When I drove into the Sun Valley parking lot with Ward Baker in January 1947, I had no idea that I would spend the next three winters there.
On the road from Ketchum to Warm Springs, there was only one building after the Bigwood River Bridge. There was no reason for anyone to live out there because there was no electricity or water beyond the bridge. The ground was pretty fallow and, as they said, it wasn’t even good enough to grow potatoes in.
The following summer, ski instructor Leon Goodman built what I recall was the first house there. Prices of real estate were still working against moving that far out of town because you could still buy a vacant lot in Ketchum in the $500 range. I bought my first piece of property in Ketchum on Trail Creek and the road to Hailey for $350 a couple of years later.
Owen Simpson, Jack Simpson’s father, upgraded a casino on Main Street in Ketchum the first winter I was there and the next summer the town shut them down so they built a gambling hall halfway to Hailey out of Ketchum’s jurisdiction. This was also short-lived and so they decided to build a large, log gambling casino in the middle of Warm Springs and fly gamblers there from Elko and Jackpot, Nev. By the time they got that giant casino built, Ketchum had annexed Warm Springs and prohibited gambling there, as well.
Eventually, the building was moved south of Ketchum just past my little log cabin on Trail Creek on the east side of the road to Hailey and became a large real estate office.
My history is vague on this point, but I think the next resident in Warm Springs was either Ernest Hemingway’s son, Jack, or a doctor whose specialty was putting legs back together before the invention of release bindings.
When Bill Janss bought Sun Valley in 1964 one of the first things he did was build a chairlift on the Warm Springs side of the mountain and created one of the best ski runs anywhere in the world. I think it climbed to 3,000 vertical feet in 10 or 12 minutes and that chairlift is the first one I rode with my soon-to-be wife, Laurie, during the Christmas holidays in 1984. The first time she said I’ll meet you at the bottom, I realized I’d met an attractive lady who I couldn’t begin to keep up with on a pair of skis and I still can’t keep up with her in many ways, after all of these years.
When I look at ski photographs of the late 1930s when Sun Valley was first developed, it helps you understand why they didn’t even look at Mount Baldy to develop at first because 1938 equipment couldn’t handle runs that steep. It would be five years after Dollar Mountain had the first chairlift invented before the first chairlift appeared on Baldy.
Ward Baker and I spent two years living in the Sun Valley parking lot and skiing seven days a week. In the early years before they built the Warm Springs’ lift, occasionally there would be a 4:15 bus from the bottom of Warm Springs back to Sun Valley and we could go out of bounds and ski top to bottom; though no area was considered out of bounds back then.
The year that I wanted to be a ski racer I can remember thinking that last run down College or to Warm Springs to the bottom meant skiing at 6 or 8 mph with snow plow turns nonstop. I knew nothing about getting in shape, but after skiing from 8:30 in the morning until 3:30 in the afternoon, I always figured I would be in good shape if I could handle that many snow plow turns. My self-imposed training method worked for me and after a year of just skiing, I spent the next year racing and the third year at Sun Valley teaching on Dollar Mountain.
Ward and I would shadow ski classes and listen to what the instructor told each individual pupil when they finished their run and apply it to what we thought we might be doing. Fortunately, we each had an 8mm motion picture camera and we’d film each other and look at them in the lobby of the skier’s chalet and correct our bumbling mistakes.
After I bought my vacant lot on Trail Creek with a great view of Baldy, I had planned on settling there someday before I’d established my film business that took me all over the world. When I produced a film for Bill Janss at Sun Valley the first time he showed it, he sold what became Elkhorn to Johns Manville for the same price that he paid for all of Sun Valley. He eventually sold me 11 acres on the back side of Baldy, from which I developed some amazing Baldy-view lots.
When Laurie and I got together, we decided to not settle down in Sun Valley because I had my circle of friends of my previous marriage and so did she. On a press trip to Vail, Colo., we thought we should start over at a different part of the world with all new friends. That worked for us and when the opportunity came to help pioneer the world’s only private ski and golf club at the Yellowstone Club, we would’ve been foolish to say no. And, after a few bumps in the road, that has turned out to be a good decision, especially because we’ve made amazing friends there and the mountain is terrific.
After traveling the world of ski resorts with my camera and a rucksack for 50 years, I still think Baldy is one of the best place to turn right and left.
Warren Miller is history’s most prolific and enduring ski filmmaker. Visit warrenmiller.net or his Facebook page at facebook.com/warrenmiller. Read more of Warren’s stories at TheTahoeWeekly.com.
