Secret is out
TAMARACK RESORT, Idaho – The full moon edged above the aspens, casting a silver light across the snow. Platinum hills rose and fell in the distance, sliced by black trails of snowshoe prints.
Suddenly a dark shape skittered across the meadow – a fox. He was after one of the many mouse-like voles tunneling under the snow.
He pawed the snow and pounced, then ran again, at one point coming within 15 feet of us – close enough to see his whiskers twitch in the moonlight.
Yes, I had come to Tamarack to ski, but this moonlight trek across the snowy fields of the resort’s golf course was something special.
Once upon a time, you might have seen a fox hunting for dinner in the middle of Vail or Whistler, but those days disappeared long ago under the shops, restaurants and endless Tyrolean plazas of the mega-resorts.
The search for quiet quality in a resort small enough to navigate on foot has led to a whole new niche of boutique destination spots, the newest of which is Tamarack Resort. Call it Deer Valley by way of the Yellowstone Club, if you wish.
The people who run the place say it is semi-exclusive. What that means is that, unlike the totally exclusive Yellowstone Club, anybody can buy a ticket to ski here (though crowds are prevented by limiting ticket sales to 2,000 a day).
But unlike, say, Vail or Steamboat, you can also (for a fee) join the resort’s club, which leads to all kinds of perks: free lift passes, line-cutting privileges, first tracks so you can ski powder before the masses and more.
Okay, call it the Yellowstone Club for the more common man. Instead of a $300,000 initiation fee, it’s $45,000. However, you still pay $425 monthly dues and are committed to buying property and building on it – not exactly in the range of your average middle-class worker, but still within the grasp of many.
And the word is out. Was that tennis star Andre Agassi who I nearly bowled over in the sport shop?
Well, yes. He was getting winter gear for his kids. Agassi and wife, Steffi Graf, ski and ride here regularly when not helping develop the five-star Fairmont Hotel being built at the resort.
President Bush (the younger) mountain biked here three summers ago.
“He’s got the body of a marathon runner,” one surprised local said, adding that Bush managed to ride the Idaho governor into the ground.
What separates Tamarack, 94 miles north of Boise in west central Idaho, from so many boutique areas is the skiing.
No, it will never compete with Jackson Hole or Whistler for heart-stopping expert terrain, but, wow, the runs here do hold your interest.
Boutique skiing is often boring skiing. After all, how much time does your average middle-aged buyer of a vacation home have to devote to becoming an expert skier?
But Tamarack’s terrain, even the cruisers, will never put you to sleep.
The ski area is basically a mile-long, 2,800-foot high ridge with runs and tree glades down the face. But while the trails are wide, they don’t drop in a consistent, ho-hum pitch. Rather, they are roller coasters, whooping up and down and around, steep enough in places to grab your attention.
They’re the kind of runs where you can’t put your brain on hold. You have to think about what you are doing.
“This is my favorite,” local Sherri Harkin said as she steered us to a run named Bliss. We bounced our way down the mountain’s entire vertical drop – 2,800 feet of nonstop, screaming fun.
Other trails are similar, if shorter: Tango, Serenity, Vista. And there are trees where snow stays fluffy in protected pockets long after the last blizzard. In fact, we had a firsthand demonstration during our visit last winter.
It hadn’t snowed more than a dusting for 22 days, a true anomaly in an area that usually gets 300 inches of snow a year. (This season, Tamarack received a record 7-plus feet of snow in December, followed by another 2 feet the first week of January.)
Still, the groomed runs were perfect. And the more adventurous of our group found untracked, astonishingly good powder snow in the trees of Tamarack’s out-of-bounds terrain.
That 5,054 acres of backcountry is a whole different experience. You are welcome to ski it on your own, and some of it is lift served (a lap takes 45 minutes), but it’s way more fun with a guide. For $200 a day, you can go by snowcat or ski up on telemark skis for awesome powder.
At the top, we stopped to buy a snazzy black Tamarack Ski Patrol T-shirt (money helps support the patrol) and took in the view.
More than 3,000 feet below, we could see Lake Cascade. If it hadn’t been covered with snow, the whole scene would have looked like Tahoe. And on three sides, we saw jagged snowy mountains which, to the west, stretched all the way to Oregon.
Tamarack, named for a local conifer tree, is the only year-round public destination resort built from scratch in the United States since Utah’s Deer Valley and Colorado’s Beaver Creek opened in 1981. And it is still a work in progress.
The main lodge, a study in timber-and-stone rustic chic, opened in January 2006 and there are several dozen more similarly styled cottages and townhouses.
But construction cranes are everywhere. The resort has sold $500 million worth of real estate in just three years. There’s a concrete pad and a model where the Fairmont will begin to rise in the coming year.
The resort shops and restaurants reside in huge white domes (don’t call them tents) in the parking lot – though in all fairness, these vinyl igloos have art on the walls, carpet on the floors and cushy leather sofas.
You can also see what is to come. The service is there – you just pick up a phone to get a ride from your cottage to the restaurant and by the second day, the drivers all know your name.
The attention to detail is there. The quality is there. And yet there is also a small-town, gee-whiz feel to the place.
You could hear it in the genuine delight in Operations Vice President Jim Spence’s voice, captured on video during opening day in December 2004. And you can hear it in the way resort executives still greet guests like personal friends.
During our visit, at an apres ski party, I got to talking with a friend who said she had been thinking about giving up skiing because she was limited to groomed cruiser runs and, well, they were getting boring.
“I was ready to quit,” said Norma Thompson of Reno, Nev. “But these runs … they’ve renewed skiing for me.”
Norma is 79. Guess the rest of us have a ways to go and a place to go to.