Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
In any case, Ketchum was touristy, though Sun Valley itself proved to be most agreeable.
It was built as a ski resort in the 1930s by the Union Pacific Railroad as a way of enticing
peopletotraveltotheregionduringthewinter.Itcertainlyhasabeautifulsetting,inabowl
ofjaggedmountains,andissupposedtohavesomeofthebestskiinginthecountry.People
like Clint Eastwood and Barbra Streisand have houses there. Ilooked in a window in a real
estate office and didn't see anything for sale for less than $250,000.
The town part of Sun Valley-it's really just a little shopping center-is built to look like a
Bavarian village. I found it oddly charming. As so often with these things in America, it
was supe rior to a real Bavarian village. There were two reasons for this: (1) It was better
builtandmorepicturesque;and(2)theinhabitantsofSunValleyhaveneveradoptedAdolf
Hitlerastheirleaderorsenttheirneighborsoffforgassing.WereIaskierandrich,Iwould
on these grounds alone unhesitatingly choose it over Garmisch-Partenkirchen, say. In the
meantime, being poor and skiless, there was nothing much for me to do but poke around in
the shops. For the most part these sold swish skiing outfits and expensive gifts-things like
large pewter elk for $t00 and lead crystal paperweights at $150—and the people who ran
them were those snooty types who watch you as if they think you might do a poo in the
corner given half a chance. Understandably, this soured me on the place and I declined to
make any purchases. “Your loss, not mine,” I murmured sniffily as I left.
Idaho is another big state-550 miles from top to bottom, 300 miles across at the base-and
it took me the rest of the day just to drive to Idaho Falls, near the border with Wyoming.
En route I passed the little town of Arco, which on December 20, 1951 became the first
town in the world to be lighted with nuclearpowered electricity, supplied by the world's
first peacetime nuclear reactor at a site ten miles southwest of town at the Idaho National
Engineering Laboratory. The name is misleading because the so-called laboratory covers
severalhundredsquaremilesofscrubbychaparralandisactuallythebiggestnucleardump
in the country. The highway between Arco and Idaho Falls runs for forty miles alongside
the complex, but it is lined by high fences interspersed with military-style checkpoints.
In the far distance stand large buildings where, presumably, workers in white spacesuits
wander around in rooms that look like something out of a James Bond film.
I didn't realize it at the time, but the US government had recently admitted that plutonium
had been found to be leaking from one of the storage facilities on the site and was working
its way downward through the ground to a giant subterranean reservoir, which supplies the
water for tens of thousands of people in southern Idaho. Plutonium is the most lethal sub-
stance known to man-a spoonful of it could wipe out a city. Once you make some plutoni-
um,youhavetokeepitsafefor250,000years.TheUnitedStatesgovernmenthadmanaged
