Back when Ernest Hemingway lived in his hillside house overlooking the Big Wood River, the view was his alone.
Now there is development throughout the world-renowned Sun Valley resort area, and Hemingway is part of the reason.His son, Jack, hopes to be part of the solution. He's on the board of the Nature Conservancy in Idaho, and he believes his father, who died here 30 years ago, would have approved.
"In his day, the word `environmental' wasn't in common usage, certainly," Hemingway said. "His feeling for the land essentially was that it should be unspoiled.
"In those days when some country you loved was overrun with people, you just moved on and found another place. Idaho was sort of his last stand; he wasn't going to move on. He wanted to keep what we had here as inviolable as possible," the son says. "He used to talk about good country, and this was good country. The country around here, the sort of deserty country, reminded him a lot of Spain, which was a place he dearly loved."
Hemingway and other celebrities were invited to be the guests of Sun Valley officials while the resort was being developed in the late 1930s. They were guided on hunting, fishing and skiing adventures while resort employees snapped publicity photos.
Some came back periodically, Hemingway more than most. And in 1958, when he could see Castro's revolution might force him out of his Cuban home, he bought the Big Wood River house where he committed suicide July 2, 1961.
The two-story house, a replica of the Sun Valley Lodge, was bequeathed to The Nature Conservancy by Hemingway's widow, Mary, who died in 1986.
The house and grounds are closed to the public, a condition of Mary Hemingway's will. But Conservancy state director Guy Bonnivier has his office in the upstairs room where Hemingway wrote standing at a window overlooking the valley toward the Boulder Mountains' basalt outcroppings.
"When Ernest lived here, you couldn't see another building from this house," Bonnivier said.
Most Hemingway furnishings remain, including impala and lesser kudu trophies of his African safaris over the fireplace and a mountain lion pelt on the sofa. Hemingway's deep-sea fishing cap is on a shelf in Bonnivier's office.
The Conservancy also owns the Silver Creek Preserve - 3,000 acres near the creek's headwaters - about 30 miles southeast of Ketchum. Hemingway's son says the author loved canoeing down Silver Creek on duck hunts.
"It would be difficult for you to find a desert spring creek in better condition than Silver Creek," Bonnivier says.
The private, non-profit Conservancy also owns 8,000 acres near the confluence of the Snake and Salmon rivers in the Hells Canyon area near the Oregon border, 120 acres along Soldier Creek, three miles of river frontage in the Thousand Springs Preserve near Hagerman and a half mile of Wood River frontage that Bonnivier calls "the Hemingway Preserve."
"There is all sorts of development encroaching on the river," Bonnivier says.
Homeowners who have built in the flood plain have lined their river frontages with protective boulders, altering the course of the river and increasing its speed, he says.
A group called Friends of the Wood River is trying to reverse the process, and the Conservancy wants to acquire more unlined Wood River frontage to protect it from development.
The Nature Conservancy, sometimes called the real estate wing of the environmental movement, has more than a half-million members nationwide. It acquires ecologically sensitive land, then rehabilitates it. In Idaho, the Conservancy has been involved in protecting some 45,000 acres.
But the Silver Creek Preserve is unusual.
Bonnivier says hunters are allowed to canoe down Silver Creek three days a week, to shoot from the public access riverbed areas to the high-water line and to walk ashore on Conservancy land to retrieve their birds.
"There had been no history in the past of the Conservancy allowing any public hunting on any of their land, but it was really felt that this was a traditional use," Jack Hemingway says.