KETCHUM, ID – It’s 5:30 pm on an April Saturday and downtown Ketchum, Idaho is deserted.
Really. It’s empty. Ketchum! We’re talking Scooby Doo episode empty. Nuthin’ shakin’ on Shakedown Street…or the intersection of Main and Sun Valley Road for that matter.
Color me shocked. There is still one day left in the season and almost half the trails are still open at Sun Valley. Did Rory winning the Masters send everyone to the golf course instead?
Golf fans out there, don’t answer that!
Of course, as I exit the restaurant, oh look at that there are not one, but two cars…and both are pulled over by separate police vehicles and getting tickets. That’s Ketchum, baby. As in “Ketchum if they go one mile over the speed limit…and no rolling stops!”
As for me – and I know this sounds like blasphemy, but it’s not – golf can hold off for just a little longer. I’d waited seemingly an eon for my shot at Sun Valley: four years to be exact. And every step closer to my first tango with Idaho’s iconic contribution to World Winter Sports proved more and more difficult, like climbing the mountain on foot. To paraphrase another song from the band I quoted earlier, what a long strange season it’s been for Your Author. Circumstances made it such that Sun Valley’s dance card didn’t get punched until so late in the season. So late that, at least for a few hours, it seemed like I missed everybody and everything.
Sunrise brought the crowds, though, the lot had all but filled to the brim as 9 a.m. arrived, and festivities were in full swing, with good cheer, camaraderie, and smiles everywhere, from the grommets to the grizzled veterans of 100-day seasons. Every costume under the sun came out: Cow and chicken were a cartoonish pair, women skiing in bikinis and Playboy bunny ears, cowboys, astronauts, a galaxy of jerseys from across every sport, and even the Kool-Aid man were shredding.
Yes, the Kool-Aid man. No, he didn’t smash through anything.
My favorite was a quartet of Colonial minutemen…actually minutewomen…fresh from Yorktown, according to them. They embraced me warmly as a comrade in arms when I jokingly informed them of college thesis on the Battle of Oriskany and the lifting of the siege of Fort Stanwix. They were also among the strongest skiers on the mountain that day, and they dove into the deepest bowls with gusto run after run.
Amazingly, their tricorn hats stayed on their heads!
The Warm Springs side of the mountain had the Flying Squirrel, Challenger and Lookout chairs spinning for the final fling of the season and, after an initial bit of iciness in spots – the shadowy Canyon trail was a bobsled run when we took it to start the day – the snow corned up nicely, and it turned into a day when you wanted your yellow wax for the smoothest ride.
Easter Bowl and Christmas Bowl saw the most action during the morning, although Cow and Chicken took a hilariously wild run down the park features, much to the delight of everyone following them, howling with laughter at their ungainly antics on the features. The trio of Greyhawk, Hemingway, and Cozy warmed up early, yet did not see much action until after lunch, making them the prime locale for early birds seeking to beat the crowds and get some untouched tracks. Of course there was plenty of action on Picabo Street, Limelight, and Flying Squirrel.
And of course, everyone was still abuzz with the warm afterglow of March’s glorious Sun Valley FIS World Cup Finals.
“The races were an all-around success. First, the return of Mikaela Shiffrin and Lindsay Vonn from serious injuries and winning the slalom and finishing second in the Super G respectively excited and energized everyone,” stated veteran sports writer and Sun Valley historian John Lundin when asked to identify the defining moments of the races. “Better still, the American fans impressed everyone with their good cheer and sportsmanship. The Europeans all told the media that in their own countries, the fans root for whoever is the local favorite in that country. The Sun Valley fans cheered everyone heartily, and they cheered for everyone, regardless of country.”
That’s Idaho for you. And that’s America’s stoke for you. We gold medal in Stoke every time.
Of course, no ski trip is complete without making friends on the chairlift. First, my puckishness got the best of me, and when four college kids in jeans pounding White Claws rode up with me asking if I saw any sick gnar, I sent them over to Canyon. When I told them it was a sheet of ice when I was on it before, their eyes lit up.
And on another ride up, I met a lady who gave me my Easter dinner recommendation – Fiamma Ristorante, just off Second Street in downtown Ketchum, and this was a flat-out winner. Head chef and co-owner Britt Recigno has become a regular on Food Network competitions. In 2019 she beat Bobby Flay on his own show “Beat Bobby Flay.”
“I made chicken and dumplings,” she recalled chuckling. That win qualified her for her first Food Network Tournament of Champions, where it happens she has now become a regular fixture.
As it happened, Easter Sunday was also the air date for the Final of Food Network’s 2025 Tournament of Champions, and Recigno was – again! – one of the finalists. Much of Ketchum was agog with anticipation and watch parties as the hours crept past before the final. Sadly, Britt was runner-up, but Fiamma, which she opened March 5 with her wife Kinsey, is a smash hit and an imperative when visiting Sun Valley.
“tt’s certainly taken the town by storm,” added Lundin, also a Ketchum resident and local bon vivant. “I recommend sitting at the bar and people watching.”
So, although it was only a quick hit for my first shred of Sun Valley, and despite only a small section of the mountain still open, Sun Valley rocked; I’m only too grateful to call it my new home mountain. You can spend the rest of your life learning all there is to study about its rich history, and historic Ketchum has countless treasures into which to delve deeply.
I could wax poetic for a few more thousand words, but for now, my Facebook post was a good capstone:
“Whiteface Mt.: Jay calls us his beloved.
Sun Valley: Hold my beer…”
***BONUS! DATELINE: BRIGHTON, UT***
Golf has Pebble Beach’s 17 Mile Drive, skiing has the 16 miles of Big Cottonwood Canyon Road, and both are equally stunningly gorgeous and iconic in their respective sport.
For American public golfers, Pebble Beach is a Holy Grail of sorts, indisputably one of the most beautiful courses in the world, and the anticipation gets ratcheted into the stratosphere as you slowly wind your way among the cypress trees of the Del Monte Forest and the pristine, sandy coastal beaches before emerging at the resort. The excitement of the drive is not just palpable but downright euphoric.
Likewise, the drive up BCCR from SLC past Solitude and arriving at Brighton is to skiers what 17 Mile Drive is to golfers; it’s the stoking of the Stoke. Dangerously windy, criminally narrow, and side-walled by rugged rock formations that seem as if to move in front of your car as you wind ever upwards, it spirals ever higher and higher until it finally emerges at the rocky face of the peaks – mighty Mount Millicent on your right looming ominously, the rest of the resort spread out along the left in a vast crescent shape, Pioneer Ridge, Preston Peak, Snake Ridge Pass, and finally, Clayton Peak and the Great Western Express.
Like Sun Valley, this was my first sojourn into the Wasatches for a ski trip. Brighton was celebrating the end of season with “May Meltdown” a two-week bacchinalia, with a particular emphasis on highlighting the resorts most excellent park features. That alone drew legendary local boarders, USNT members returning from injury, and a smattering of old school X gamers, freestylers, and ragers excited for one last shred and hang. This is the pulse of the late season zeitgeist.
I got my invite to the party from Jamie Enwright, a young rising star of a female multi-sport athlete: climber, boarder, fisherwoman, superstar. Girl can shred madly. And later this summer she’ll be marrying a local Brighton legend/mountain ops guru/wild man. Jarvis, as his friends call him could do the work of three mountain ops men, he’s so technically skilled, physically fit, and operationally organized. He was so beloved as an employee, they looked the other way when, mourning the loss of his grandfather who had died earlier that day, he got drunk at the lodge bar, then took a snowmobile for a joyride.
Talk about two angelic free spirits meeting, both of whom are whirling dervishes on a snowboard, their wedding looks to be the outdoorsy event of the season, at least for skiers and boarders.
But several other USNT members were hanging out as well. Sam Worthington, daughter of two-time Olympian and multi-world cup freestyle champion Trace Worthington and Hanna Faulhaber were both on mountain and recovering well from injuries.
“I landed wrong doing a 720 in New Zealand,” Worthington recalled laconically. You could see the grit and focus in her eyes as she finished booting up and heading out. Meanwhile I was totes jelly about her skiing New Zealand; Coronet Peak and the Remarkables look pretty sweet. (Look it up on Google, and add it to your bucket list.) Faulhaber had equally lean and hungry look about her as well, that ferocity that an elite athlete commands and controls to channel into a podium worthy performance. Watch out, world, the U.S. ladies are lionesses, and they are back on the prowl.
The Crest chair, the only lift spinning, terminates just short of Preston Peak’s summit. Sadly, the Snake Bowl wasn’t open, but the entirety of the pod based at that broad shoulder of the mountain was, including all the major park runs. Your Author’s favorite run was Wintergreen, steep and bumpy. But My Oh My was where the majority of high-flying, whirling dervish-spinning action took place.
Not by me. I just watch the park rats. Although I did take a hair-raising run down My Oh My once during the trip, carefully hitting the smaller corners of some features and slithering completely around others. In the entire nation of park runs I’ve taken, is there a narrower, steeper, windier one than My Oh My?
“Oh yeah, My Oh My,” gushed jarvis with a knowing look. “Lot of great boarders have wrecked on My Oh My.” Jarvis knows first-hand; he was nursing a barking left shoulder after a crash the week before. That left Jamie and the other girls to fire the stoke, on the upper mountain as well as the vast panoply of features located just below, on the Majestic line.
Unlike Sun Valley, everything on the Brighton trail map skis and rides a little harder than expected. That’s great for experts, but everyone else, take the trail designations seriously. Cat skiing and back country/side country excursions are available deep into the Wasatch Mountains. Brighton has a pass that allows access to Solitude as well.
The Brighton Lodge is no frills, but is convenient, comfortable, slopeside, and has a huge hot tub. You will need to leave the Lodge for meals; three miles away, right on Big Cottonwood Canyon Drive is the Silver Fork, but most folks regard the Porcupine, located at the base of Big Cottonwood Canyon Road in SLC as the most popular location for apres, other than Molly Green’s right in the Crest ski lodge, of course.
There are no TVs in your sleeping quarters at the Brighton Lodge, but there is a large common room with a huge smart TV. On Tuesday night I hooked up my laptop and screened Talking Heads’ seminal rock concert video “Stop Making Sense” for everyone, turning the lodge into a dance party. Happily, your hosts at the lodge are big-time, old school rock music aficionados. One of them had just rolled in from seeing shows at the Sphere in Vegas. But that’s Brighton for you – like I said…they always have their finger exactly on the pulse of the zeitgeist.
Brighton is an absolute imperative when thinking about skiing or boarding the SLC scene. Bigger seldom means better, and Brighton’s incredible terrain punches far above its weight class. If you can ski here, you can ski gnar. And if you can ski gnar, they will love you here.
