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more photosLegacy Park is McCall's showplace, its curving sidewalks carving a path between grassy lawns and a sandy beach on the south shore of Payette Lake.
The Mile High Marina, at its far end, has ski boats and jet skis available for rent.
Photos by John Gottberg Anderson / For The Bulleti
The call of McCall
By John Gottberg Anderson / The Bulletin
Published: September 20. 2009 4:00AM PSTMcCALL, Idaho — “I'm done with summer,” said the woman who stood ahead of me in line at the Common Ground Cafe in this almost-mile-high, central Idaho resort town.
“I am so ready for the snow,” she told the man tending the counter. “I can smell it in the air. I could start skiing tomorrow.”
It was Tuesday, the day after Labor Day. Holiday weekend crowds had returned home to Boise and Spokane. The previous night had been crisp; my car's windshield carried a suggestion of frost when I awoke. But the morning blossomed clear and blue, and it carried the promise of another 80-degree day on the evergreen shores of Payette Lake.
I laughed to myself as I thought about friends back home in Bend, a seven-hour drive west of here. Although many of them are skiers, I had not heard a soul utter the word “winter” in months. Fall had yet to make its entrance. My friends were still reveling in summer's heat, hiking Cascade trails and paddling the Deschutes.
But I discovered this about McCall: Even though it rests upon the shore of one of the Northwest's most stunning inland waters, to its 2,300 year-round residents, it is first and foremost a ski town.
Brundage Mountain, 7,640 feet high, looms over the northwest shore of Payette Lake. The trails that fan through its Lakeview Bowl are easily visible over the masts of sailboats in Mile High Marina. With the summer mountain-biking season having ended at Brundage on Labor Day, area employees are focused on the upcoming ski season, which they hope will begin by Thanksgiving.
Twenty-two miles south, the luxurious Tamarack Resort is, at least temporarily, out of business five years after opening, so Brundage may inherit that area's winter clientele along with its own returnees.
Around and about McCall
Winter wistfulness notwithstanding, I came to one of my favorite small towns in the Pacific Northwest to embrace some of the final days of summer. It had been many years since my last visit; not surprisingly, there have been some changes.
Gratefully, I saw positive change. The town beach and marina have been improved, and a beautiful new ice arena worthy of a much larger city occupies a place of honor nearby. Two venerable hotels, the Shore Lodge and the Hotel McCall, have undergone face-lifts. An impressive mixed-use retail-and-residential plaza awaits tenants in the heart of town.
McCall's main route is state Highway 55, which runs 107 miles from Boise, Idaho's capital city. Coming from the south, the highway enters McCall as Third Street and does an abrupt 90-degree turn to the west when it meets Payette Lake.
To the immediate right is the Hotel McCall, a 19-room bed-and-breakfast hotel built in 1904 by town father Tom McCall — no relation to the late Oregon governor of the same name. Idaho's McCall helped establish a logging industry that provided an economic foundation for this community until the last mill closed in 1977.
Straight ahead is lovely Legacy Park, its curving sidewalks carving a path between a grassy lawn and a sandy beach. West is Lake Avenue, lined for a couple of blocks with restaurants and retail outlets. The Manchester Ice & Event Centre occupies a full city block on the south side of Lake Avenue at State Street.
Opened in 2003, the Manchester center could be the envy of many a small town, not to mention a city like Bend, a winter-sports town without an ice arena. Built with private-foundation funding for $6.2 million, it houses a professional-sized hockey rink, grandstand seating for 650, skating rentals and year-round free public skating and junior hockey competition.
A half-mile west of the rink, the North Fork Payette River, a Snake River tributary, pours out of the lake. The Shore Lodge, which many visitors regard as McCall's finest hotel, occupies the lakeshore just across the Payette River bridge. Built in 1948, the 77-room inn was converted to a private golf resort, the Whitetail Club, in 1999, but reopened to the public in 2008.
Museums and parks
East of the Shore Lodge is the Central Idaho Historical Museum, a national historic site of eight buildings constructed in 1936 and 1937 by the Civilian Conservation Corps. Once the official summer home of the Idaho governor and headquarters for a timber conservation organization, the site now features exhibits on the McCall area's logging and mining history. A statue honoring the CCC is at the foot of a “Foresters' Walk” identifying trees native to local forests.
Idaho's forests are well protected. The McCall Smokejumper Base — one of just eight in the United States (another is adjacent to the Roberts Field airport in Redmond) — welcomes visitors (by appointment) for weekday tours of its training facilities, including a “paraloft” and an air tanker facility. One of its former smokejumpers is author Clay Morgan, whose wife, astronaut Barbara Morgan, became the first designated Teacher in Space in 2007. The couple maintain dual residences in McCall and Boise.
Legacy Park, beside the Hotel McCall, is the town's showplace. Its white-sand beach extends more than 500 feet to the Mile High Marina, where jet skis, water-ski boats and pontoon boats are available for rent. Many summer residents keep their sailboats moored at this marina, ready for voyages on the blue waters of 6¼-mile-long Payette Lake.
Carved by glaciers more than 10,000 years ago, Payette Lake is 300 feet deep — yet its surface freezes between December and April. The main body of the lake is separated from its East Arm, like a mitten from its thumb, by Ponderosa State Park, a 1,000-acre peninsula just two miles from downtown McCall.
Old-growth pine, fir and spruce trees shelter scores of campsites. The park has boat launches, youth camps, wildlife-watching areas and miles of trails for hikers and bikers. Osprey Cliff, at the end of a five-mile, partially gravel-topped road from the park's visitor center, offers a spectacular view of the lake's west arm.
Up in the mountains
Brundage Mountain opened as a ski resort in 1961, and it is widely regarded as Idaho's second-leading winter-sports destination after Sun Valley. It's still a family-style area, owned by descendants of Idaho pioneers, and it has avoided corporate intervention partly by staying small.
Even after 48 years in business, Brundage has just five chairlifts. Two of them, including the Lakeview Lift that overlooks Payette Lake, were added in 2007. Its 1,500 acres (less than half the size of Mount Bachelor) include mostly intermediate runs. Plans to add another lift to the apex of adjacent 7,803-foot Sargent's Mountain will open more expert runs while increasing the area's vertical drop to nearly 2,000 feet.
Winter snowfall regularly exceeds 300 inches, but in summer, the resort is snow-free. From Memorial Day through Labor Day, the Blue Bird Express quad chair carries mountain bikers to the Brundage Mountain summit. Here they can take in the view from a fire lookout tower before beginning a challenging descent down an established set of bike trails.
Brundage is just eight miles from downtown McCall: four miles west on Highway 55 and another four miles north on Goose Lake Road. In normal winter driving conditions, it takes about 20 minutes; in summer, about 15 minutes. And it's not even the nearest ski area to town. That honor falls to the Little Ski Hill, just three miles from McCall on Highway 55. Established in 1937, a year after Sun Valley, it has a single T-bar serving a 400-foot hill.
McCall is an ideal location for a winter carnival. Indeed, it has had one every year since 1924. Extending for 10 days, the fest includes parades, fireworks, live music, skijoring and snowshoe-golf competitions, a snowman-building contest, the Idaho state snow-sculpting championships — and lots of eating and drinking. Next year's carnival will begin Jan. 29.
Long Valley and Tamarack
McCall sits at the head of Long Valley, settled by Finnish homesteaders in the 1880s. Their legacy may be viewed in the old-town site of Roseberry, 1½ miles east of the village of Donnelly (about 12 miles south of McCall) on Farm to Market Road.
The Roseberry General Store stands where it was built in 1905, selling gumballs, long-handled underwear and Finnish knives. The Valley County Museum, across the road, incorporates an old schoolhouse and Methodist-Episcopal church. Nearly 20 other historic structures are scattered about the junction of East Roseberry Road. (It's open weekends through September, then closes again until May.)
Long Valley extends about 35 miles from north to south, five miles from east to west. At its heart is Lake Cascade, a reservoir created in 1948 by the earthen Cascade Dam. At its foot is Cascade, a town of only about 1,000 people that is, nevertheless, the Valley County seat.
In recent years, the chief claim to fame of the Lake Cascade-area has been the Tamarack Resort, hailed as the first major new U.S. ski resort in decades when it opened in 2004. But when the ownership group defaulted on a $250 million loan from a consortium led by Credit Suisse, it went into receivership in February 2008. It closed its doors March 4 of this year.
Today, only a skeleton staff remains for security and limited maintenance of the 21st-century ghost town. In Tamarack's village center, an abandoned construction crane hovers above elaborate resort hotels and condominiums covered with Dupont Tyvek siding. One hotel, the Lodge at Osprey Meadows, remains open; it serves visitors to Tamarack's championship golf course. Otherwise, there's little here but a zip-line concession.
Tamarack once held tremendous promise. Handsome mountain homes line the lanes that climb a handsome ski mountain, larger than Brundage. Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf were among the investors here. The international tennis stars were building a luxury hotel.
The future of Tamarack is uncertain at best. The future of McCall, however, seems assured. Winter or summer, the lovely resort town on Idaho's Payette Lake will continue to be a favorite of visitors from throughout the Pacific Northwest — and beyond.
John Gottberg Anderson can be reached at janderson@bendbulletin.com.
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