Ketchum Keystone, March 16, 1882
Snow, snow, snow.
Winter lingereth in the lap of spring.
Uncle Sam's mails have been late again, twice this week.
Every stage brings in returning Ketchumites who have been spending the winter in some warmer climate.
The late snowstorm is answerable for many a blockage caused by shoveling out trails between business places and residences.
A number of snow slides have occurred along the line between Champagne and Fish Creek station. A short distance below Mountain spring station a slide completely covered the stage road for a space of several hundred feet and about twenty feet deep.
In mountain resorts like Sun Valley, observations and interest in the vagaries of the weather border on the obsessive.
When your passion is skiing, as it is for so many in places like this, and the season is brief and almost wholly dependent on nature's most whimsical act - the production of snowflakes - then it is understandable for folks to be concerned, if not obsessed, with winter's weather.
Like tornadoes in Oklahoma and hurricanes in Florida, heavy snows in the Rockies - or "dumps" as we call them here - are events that occur with some regularity but no precise predictability.
Fifty-four years before there was a Sun Valley in Idaho, and long before Forest Service rangers began taking note of the weather in these parts, intrepid newspapers provided the earliest accounts of snowfall and how it affected the lives of the small mining camps that populated the region.
First of these was the Ketchum Keystone…
Listen to winter.
Sometimes it howls, sometimes it hails.
But mostly, it whispers.
