Ketchum is the small town below the big ski mountain, at about 1,800 metres in the Wood River Valley of central Idaho, and it is best known for two things: skiing, and Ernest Hemingway. The writer first came in the late 1930s as a guest of the new Sun Valley resort, returned often, and settled here in his last years. He died in Ketchum in 1961 and is buried in the town cemetery, under a simple slab that visitors still leave pennies and bottles on. A memorial to him stands nearby in the woods beside Trail Creek.
Skiing came earlier than the writers. In 1936 the Union Pacific Railroad, searching for a place to build an American answer to the Alpine resorts, sent an Austrian count to scout the West, and he picked the valley behind Ketchum. The result was Sun Valley, which opened that winter with the world's first chairlifts, adapted from the contraptions used to load bananas onto ships. The town that grew beside it took its own name from David Ketchum, a trapper who had a cabin in the area in the 1860s. Today Ketchum has the feel of a place that is half mining town, half resort, with log lodges and low brick shops on the main street, expensive boutiques, cheerful bars and mountain bikes everywhere.
The roads here are some of the best in Idaho. Highway 75, the Sawtooth Scenic Byway, runs north from Ketchum up the Big Wood River to Galena Summit and then down into the Sawtooth Valley, and it is a beautiful, easy ride of long, smooth curves through lodgepole forest, with the jagged Sawtooth Mountains appearing ahead. South toward Hailey, the road follows the valley through a broad landscape of aspen and sagebrush. Summer is warm and dry with cool evenings, autumn brings golden aspen, and winter is for skiers, with snow and ice on the roads. Tourist traffic is heavy at weekends.
Ketchum has petrol, supermarkets, coffee shops, restaurants and every kind of lodging, from hostels to grand hotels, though prices are not low. Hailey, about eighteen kilometres to the south, is bigger and a little cheaper. Stock up here before heading north, because the next services are at Stanley, a long way off. Allow time to wander the main street, and if you are in town in September, the light on the hills is lovely.