Traveling Smart / Close To Home -- Homage To Hemingway In Ketchum, Idaho

KETCHUM, Idaho - On a summer day in 1961, a bloated, sick and depressed Ernest Hemingway took out his favorite shotgun, pressed it to himself and pulled the trigger.

The town of Ketchum hadn't planned to build a tourist industry around the suicide of a Nobel Prize-winning author. But for more than three decades, fans of "Papa" have trekked to the Idaho mountains to delve into the writer's dashing life and violent death.

They walk up the gravel road at the tiny Ketchum Cemetery. A gray granite slab amid a small stand of pine in the middle of the cemetery says: "Ernest Miller Hemingway, July 21, 1899-July 2, 1961."

Hemingway was 40 when he came to Ketchum as a world-famous author whose best writing was arguably already behind him. The developers of the Sun Valley Lodge asked Hemingway up in September 1939 as a kind of living tourist attraction. He brought his mistress, journalist Martha Gellhorn, and set up shop in suite 206.

While in Idaho he wrote portions of "For Whom the Bell Tolls," "Islands in the Stream" and "A Moveable Feast." A minor short story about a hunting party, "The Shot," is one of the few pieces set primarily in the Ketchum area.

The writer made promotional films for the Sun Valley Lodge. But in later years, as he wrote less and the checks became fewer and smaller, he moved to not-so-swank digs at what is now the Sun Valley Inn and the Ketchum Korral motel.

Work and travel in Africa and Cuba kept him away from Idaho for most of the 1950s, but he finally settled in Ketchum in 1959. Two years later, he was dead.

But many of his haunts still survive. Visitors can stay in the Sun Valley Lodge's suite 206, known today as the Parlour Suite, for $309 per night.

Hemingway ate and drank his way through most of the establishments in the area. The Duchin Bar at the Sun Valley Lodge and the smoky, rough-hewn Casino Bar in downtown Ketchum were among his favorite watering holes.

Outdoor types can fish and hunt along Silver Creek, about a half-hour south of Ketchum, just as Hemingway did. More sedentary pleasures can be had over coffee and one of Hemingway's tomes at the Main Street Bookcafe.

Travelers can't visit the most important Hemingway site in Ketchum: His former house off Warm Spring Road is closed to the public under a deal made with the Hemingway family when the 14-acre property was purchased by the Nature Conservancy in 1986. But the house can be glimpsed amid the trees by driving south on Highway 75 and looking up the hill to the right above the Northwoods development, just before crossing Warm Springs Road.

Perhaps the most moving reminder of Hemingway's time in Idaho is the simple stone memorial to him near Trail Creek, about two miles from the Sun Valley Lodge. A bronze bust of the writer sits atop a rough stone pedestal next to the slow-moving stream amid a beautiful aspen grove.

Inscribed are the words Hemingway wrote for the funeral oration for a friend killed in a hunting accident in 1939, but which could also be said of the troubled man who sought but never found peace in Ketchum:

"Best of all he loved the fall

The leaves yellow on the cottonwoods

Leaves floating on the trout streams

And above the hills

The high windless sky

Now he is part of them forever."

--------- IF YOU GO ---------

Hemingway's Ketchum

-- A first stop should be the Main Street Bookcafe, 211 N. Main St., to pick up a $5.95 copy of "Ernest Hemingway in Idaho" by local historian Marsha Bellavance-Johnson. It's a handy book with map.

-- If you have the greenbacks, stay at the Sun Valley Lodge or less-plush Sun Valley Inn, (208) 622-4111. Rooms start at $100 in high season and go up to the $309-per-night Parlour Suite in the Lodge. Rooms at the more rustic Ketchum Korral Motor Lodge, 310 S. Main St., (208) 726-3510, begin at $50.

-- The Sun Valley Lodge and its Duchin Bar were Hemingway haunts, as was the Casino Bar and Whisky Jacques in the 200 block of North Main Street. When he was out with his family, Hemingway often chose Christiania Restaurant, 303 Walnut Ave., (208) 726-3388. Traveling Smart / Close to Home focuses on topics in the Pacific Northwest on the third Tuesday of the month.