The El Niño winter stoke is alive in well in Sun Valley! Nearly 7 FEET!! of snow has fallen so far this season with no sign of letting up. Skiers and boarders are reaping the benefits of deep powder days and all-time coverage. This season is shaping up to be one you'll want to add to your highlight reel!

El Niño or as Chris Farley referred to in simpler terms as, “The Niño“, brought about a mixed bag of early season predictions from meteorologists far and wide. Skiers and boarders throughout the west became overnight skeptics serving up their own myriad of prophesied forecasts as to whether it would be a lack luster winter or flashback to being like the “good old days”. At the end of the day, no one could put any weight behind their hunches for what the 2015/2016 season would bring.

Fast forward to the first actual day of winter and we have a bit of empirical data to suggest that this El Niño is coming through huge, bringing those good old days back to Sun Valley. As of December 22nd, Bald Mountain has seen nearly 7 feet of crowd-pleasing snowfall. We’re savoring all-time conditions that have opened up access to certain terrain that hasn’t been rideable in years past. Enough hyping up the winter we’re having here – we’ll let the photos below do the talking for us.

IT’S HARD TO GET AWAY from it all these days. With sprawling cities and ever-expanding cell networks, it’s more difficult than ever to disconnect from technology and reconnect with nature. That’s where Idaho comes in. The Gem State is still largely wild, rugged, and mostly left alone, while tourists flood the bigger names nearby: the Tetons, the Grand Canyon, Yosemite Valley.

And that’s a really fantastic thing for the rest of us. Because unbeknownst to the masses, this mountain state has a river gorge deeper than the Grand Canyon, a granite mountain wilderness area larger than Yosemite, and Teton-caliber trekking without all the tourists. It’s a place to get off the grid — to revel in the remoteness.

Here’s a little bit more on what that looks like.