Dated January 21, 1948, and marked on the inside for the Los Angeles Limited, which then carried the prestigious numbers 1 and 2, this is the earliest color-cover menu I have seen featuring Sun Valley. The image shows a lone skier high above the valley bottom; most later Sun Valley covers would show two or more people and be lower in elevation to better show off the lodges and other facilities.
Click image to download a 1.4-MB PDF of this menu.
The menu inside features four meals–chef’s salad, ox tongue, chicken salad, and beef casserole–and numerous a la carte items including lamb chops, fried chicken, corned beef hash, Boston baked beans, and sirloin steak. This particular menu is not in my collection but its individual pages are posted on the New York Public Library’s web site, and I turned them into a PDF.
I see tongue is back on the menu again. One of the reasons the skier may have been shown alone and so high up was that the Lodge and Sun Valley were still recovering from WWII. It was a naval R&R facility from April 1943 until it was turned back to the UP in November, 1945. Even though it opened for Christmas, the guests described the place as wrecked, with most of the furniture gone or destroyed, the landscaping torn out, and even most of the light bulbs gone. The famous pool was half-empty and filled with algae and very few buildings had been painted when it was under naval control. The UP closed Sun Valley right after New Year, 1946, and totally refurbished the resort, opening it again on October 1, 1946. If you zoom in on the lodge, you’ll see very few cars in the parking, which makes me think this was the period in 1946 when the lodge was actually closed. Even though the menu is dated in January, 1948, I’ll bet that picture was from the immediate postwar era, where they didn’t want any real close pictures taken. BTW, you can tell it’s January, since the only choice of fruit is canned.