How the Threat of Wildfire Unlocked Acres of New Glades at Sun Valley

The sun beamed brightly overhead. South-facing slopes were barren and brown. Like so many other western ski resorts this season, Sun Valley Resort, Idaho, was still waiting for a consistent storm cycle. It felt like spring. Beyond the mountain's calling cards-expertly manicured groomers perfect for some ballroom skiing-the snow wasn't inviting.



Still, I dropped into a freshly gladed swath through the trees called Sheep Camp, following Ford Van Fossan, a program manager with the National Forest Foundation. We hacked our way through the manky, inconsistent snow. A breakable crust grabbed at my skis, so, on each turn, I had to hop or lift them independently. When Van Fossan and I reached the bottom, we both agreed: that was pretty sporty.



The new glades, clearly, weren't at their best. But from the chairlifts and the ridgelines, I could see their potential. As part of a forest health initiative called the Bald Mountain Stewardship Project (BMSP), pockets of thinning appeared all around the resort, inviting skiers to dip off the beaten path and venture into the woods.



"When you're creating greater spacing to mitigate the intensity of future fire, you're creating more space to ski through," Van Fossan, who's working on the project, told me later.



The BMSP started several years ago when Sun Valley Resort and the federal agencies that manage its land-the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management-alongside the National Forest Foundation and local groups, teamed up.



With the project, they've worked to foster a healthier, fire-resilient forest by removing dead and dying trees and planting new ones, among other measures, within and outside Sun Valley's boundaries. Along the way, new runs that further tweaked Bald Mountain's reputation as a groomed run hotspot would be unlocked, satisfying another angle of the BMSP: adding some fun skiing.



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Over time, that's grown to include 380 acres of skiable glades. A clutch of runs in the wooded Olympic area beneath the Roundhouse Express Gondola is the latest addition. Sheep Camp, the one I skied, was among them. A gentle pitch that dove off Olympic Lane, the run has widely-spaced trees-enough to keep you on your toes, but not threaten the risk of a bark sandwich.



"I've actually always loved that area," said Betsy Siszell, Sun Valley's sustainability manager. But, she added, "It was tight. So it's so cool to be exploring it now, where you're just like, Oh, I can now dip in over here. I can check this out."



New terrain at Sun Valley is the most obvious, public-facing aspect of the BMSP. Behind the glades, though, is a plan meant to protect the resort's forests from looming ecological challenges.



Before the effort got underway, two wildfires jolted Sun Valley. After a lightning strike in the summer of 2007, the hills around the ski resort and the town of Ketchum burned. To ward off the flames, the mountain turned on its snowmaking system. Normally, those pipes and hoses pumped out flakes. Now, they were being used to spray water in hopes of saving the iconic resort from the inferno, which at one point came within 50 yards of a lodge.



By September, firefighters had contained that fire-the Castle Rock-but only after it consumed nearly 50,000 acres. Just a few years later, in 2013, another blaze, the Beaver Creek fire, struck, gobbling up more acres.



The fires left the town of Ketchum and Sun Valley largely untouched. They spared the wooded areas of the ski resort, too. But each one showed what could have happened had things gone differently: the razing of the beloved slopes and forest at the heart of Sun Valley. They were, to put it lightly, close calls.



"The mountain didn't, luckily, go up in flames, but it came so close to our community," said Siszell. "I think a lot of people got on their radar like, How are we going to be fire aware? What are we going to do?"



Locals got to work. They dedicated years and volunteer hours to making the BMSP happen. Federal funds from the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management joined contributions from Sun Valley and donations. One Ketchum bakery, Bigwood Bread, led a fundraising campaign. Spurred by wide-ranging support, the BMSP officially got underway.



"You've gotten people who wouldn't be thinking about it, thinking about it, and then also putting their money on the line for it," said Nelson Mills, the timber program manager for the Sawtooth National Forest. "It's amazing to think about how many people started to care about the health of this mountain."

There was plenty to do. The trees on Bald Mountain were dying, a problem tied to extended droughts, insect and disease outbreaks, and more than a century of fire suppression, according to the Forest Service.



Keeping blazes away from Sun Valley makes sense, given the town, resort, and ski lifts. But some kinds of forests can become dense and prone to disease when they don't see natural, lower-intensity fire cycles. And as Sun Valley's trees died, they became fuel for another, perhaps bigger, wildfire that might threaten homes, ecosystems, or people. Thinning tree stands and clearing out debris from the understory, then, was a pillar of the BMSP, with more treatments planned in the future.



But the project doesn't only involve cutting trees. New ones are sprouting, too. Largely, the trees on Bald Mountain were Douglas-fir. They're exposed to specific kinds of bugs, namely the Douglas-fir beetle. By adding new species to the mix, like ponderosa pine, the forest at large becomes more diverse and less susceptible to one kind of insect or disease. To date, crews have planted nearly 50,000 trees through the BMSP.



Methods like this didn't emerge from thin air. Sun Valley hasn't seen a forestry project of this scale, but there have been forest treatments and conversations about management over the years. Mills said, too, that his branch of the Forest Service learned from land managers who work with other ski areas, like Ski Apache, New Mexico, and Monarch Mountain, Colorado.



"There's been information transfer that occurred to help us develop the [BMSP]," said Mills. "We've taken it, applied it to our project, and scaled it to a way that makes large impacts."



And small ones, too, like the little thrill each skier gets from sliding through the trees. After my visit to Sun Valley in February, I called Van Fossan and others to learn more about the BMSP. The forestry details mattered, of course, but since I'd missed a good weather window, I wanted to hear about their experiences with the altered woods.



Van Fossan helped me out. He described the glades as the kind of place you'd go at 10 a.m. on a powder day and find fresh lines. It had snowed in Sun Valley the day we did the virtual interview-a bright spot in an otherwise challenging season-and Van Fossan brought up Sheep Camp, the run we skied together weeks earlier, as an example.



"People were probably ripping it this morning," he said. I nodded along, in a second-floor apartment hundreds of miles away from Sun Valley, likely doing a bad job of hiding my jealousy.

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This story was originally published May 10, 2026 at 3:31 AM.