In the fall, the valley relaxes. And it’s not just our bustling grocery store aisles and busy streets that simmer down. When high summer ends, crisp mornings open quieter days and the Wood River Valley seems a bit truer to itself.

But once the crowds have thinned and a sort of privacy returns, nature loses her inhibitions. Aspens and willows go off, flared with sudden change. Amid this colorful riot, festivals punctuate the calendar with activity. If it’s not mules and wagons filling Ketchum’s Main Street, then it’s a boiling flock of sheep, trotting and jumping and clinging together as the wool and mutton flow south to warmer winter pastures.

In central Idaho, autumn is a paradox. We breathe deep and walk hushed streets. Then a weekend comes along and shatters the calm with concerts, celebrations and feasts.

This fall, the Sun Valley Guide explores change in its many forms. Two veteran Idaho journalists—Dean Ferguson and Chuck Oxley—are first-time Guide contributors, and both bring new voices to these pages.

On a Carey ranch, Ferguson finds the withering signs of drought in southeastern Blaine County. He meets Idahoans marking climate change in real time in "The Unforgiving Sky."

Oxley’s first big-game hunt taught him the basics of tracking white-tail deer, but his journey is ultimately an education in self. To kill a majestic wild animal, he learns, requires a stilling of the heart and an initiation into a new state of mind.

In a Craters of the Moon photo essay, Kirsten Hepburn and Ken Retallic land on southern Idaho’s youngest volcanic formations. Hepburn captures a long view of basalt flows that, in just a couple hundred years or so, may transform again.

Change is not always smooth. In it we find the anxiety of the unsettled, but also the intimate beauty of a kaleidoscopic autumn leaf. At the Sun Valley Guide, we remain open to the great variety.

Michael Ames

Contributors

Idaho Press Club Awards