STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

After months of blowing blizzards of snow out of its snow guns and sending groomers up and down the Warm Springs side of Baldy, Sun Valley Resort is on the precipice of the 2025 Audi FIS World Cup Finals, or what many call the Super Bowl of Skiing.

FIS officials have been peering through rangefinders to make sure the courses are perfectly tailored to specifications, and on Friday workers skied the courses with shovels in hand to fine tune things.

Last week dozens of the 300 volunteers working the event fanned out across the hill from International down to Lower Greyhawk, wielding fire hoses as they poured gallons of water on the courses saturating the course six to eight inches deep, turning it rock hard for the big week that kicks off on Thursday, March 20, with downhill training runs.

The A-netting, far bigger than the B-netting used for the 2024 Alpine National Championships at Sun Valley, is pretty impressive.

While their work has left the course unskiable for the average skier, it will keep the course from deteriorating as racers ski over it, ensuring that the racer wearing Bib 25 gets the same experience as the one wearing Bib 1. The ice-like surface will be free of ruts—maintained by a crew of 200 volunteers and 50 paid staff.

Harry Griffith, who has been in charge of finding housing for the World Cup, spent a day hosing down the course and he was perfectly content to retreat to the couch when the day was over.

“It was exhausting holding the hose because it wanted to zigzag all over the place,” he said. “And, of course, you’re trying not to slip.”

Sun Valley Resort has brought in five extra snowcats, parking them at the top and bottom of the course to push snow off the course in case Mother Nature does not cooperate and dumps snow on race day.

It’s hard to miss the orange netting that has gone up on the Warm Springs side of Bald Mountain.

The resort has cut 7.3 yards of trees where FIS officials specified they needed to be removed for skiers’ safety. Workers put in 34 new snow guns—16 of them on International--and filled in the normally bowl-shaped Mid Warm Springs with snow so that it is level from one side to the other.

They installed 35 winch cat pick points in six-foot deep holes so that snow cats can hook to them with thick steel cable while grooming steep slopes without risk of slipping downhill. And they set up tall orange A-Nets that loom over everything—a vertical trampoline held up by 32 towers and, 14-meter poles and lattice towers that are prepared to bounce skiers back towards the course should they have an accident.

Workers have added some rollers and jumps, including one on Lower Greyhawk built for the slalom race. They rebuilt the Steilhang traverse as skiers go from Warm Springs to Upper Greyhawk, making it more terrifying than it was for the U.S. Alpine Championships held in Sun Valley the past two years.

They installed timing equipment two feet beneath the ground along a route that winds 8,500 feet from the top of Baldy to the bottom. And late this week they put in place a large grandstand at the bottom of Greyhawk, along with platforms for TV cameras.

A worker sprays water on Upper Greyhawk.

The base area is said to accommodate 2,000 people, all come to watch the world’s top 25 downhill male racers and the world’s top 25 female racers zoom up to 80 miles per hour on what is said to be the most challenging downhill in the world.

Many of these athletes will likely be the ones spectators will watch at next year’s Olympic games in Italy.

It’s exciting for the athletes as none have ever raced this course, which was built over the summer in an unimaginable whirlwind of dirt moving that usually takes three to five years

The excitement only grew Friday as word spread that Swiss racer Marco Odermatt, who has won four World Cup overall titles and 43 races in giant slalom, super-G and downhill, was in town and might be doing a photo shoot at Rotarun ski area.

Netting runs down mid-Warm Springs from International.

“I think the whole World Cup coming to Sun Valley is just so exciting,” said Brynda Petrie, who helped hose the course down. “And it has been so fun to be part of it.”

Griffith, the executive director of Sun Valley Economic Development, predicts that the World Cup Finals will bring between 3,000 and 5,000 people to Sun Valley. That’s far below the 30,000 and 40,000 people that can crowd into European venues, thanks to Europe’s trains. But it doubles the population of Ketchum and Sun Valley.

A thousand of those will be race participants, along with their wax technicians, coaches and medical personnel. A thousand will be locals and there will be at least another thousand visitors, Griffith said.

It’s Spring Break for Wood River Valley schools so a lot of students and their families will be in Disneyland and Baja. And the Treefort Music Fest--Boise’s biggest festival-- is going on the latter part of the week so that may cut down on some of the Boiseans who would otherwise come. But in their place will be fans from as far away as Europe, among them ski racer Atle Lie McGrath’s grandmother from Norway.

Back home the eyes of ski-crazy Europe will be focused on Sun Valley, as the races are taking place during prime time in Europe.

“They’ve been talking about Sun Valley on the World Cup coverage on TV, and the athletes are so excited to be here,” said Sun Valley Council President Michelle Griffith. “Given that these racers are the best of the best, the races are anyone’s to win. And this could open the door to our hosting future World Championship races.”

The City of Sun Valley charged the company that makes football’s Heisman trophies with making two 25-pound Harriman Cup trophies to give to male and female who win the downhill races this coming week.

The Harriman Cup, first handed out by Sun Valley Resort founder Averell Harriman, was one of the four big international ski races at the time it was started, including the famed Hahnenkamm race in Kitzbuhel, Austria.

The Harriman Cup was first run in 1936. And the Hahnenkamm had only been raced five years at that point, said Harry Griffith.

Each skier who comes will probably bring more than a hundred pair of skis with them, trucking them to Sun Valley from wherever they land, whether it be Salt Lake City or Boise. The ski techs charged with making them fast will be set up in trailers that have been trucked into the valley to the Sun Valley’s Horseman Center.

March occupancy is up 12 percent driven largely by the Finals, with the occupancy rate for March 19-27 averaging about 70 percent, according to Visit Sun Valley.

While there were reportedly some hotel rooms available this past week, Griffith has been able to arrange for 130 residential homes, providing 300 pillows for racers, officials medical personnel and forerunners who could not get into major hotels.

“I’m excited about the passion of the community for making this happen,” he said. “The way they’ve opened homes, donated time…There’s been an incredible commitment.”