Photos Courtesy Whitetail Club & Resort Whitetail’s lakeside lodge

With cool nights, warm days and plenty of outdoor activities, this small mountain town is as close as you’ll get to
having your own private Idaho.

People say McCall, Idaho, is destined to be the next big thing, a prediction that sounds far-fetched for a secluded mountain town with a population of just under 3,000. But seeing is believing, and people who get a little taste of this alpine paradise find themselves wondering how to get a little more, which explains the housing boom that’s already underway.

Located 100 miles and two hours of winding road north of Boise, Idaho, McCall (a former logging town that still retains a certain roughneck swagger) has been likened to the Sun Valley of 30 years ago, before that once-rustic retreat became a crowded celebrity hangout. Although it’s true that potato potentates and other wealthy residents of Boise have taken their summer and winter holidays here for generations (building gorgeous vacation homes around pristine Payette Lake), this breathtakingly beautiful place – a dazzling patchwork of pine-covered mountains, meandering streams, flower-filled meadows and cobalt blue sky – still feels quiet and a wee bit countrified, which is precisely its appeal.

Whitetail Club and Resort lobby

Founded near the heart of the Payette National Forest, on the southern edge of the cleanest, clearest, glacier-carved lake you’ll ever see, McCall is an all-season vacation destination, offering more outdoor activities than the average person can tackle in one trip. With two large ski resorts (Tamarack and Brundage Mountain) located less than 15 miles away, the town gets its share of winter visitors who come for snowboarding, snowmobiling and both downhill and cross-country skiing.

For us heat-crazed desert rats, however, McCall is at its irresistible best in the summer, when cool nights and 80-degree days seem utterly heavenly. Here, all things outdoorsy are possible, including hiking, mountain biking, golfing, fishing, fly-fishing, kayaking, boating, swimming, water skiing, horseback riding and river rafting. In McCall alone, there are 300 mountain lakes, thousands of miles of walking and biking trails and 1,400 miles of rivers and streams to follow. The place is breathtaking in every sense of the word.

As anyone who’s done it knows, organizing an action-filled vacation feels suspiciously like work. But in McCall, there’s an easy way to avoid that pitfall: Simply book your stay at the Whitetail Club and Resort, a lakeside resort offering a multitude of fun things to do for people of every age and inclination. Activities not offered on-site (river rafting, fly-fishing, kayaking and horseback riding, for example) are easily arranged at the front desk, which leaves the worrisome details to someone else. Ah, but convenience is only one of many things you’ll love about this gracious place.