On a summer day in 1961, a bloated, sick and depressed Ernest Hemingway took out his favorite shotgun, pressed it to himself and pulled the trigger.
The town of Ketchum hadn't planned to build a tourist industry around the suicide of a Nobel Prize-winning author. But for more than three decades, fans of "Papa" have trekked to the Idaho mountains to delve into the writer's dashing life and violent death.On a recent crisp autumn morning, Klaus Steinbicker and Inge Munch, both of Munich, Germany, walked up the gravel road at the tiny Ketchum Cemetery.
"Where is his grave?" Munch asked a stranger, knowing she needn't say whom she was seeking.
The couple found the gray granite slab amid a small stand of pine in the middle of the cemetery. Etched on the marker: "Ernest Miller Hemingway, July 21, 1899-July 2, 1961."
"We are traveling all over the western United States," Steinbicker said. "Glacier National Park, Zion, but this grave is the one thing she said she had to see."
Munch gazed down at the grave, flanked by a matching slab for his last wife, Mary.
"I loved his writing, especially `For Whom the Bell Tolls,"' Munch said. "It is so sad that he killed himself. He must have been very unhappy."
Hemingway was 40 when he came to Ketchum as a world-famous author whose best writing was arguably already behind him. The developers of the Sun Valley Lodge invited Hemingway up in September 1939 as a kind of living tourist attraction. He brought along his mistress, journalist Martha Gellhorn, and set up shop in suite 206.
During his time in the spud state, he wrote portions of "For Whom the Bell Tolls," "Islands in the Stream" and "A Moveable Feast."
Most of the works he fashioned on a portable typewriter on the porch of his Ketchum home were about other times, other places. Paris. Cuba. Key West. "The Shot," a minor short story about a hunting party, is one of the few published pieces set primarily in the Ketchum area.
The writer made promotional films for the Sun Valley Lodge. But in later years, as he wrote less and the checks became fewer and smaller, he moved to not-so-swank digs at what is now the Sun Valley Inn and the Ketchum Korral motel.
Work and travel in Africa and Cuba kept him away from Idaho for most of the 1950s, but he finally settled in Ketchum in 1959. Two years later, he was dead.
But many of his haunts still survive in one way or another. Visitors can stay in the Sun Valley Lodge's suite 206, known today as the Parlour Suite, for $299 per night ($309 after June 2).
Outdoor types can fish and hunt along Silver Creek, about a half-hour south of Ketchum, just as Hemingway did. More sedentary pleasures can be had over coffee and one of Hemingway's tomes at the Main Street Bookcafe.
Travelers can't visit the most important Hemingway site in Ketchum: His former house off Warm Spring Road is closed to the public under a deal made with the Hemingway family when the 14-acre property was purchased by the Nature Conservancy in 1986.
The house can be glimpsed amid the trees by driving south on Highway 75 and looking up the hill to the right above the Northwoods development, just before crossing Warm Springs Road.
There is a Hemingway ski run on Bald Mountain in Sun Valley, a Hemingway Elementary School, a Hemingway Western Studies Center at Boise State University and a Hemingway photo exhibit put on by the local chamber of commerce.
Perhaps the most moving reminder of Hemingway's time in Idaho is the simple stone memorial to him near Trail Creek, about two miles from the Sun Valley Lodge. A bronze bust of the writer sits atop a rough stone pedestal next to the slow-moving stream amid a beautiful aspen grove.
Inscribed are the words Hemingway wrote for the funeral oration for a friend killed in a hunting accident in 1939, but which could also be said of the troubled man who sought but never found peace in Ketchum:
"Best of all he loved the fall
The leaves yellow on the cottonwoods
Leaves floating on the trout streams
And above the hills
The high windless sky
Now he is part of them forever."