STORY AND PHOTO BY KAREN BOSSICK
Get ready to have your morning and evening commute turned upside down if you work in Ketchum.
The Idaho Transportation Department will resume construction on Highway 75 at the Trail Creek Bridge in Ketchum.
Southbound Trail Creek Bridge traffic will be detoured from Main Street onto River Street. Motorists will proceed south on Second Avenue where they will meet up with skiers driving east on Serenade Lane to get back to the highway.
Work will take place between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. weekdays. It will take place between 7:30 a.m. and 7 p.m. Saturdays and 8 a.m. and 7 p.m. Sundays.
One lane will remain open in each direction on the highway between Elkhorn Road and the Trail Creek Bridge. Speed limits will be reduced to 25 miles per hour.
The construction is designed to accommodate growing traffic volumes in the Wood River Valley. But ITD is still waiting to see whether the Ketchum City Council will approve four lanes on the bridge to eliminate the bottleneck that currently occurs as traffic goes from four lanes to two.
The bridge expansion is scheduled to be completed in April. But commuters won’t get a break as that’s when work is set to resume on the expansion of the highway.
Commuters experienced delays exceeding an hour at times last summer during the first summer of the two-year project.
This summer crews will expand the highway to four lanes from Trail Creek Bridge to River Street. They’ll also improve the intersection of Highway 75 and Elkhorn Road, complete improvements to the highway between Elkhorn Road and Weyyakin Drive, widen the highway between Weyyakin Drive and River Street and improve the intersection of the highway and Serenade Lane.
When complete, the traffic signal at Serenade Lane and the highway will be activated. The traffic light has been activated only once so far—for testing purposes.
ITD expanded the highway to four lanes from Elkhorn Road to the Trail Creek Bridge last summer. But it installed temporary pavement on part of the road when the weather turned cold. Workers will tear up that section and replace it with permanent pavement this year.
ITD hopes to complete the bulk of the work in the fall of 2026 but has left the door open to some minor touch-ups the following spring.