Silver Mountain Resort

Silver Mountain Resort has changed its name almost as often as its ownership. It opened as Jackass Ski Bowl on Wardner Peak in January 1968, became Silverhorn in 1973 after the Bunker Hill Company bought it out of foreclosure, and finally took its current name in the summer of 1989 following a major expansion built around one striking piece of infrastructure: a gondola. That gondola still defines the resort today, a 3.1-mile, roughly 17-minute ride that climbs south-southeast over the town of Wardner from the base village to the Mountain Haus lodge higher on the mountain.

Beyond the gondola, Silver Mountain runs 7 lifts in total, five chairlifts and a magic carpet alongside it, serving 79 runs across 38.11 kilometers, with a 631.9-meter vertical drop between a 1,903.8-meter summit and a 1,271.9-meter base in Idaho’s panhandle. The terrain favors the middle of the range, 18.71 kilometers intermediate against 11.65 kilometers advanced and 6.79 kilometers easy, with small pockets of novice and expert terrain filling out the rest.

Ownership has moved through several hands since those Bunker Hill days: the City of Kellogg took over in 1984, Eagle Crest Partners and Jeld-Wen Corporation ran it from 1996 to 2016, and Tryg Fortun’s CMR Lands LLC has owned it since. No multi-resort pass affiliations currently cover Silver Mountain, leaving it as a standalone destination built around that signature gondola ride.

Spokane International Airport, 106 kilometers away, is the nearest air option, just ahead of Pullman-Moscow Regional at 112.9 kilometers and Lewiston Nez Perce County at 142.7 kilometers. Spokane itself, population around 229,400, is also the closest listed city at 98.8 kilometers, with Washington’s Tri-Cities and Lethbridge, Alberta both considerably farther out. With 7 lifts serving 79 runs, better than 11 runs per lift, Silver Mountain’s trail count is dense relative to its lift network, a legacy of its long, name-changing build-out from a single ski bowl into a full resort centered on one long ride to the top.

That gondola ride, connecting a base village under 700 meters elevation to the Mountain Haus lodge near 1,720 meters, remains the defining way most visitors experience the mountain, turning what would otherwise be a normal lift queue into a scenic seventeen-minute commute over the town of Wardner below. The mountain’s history has not been without tragedy: an avalanche on January 7, 2020 killed three people and injured four others, a reminder of the real risk present on steep terrain even at resorts built around a comparatively gentle, family-friendly gondola-access model. Average snowfall around 300 inches a year keeps the mountain reliably covered through a full Idaho panhandle winter, and the resort’s regional identity remains tied to the area’s mining heritage as much as to skiing itself, evident in the Bunker Hill Mining Company’s early role in the mountain’s development under its earlier Silverhorn name before the City of Kellogg took over ownership in 1984.

Spokane, the nearest city of real size at 98.8 kilometers, and Spokane International Airport, 106 kilometers out, put Silver Mountain within a comfortable day’s drive of a mid-sized regional hub, closer than the resort’s other listed access points at Pullman-Moscow and Lewiston. That proximity to Spokane, combined with the gondola’s status as the resort’s signature attraction, has made Silver Mountain a popular weekend option for Inland Northwest skiers who want a distinctive lift experience without the longer drive required to reach the larger destination resorts in Idaho’s more mountainous central and northern reaches.