fine" she said.
Obviously I didn't take that on so they sent another vehicle on a flat bed from Las Vegas. It took a while. The kids were about 7 and 9 at the time. 6 hours in Furnace Creek Visitor Centre goes slow.
I'm always 'bragging' that we broke down in Death Valley.

 

[ShiftyRider]

Windsift is the closest that Mammoth gets to powder.

Intercepted texts...
"Woke up to tons and tons of fresh, it was like butter"

Reply from California: Woohoo I'm jealous, that's my favorite!

Reply from Colorado or Utah: Oh well, that happens sometimes...

 

[jamesdeluxe]

I'm sure that the situation this NY Times article describes is replicated in many ski towns.

A Town’s Housing Crisis Exposes a ‘House of Cards’​

In the Idaho resort area of Sun Valley, there are so few housing options that many workers are resorting to garages, campers and tents. Built as a destination ski resort to mirror the iconic winter appeal of the Alps, the Sun Valley area has grown into an exclusive enclave for the wealthy and famous.

HAILEY, Idaho — Near the private jets that shuttle billionaires to their opulent Sun Valley getaways, Ana Ramon Bartolome and her family have spent this summer living in the only place available to them: behind a blue tarp in a sweltering two-car garage.

With no refrigerator, the extended family of four adults and two young children keeps produce on plywood shelves. With no sink, they wash dishes and themselves at the nearby park. With no bedrooms, the six of them sleep on three single mattresses on the floor.

“I’m very anxious, depressed and scared,” said Ms. Bartolome, who makes her living tending to the homes of wealthy residents but cannot afford even the cheapest housing in the famous ski-and-golf playground.

Resort towns have long grappled with how to house their workers, but in places like Sun Valley those challenges have become a crisis as the chasm widens between those who have two homes and those who have two jobs. Fueled in part by a pandemic migration that has gobbled up the region’s limited housing supply, rents have soared over the last two years, leaving priced-out workers living in trucks, trailers or tents.

The housing shortfall is now threatening to paralyze what had been a thriving economy and cherished sense of community. The hospital, school district and sheriff’s office have each seen prospective employees bail on job offers after realizing the cost of living was untenable. The Fire Department that covers Sun Valley has started a $2.75 million fund-raising campaign to build housing for their firefighters.

Already, restaurants unable to hire enough service workers are closing or shortening hours. And the problems are starting to spread to other businesses, said Michael David, a Ketchum council member who has been working on housing issues for the past two decades.
“It’s kind of a house of cards,” he said. “It is close to toppling.”

Built as a destination ski resort to mirror the iconic winter appeal of the Alps, the Sun Valley area has grown into an exclusive enclave for the wealthy and famous, drawing Hollywood celebrities, political elites from Washington and business titans from Wall Street, many of whom gather each year for Allen & Company’s annual media finance conference, known as the “summer camp for billionaires.” They have scooped up desirable vacation properties nestled next to winter ski lodges and summer golf courses, away from the gawking crowds of their home cities.

With the onset of the pandemic, the region saw an influx of wealthy buyers looking for a work-from-home destination with plentiful amenities, and the migration sent housing costs soaring even further. In Ketchum, the town next to Sun Valley, officials found that home prices shot up more than 50 percent over the past two years, with the median reaching about $1.2 million. Two-bedroom rentals went from less than $2,000 a month to more than $3,000.

Those jolts came after two decades of minimal residential construction in the city and a dramatic shift in recent years that converted renter-occupied units into those that were either kept largely vacant by their owners or used as short-term rentals.

Similar trends are happening in resort towns across the Rocky Mountain West, including Jackson Hole, Wyo., Aspen, Colo., and Whitefish, Mont. Although some larger employers, including the Sun Valley Company, have developed dorm-style living options for seasonal workers, those have done little to change the housing trajectories for the broader communities.

People filed into a regional food bank in Bellevue, Idaho, one recent afternoon, ordering boxes of food from a warehouse stocked with cereal, fresh produce and Idaho potatoes. One family there said they were being evicted from the trailer park where they live because the land was going to be redeveloped. They had been unable to find a new place and were fearful about what was coming next.

The food bank has experienced a surge in demand in the past two years, serving about 200 families each week to nearly 500 with the number still climbing, said Brooke Pace McKenna, a leader at the Hunger Coalition, which runs the food bank.

“More and more, we are seeing the teachers, the policemen, the Fire Department,” Ms. McKenna said.

Kayla Burton had grown up in the Sun Valley region and moved away after high school more than a decade ago. When she returned last year to take a job as a high school principal, she and her husband, who is a teacher, were shocked at how hard it was to find a place to live. Home prices were spinning out of control, she said, even for places that were in desperate need of repairs. When rentals became available, the properties were flooded with applicants. The couple looked at trying to build their own place but found that the cost was far out of reach.

Ms. Burton and her husband moved into a camper on her parents’ property. The couple have since managed to find a unit inside an industrial building with no air-conditioning, leaving them wondering if it is the kind of place where they would want to start a family.

“We are in this weird limbo spot in our life right now,” she said.

With some job applicants unwilling to make the move, the region’s school district now has 26 job openings, some that have gone unfilled for months. The district is working on plans to develop seven affordable housing units for employees.

Gretchen Gorham, the co-owner of the Johnny G’s Subshack sandwich shop in Ketchum, said that while it was vital to find housing for firefighters, teachers and nurses, she also worried about the many people who service vehicles, equipment and homes.

This year, Ketchum officials asked voters to approve a tax increase to fund affordable housing for hundreds of workers over the next 10 years. It did not pass.

The housing shortfall is now threatening to paralyze what had been a thriving economy and cherished sense of community.

“We live in a town of Wizard of Oz,” Ms. Gorham said. “People say one thing, and then behind a closed curtain they’re doing another.”

Officials in the region have been reaching for Band-Aid solutions. In Hailey, city rules prohibit R.V.s from parking on private property for more than 30 days, but council members have agreed not to enforce those rules for now; as a result, R.V.s can be seen in driveways and side yards across town. In Ketchum, officials considered opening a tent city for workers but decided against the idea.

So in an area whose principal asset is its spectacular wilderness, some people have taken refuge in the woods.

Aaron Clark, 43, who owns a window washing business, lost his long-term rental this spring when the landlord sold the property for well beyond what Mr. Clark could afford. Knowing the exorbitant cost of all the other options around him, Mr. Clark moved into the box truck he uses to shuttle his ladders and washing equipment.

Inside the truck, he has a bed and cabinets, and he recently added amenities like a sink with running water and solar power. He also got a refrigerator, so he no longer has to keep restocking an icebox for his food. Out the back is a shower hose with heated water.

Each night, when he’s done working, he drives out into the wilderness to park for the night. One recent day, he found a spot at the end of a potholed dirt road, next to a stream, where he spent a bit of time assessing the cryptocurrency market on his computer and then played fetch with his dog. Mr. Clark said he had found joy in the lifestyle, which at least has allowed him to save for when he eventually re-enters the housing market.
But it has its challenges. “It is a drain, every day, deciding, ‘Where am I going to park, where am I going to go?’” he said. “You get off work, you are tired, you are hungry, you are dirty, and now you have to decide what you are going to do next.”

For the region’s many Latino workers, about one-quarter to one-half are living in difficult situations, said Herbert Romero, co-founder of the Hispanic LatinUS Leadership Task Force of Blaine County, a group that works with the community. He said he had seen up to 10 people living in two-bedroom mobile homes. Others are living on couches. Some have been living in vehicles.

Ricky Williams, 37, grew up in the region before moving away and starting a career in firefighting. A year ago, he and his wife planned a return to the Sun Valley area, anticipating a high cost of living but still unprepared for what they would find. He recalled checking out one dilapidated home that was on the market for $750,000 — well beyond their budget with him as a full-time firefighter and his wife as a small-business owner — and there was a rush of potential buyers on the day it was available to see. He said the couple was lucky to get one of the Fire Department’s existing housing units, paying discounted rent to live next to a fire station in exchange for being on call outside regular work hours.

Mr. Williams said he feared what was becoming of his hometown as he watched people priced out and moving away. “It’s affected so many of my friends and family,” he said. “I came back here to this community to give back to the community. And I kind of see it slowly dwindling away. It’s pretty heartbreaking.”

 

[EMSC]

Similar stories are shared all across the big resorts of the west. Thing I don't get from that article is that in Colo it makes for a lot of hour commutes for resort town workers. They keep moving further 'down valley' to afford it. Why would workers only be willing to live in Ketchum or Hailey as implied in the story (just barely down the road)? In Colo they'd be living in picabo, carey, shoshone or heck even Twin Falls. The commute wouldn't be super fun, but the higher pay rates in the the millionaire/billionaire zones in theory would make it worthwhile.

A lot of it is hyper-local anti-development forces pushing to limit housing stock/building of any kind (and in a couple Colo locales, literally starting to run out of buildable land). By the time you get just south of Hailey it really opens up and could support significant housing barring local NIMBY-ism. Residential water usage would also likely be much lower than the current irrigation heavy farms there too.

 

[ChrisC]

Thought this was interesting. Sun Valley was going to redesign its Warm Springs lifts system for next year.

"The Sun Valley Company and US Forest Service are soliciting public comments on an ambitious plan to redesign lift service on the Warm Springs side of Bald Mountain. First, a new Challenger six place chairlift is proposed to replace the aging Challenger and Greyhawk detachable quads. Challenger is no ordinary chairlift – it services more vertical than any other chair in North America – 3,142 vertical feet in nine minutes. Greyhawk runs parallel to Challenger for its first 1,488 feet of vertical. Both Lift Engineering-turned-Doppelmayr detachables date back to 1988. The wider gauge Challenger would feature a mid-unloading station at the top of the Upper Greyhawk and move 2,400 skiers per hour.

The project also includes a new Flying Squirrel/Lift A detachable quad. The original Flying Squirrel opened in 1972 and operated until February 1st, 2014, when it was destroyed by a drive terminal fire. The lift was removed the following offseason but never replaced. The A quad would follow a modified alignment, loading at the base of Warm Springs and terminating near the top of Picabo’s Street and Flying Squirrel. It would move up to 1,800 skiers per hour and provide key redundancy out of the base area. The Flying Squirrel run would be extended downhill to the bottom of Warm Springs and the new lift’s load point. New snowmaking would also be included."