HISTORY
By Pamela Kleibrink Thompson Bowling proprietors are converting their centers into BECs, realizing that customers want a variety of activities in addition to bowling. More than 80 years ago, W. Averell Harriman, visionary chairman of the board of the Union Pacific Railroad, created a winter resort that offered not just skiing, but bowling, swimming in a heated outdoor pool, tennis, golf, fishing, shooting, iceskating, and more, a precursor to many BECs and FECs of today. Here is the story of the important part bowling played in the development of America’s first destination ski resort. In a foreword to the book, Sun Valley, a Biography, by Doug Oppenheimer and Jim Poore (published by Beatty Books, Boise, ID, 1976), W. Averell Harriman describes the history behind the founding of ski resort Sun Valley, ID.
W.
Averell Harriman had a monopoly on rail transportation in Idaho and wanted to increase Union Pacific’s passenger service in the West. The competing Santa Fe Railroad was offering passenger service to the Grand Canyon. When Harriman discovered his banking colleagues were vacationing at ski resorts in Europe, he wondered why couldn’t skiing be popular in America too? He decided to create a destination people would want to travel to on the Union Pacific. “I thought we’d make an asset out of a liability-the snow... I thought we could start a new industry in the West,” said Harriman. In America in 1935, skiing was fairly unknown and confined to New England’s icy trails, where gloomy skies and sub zero temperatures made it hard to promote the sport, but if Harriman and his Union Pacific line could bring passengers to a blue sky, sun-kissed ski resort, he could outshine his competitors. 50
IBI
June 2017
W. Averell Harriman, chairman of the board of the Union Pacific Railroad, founded Sun Valley. Harriman skiing shortly after Sun Valley's opening in 1936 on Dollar Mountain. Photo courtesy of Sun Valley Resort.
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