STORY AND PHOTO BY KAREN BOSSICK

Wood River Valley residents are used to the slow crawl home from Ketchum between 4 and 6 p.m. after work.

But hundreds of people were stuck in traffic for more than two hours Saturday night as Idaho Transportation Department started chip sealing Idaho 75 in the vicinity of Ohio Gulch.

The traffic was backed up to the Sawtooth Botanical Garden at 9 p.m., and the line of recreational vehicles and other cars heading south from Ketchum only grew longer as the night wore on. ITD had mentioned in its press release that the crews would be working during the day.

Andrea Pierceall said she left Ketchum at 9:15 p.m. Saturday, after having dinner with a friend, and arrived home at 11:50.

“We’d been told that repairs would start Monday. And, although they said to expect delays, they did not say it would take over two hours to drive 10 miles or that they would begin Saturday night. We sat there without knowing if it was an elk accident, or just plain stupidity on the part of ITD,” she said.

Crews worked through the night Saturday night until about 7 a.m. Sunday morning. Sherry Thorson, who lives a few blocks off the highway in the Deer Creek area south of where the work was being done, said she could hear the rumble of the trucks all night long.

On Sunday morning traffic was moving at 35 miles per hour along the treated section, the dust cloud visible for a mile. There was no water truck in the vicinity to tamp down the dust. Tennis Legends John McEnroe, Mats Wilander and Vince Van Patten were slightly late getting to the Tennis Legends Celebrity Pickleball Tournament being held at the Valley Club Sunday morning, as a result.

Pierceall and others have been left wondering whether they dare drive to Ketchum for Sun Valley Music Festival concerts and other events after the Blaine County Sheriff’s Department cautioned that crews planned to shut the highway down to one lane on Sunday beginning at 6 p.m. to paint the road black.

“Are we to expect that kind of delay every night? Summer is a blink of an eye here and being prohibited from going to Ketchum for music, art and other things is inexcusable,” she said.”

Courtney Wagner, ITD spokesperson, said ITD crews finished their chip sealing work in the Galena area early and that gave them the opportunity to start work in the Ohio Gulch area earlier than they had expected. The chip sealing and restriping project is expected to take two weeks.

The chip seal will extend the life of the roadway and the restriping will create additional lanes to reduce congestion near Ohio Gulch Road where the highway transitions from two lanes to four. ITD determined that there is enough pavement width between East Fork Road and Buttercup Road to temporarily restripe the highway to include two lanes in each direction to help with traffic flow until that section of the highway is expanded within the next two years.

Some motorists who have seen the reflector dots placed to mark the lanes have worried, however, that the new lanes are dangerously narrow. What’s more, they say, there’s no shoulder left on the highway.

Further north in Ketchum Main Street reopened this past week between 2nd and 4th Street. Workers are continuing to install sidewalk pavers in front of Sturtevant’s and other shops.

Workers are currently working on Main Street between River Street and 2nd Street in front of The Argyros and Limelight. It is expected to be complete in early October—hopefully, in time for 1,500 sheep to trail through Ketchum during the Trailing of the Sheep Festival.

The bad news is that Main Street from 6th through 10th street will not be reconstructed until mid-May 2025, pending funding from Idaho Transportation Department funding. It was supposed to have been the first part of the Main Street project to be reconstructed this year, but there were delays due to the unavailability of contractors and supplies. That reconstruction project is expected to last through July 2025.

The Idaho Transportation Department plans to fully reconstruct Highway 75 from Elkhorn to River run in 2025. It plans to repair the highway in Bellevue this year, according to Courtney Wagner, ITD spokesperson.