Hailey, ID
Ketchum classic since 1955. Sun Valley resort and Hemingway's final home are nearby.
Sun Valley was America's first destination ski resort (1936). Ernest Hemingway spent his final years here and is buried in the Ketchum Cemetery. The airport approach through the Wood River Valley is surrounded by peaks above 10,000ft.
Ernest Hemingway spent his final years in Ketchum, Idaho. He wrote parts of 'A Moveable Feast' here and is buried in the Ketchum Cemetery beneath a simple stone marker. The Wood River Valley that surrounds Ketchum was Hemingway's ideal landscape — big mountains, clear streams, and open sky. Sun Valley Lodge, where he often wrote, is visible from pattern altitude at Friedman Memorial.
A vast ocean of black lava on the Snake River Plain, so strange that NASA sent Apollo astronauts here in 1969 to learn the basics of volcanic geology before walking on the actual Moon. The lava isn't from a single volcano but from the Great Rift, a deep crack in the Earth that has erupted repeatedly over the last 15,000 years (most recently about 2,000 years ago, and geologists expect it will again). The result is 600 square miles of cinder cones, spatter cones, lava tubes, and frozen black flows dotted with islands of sagebrush — an otherworldly moonscape in the middle of Idaho. You can hike Inferno Cone for a 360° view over the flows, or descend into lava-tube caves where ice survives the summer.
Idaho's crown jewel: a range of jagged pink-granite spires — over 50 peaks above 10,000 feet, sawing into the sky in a skyline that gave the range its name — cradling more than 400 alpine lakes carved by Ice Age glaciers. Below the peaks sits Redfish Lake, a glacial lake of startling clarity named for the sockeye salmon that once turned it red when they spawned, having swum 900 miles up the Columbia and Snake from the Pacific — one of the longest and highest salmon migrations on Earth. The little town of Stanley, on the Salmon River at the range's foot, is a classic Western mountain hamlet. The Sawtooth National Recreation Area protects it all, alongside the vast Frank Church–River of No Return Wilderness, the largest in the lower 48.
Shoshone Falls drops 212 feet over a basalt rim that is wider than Niagara — about 900 feet at full flow — earning it the local name "Niagara of the West." The Snake River carved the canyon during the Bonneville Flood 14,500 years ago, the same catastrophic drainage that left the Bonneville Salt Flats. The canyon at Twin Falls is 500 feet deep and a quarter-mile across. The Perrine Memorial Bridge, completed in 1976 at 486 feet above the river, replaced a 1927 truss bridge and is one of only a few US bridges where BASE jumping is legal year-round. On September 8, 1974, Evel Knievel attempted to jump the canyon eastward in a steam-powered "Skycycle X-2" rocket; the drogue parachute deployed seconds after launch and Knievel drifted back to crash on the north rim, breaking his nose. The ramp foundation still stands.