Plan the Perfect Sun Valley Winter Adventure
Click into central Idaho’s legendary ski zone and cultural epicenter
Kevin Syms, Courtesy of Sun Valley Lodge
Many alpine destinations in the West will hook you up with demo skis, a stylish hotel room, and a crackling fire, but few do it with the panache of Sun Valley, Idaho. The idyllic valley in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains has been welcoming the rich and famous (along with plenty of regular folks) since Sun Valley Resort opened in 1936. The area’s towns have earned a reputation for being low-key celebrity hideouts (at one time for Ernest Hemingway and Gary Cooper, and, more recently, for Bruce Springsteen, Jodie Foster, and Tom Hanks). But it’s getting ever more enticing for the sort of person who doesn’t have a personal chef (or their own private slope). The most recent hotel arrivals are smart without feeling exclusive, and new breweries, design shops, and performance venues are adding lively places to hang with the crowd. Mostly here for the powder? There’s exciting news on that front too.
Courtesy of the Warfield Distillery & Brewery
Must-Try Drinks
It’s no surprise that visitors here tend to crave something classic (Manhattans!) or Western (tequila shots!) when raising a glass at a bar where golden-era Hollywood stars and renegades once drank. The three-year-old Warfield Distillery & Brewery (warfielddistillery.com) in downtown Ketchum, by contrast, gives the valley a very 21st-century watering hole: ebony booths, exposed brick walls, and gleaming copper piping. Beers like a frisky saison and a strapping Scottish ale meet cocktails emphasizing the distillery’s whistle-clean vodka and gin. Upscale pub dishes, such as chef Sean Temple’s duck confit drumsticks, cap the experience.
Holly Bornemeier/Courtesy of Sun Valley Center
Liberty Theater, in Hailey
A Big Little Arts Hub
For such a small community—the entire county has just 22,000 permanent residents—the area’s creative output is impressive. Much of the thanks goes to Sun Valley Center for the Arts (sunvalleycenter.org), Idaho’s largest arts organization, which brings in phenomenal exhibitions, outdoor installations, music, dance, film, and lectures. The nonprofit expanded further last year, when actor Bruce Willis gifted it with the painstakingly restored Liberty Theater in Hailey, a neon art deco dream that’s home to the Company of Fools drama group. For the 2018-2019 season, they’re putting on The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane (Dec 12–30), adapted from Kate DiCamillo’s charming novel about a china rabbit. Meanwhile, the Argyros Performing Arts Center (theargyros.org), is a recently opened, $15 million venue in downtown Ketchum. The central theater, designed by San Francisco–based performance-space gurus at Auerbach Pollock Friedlander, combines clean visuals with a next-gen digital acoustics system from Meyer Sound. The Sun Valley Summer Symphony (svsummersymphony.org) will take it for a spin in February 2019, when the orchestra kicks off its first-ever Winter Festival with both new and classic works.
