Hours of Daylight – 14:55

We spent last weekend up in Ketchum. Annette had a three day conference to attend at the resort at Sun Valley that ended Saturday morning. Perfect! I drove the little truck up on Saturday morning and met her. She had booked one night for us at the goofy “Tyrolean Lodge” so we spent the afternoon bumming around Ketchum and environs during “slack.”

Kayakers and assorted boaters understand slack to be when the tides are turning and the currents approach zero. Slack in Ketchum is when the winter residents have all but departed, but the residual snow prevents the summer revelers from descending on the little town. It’s when the incomes of local businesses approach zero.

But it’s also when the town is at it’s nicest. There are few mamouth SUV’s cavorting on the tiny roads, the number of Ferrari’s and Porsches and Bentleys and G-Class Mercedes drop to near zero as well. Not familiar with the G-Class Mercedes? Pity. We had no problem getting a choice seat at the Pioneer Saloon.

I like Ketchum. Of course the median price of a house there is about $490,000, so the odds of actually living there are slim. But given there are about 5,000 million-plus dollar homes actually occupied only a few weeks each year the odds i might land a “caretaker” position is not outside the realm of possibility. I keep a good house. I appreciate rich-man’s toys. Yeah, whatever.

We were planning on hiking, but we found over three feet of snow still covering every trail we tried, so we drove the little white truck instead to all the places we’d tried to go in the Volvo, but failed. It was fun. I also took a moment to visit the cemetery (it’s right on the only main road, so it’s hard to miss) to pay my respects to a man i don’t know, but have come to admire more and more of late.

We also drove up Galena summit. It was quite cold on top.

Once over Galena you get a pretty spectacular view of the Sawtooth Range. These are not giant mountains, but they present a world-class obstacle to the best laid plans of any traveler not equipped with a snow cat and a reliable map of the available passes. They live up to their name. Steep, rocky and snow covered year-round they form a barrier to east-west travel that has yet to be addressed. Look at a map of the roads in Idaho. Not unlike the coast of Maine you’ll see they run largely north-south. There are reasons for that and the Sawtooth range is one of them.

But we were not worried about the difficulty of crossing the Sawtooths. We were more concerned with what the specials would be at the Ketchum Grill later in the evening and, perhaps more importantly, what wine would we order. And what of desert? Would we go with the tried and trusted creme brulee or would we throw caution to the wind and try the mousse?