The first time you drive to Ketchum, traveling north up Idaho State Highway 75, you might wonder where the mountains are. The terrain is wide-open prairie, scattered with sagebrush and streaked with rocky moonscape. You’ll see a lot of ranch land and barren hills, but not much else. There’s no hint that you’re minutes away from one of the world’s oldest ski resorts, Ernest Hemingway’s home away from Havana and the sprawling expanses of the Sawtooth and Salmon-Challis National Forests.

Stand in the center of Ketchum and walk just a few blocks in any direction and you’ll be on the edge of town. Just one paved road, Highway 75, runs all the way through and keeps going. The rest turn to dirt soon after leaving town. A bike will take you into the wilderness quicker than almost anything else, and can take you much further from the beaten track than a car can, through thick forests, up and down mountain passes, over open plains, or even across deep snow in the winter.

When adventure racer Rebecca Rusch first made the journey to Ketchum in 2001, she was sure she wouldn’t like Idaho. Originally from Chicago, she had been driving around the West since 1996, exploring, adventure racing and living out of her red Ford Bronco, Betty. All she really knew about the Gem State was that it was where potatoes came from (roughly 30% of the USA’s crop is grown in Idaho). Yet a few miles short of Ketchum’s Main St., her world suddenly opened up, the mountains rising high around her. “From a geographical standpoint, and also a human one, it felt like a hug,” she says.

(full article published in Kinfolk Travel: Slower Ways to See the World)