If you spent any part of July idling behind a flagger on Elkhorn Road, watching a line of cars back up toward Highway 75 while a loader moved dirt where the intersection used to be, you already know the shape of this summer. For 26 days, from July 13 through August 7, the only way out of that stretch of town was a detour through Ketchum and Sun Valley Road. Then, on schedule, the barricades came down.
What most residents don't realize is that the Elkhorn fix was only ever half the story. Sun Valley has two main points where local roads meet the highway system, and while one of them just came out of a two-year construction stretch, the other hasn't broken ground yet. It's barely finished picking a design.
The 26 Days That Mattered
The closure on Elkhorn Road wasn't a delay. It was a deliberate trade. The Idaho Transportation Department told the Sun Valley City Council that closing the road entirely, 24 hours a day, would let crews finish the east half of the Highway 75 and Elkhorn Road intersection in 26 days instead of the 84 days it would take working around live traffic. Council members Mike Burchmore, Dave Madaras, and Michelle Griffith voted for it. Keith Saks voted against. Mayor Peter Hendricks made the motion, and it passed 3-1 after roughly 20 residents raised concerns about detour length during the valley's busiest season.
The math held. The closure ended on time, and the intersection that had been a bottleneck since ITD broke ground on the SH-75 Elkhorn Road to River Street project is now largely rebuilt: a new left-turn lane for westbound traffic heading south on the highway, a rebuilt storm drainage system running under the road, and new signals at the intersection itself.
This is the project residents have been living with since 2024. It's a $28.5 million widening of Highway 75 between Elkhorn Road and River Street, taking the corridor from its current configuration up to two lanes in each direction with a center turn lane. The reason ITD pushed so hard to compress the Elkhorn closure into three and a half weeks rather than three months is the same reason the whole project exists: close to 25,000 vehicles a day already use this stretch of highway, and ITD is planning for close to 40,000 by 2047.
What "Almost Done" Actually Means
Here's where the story gets more specific than "the construction is over." When ITD's district engineer, Jesse Barrus, presented the closure plan to the council in May, he told them that with the Elkhorn work compressed into July and August, the contractor projected finishing every remaining piece of the project by the end of this building season, October 31.
Every piece except one. The stretch of highway between Serenade Lane and the Trail Creek Bridge in downtown Ketchum is a separate problem, and as of this spring ITD's own inspectors weren't ready to promise it would wrap this year. In April, ITD Lead Inspector Justin Schoolcraft told the Ketchum City Council that the Serenade Lane and Elkhorn Road intersections specifically might not be finished until the 2027 construction season, even as the rest of the corridor closed out in 2026.
"All other Highway 75 construction is expected to be complete this year."
That's the honest state of things heading into fall: the Elkhorn intersection is functionally done, the highway between Elkhorn and Serenade is on track for this season, and the last connector piece into Ketchum, the one running past Trail Creek Bridge, a structure that dates to the 1920s and is being widened to fit three lanes with sidewalks on both sides, still has a foot in next year.
A quick way to sort what's settled from what isn't:
- Finished or finishing by October 31: The Elkhorn Road and Highway 75 intersection, including the new left-turn lane, signal upgrade, and stormwater system.
- Still uncertain into 2027: Full completion of work between Serenade Lane and the Trail Creek Bridge.
- Already open, but under different lane counts through the season: The section between the Elkhorn intersection and Weyyakin Drive.
The Other Way Into Town
Elkhorn Road isn't Sun Valley's only connection to the rest of the valley. The four-way intersection of Sun Valley Road, Dollar Road, and Saddle Road is the other one, and it has its own history, unrelated to ITD, unrelated to Highway 75, and running on a much slower clock.
That intersection's traffic signal failed in November 2022. Rather than replace it right away, the city switched to temporary stop signs and left them in place. Two years ago, the council studied three fixes: an $911,000 upgrade to the stop-sign setup with better pedestrian crossings, a $2.6 million signal replacement, and a full roundabout estimated near $4 million. The city even signed a contract with Ketchum-based engineering firm S&C Associates in the fall of 2023 to design that roundabout. In December 2024, Sun Valley landed a $3 million federal grant earmarked for intersection improvements at the site.
None of that money has been spent on construction yet.
The Vote Nobody Outside City Hall Noticed
On September 3, just two weeks before this was written, the Sun Valley City Council quietly changed course. Rather than move forward with the roundabout the city had been planning to design, or the pricier signal option, council members directed S&C Associates principal engineer Sherri Newland to develop a fifth design that keeps the intersection as a four-way stop and adds targeted turn lanes: right-turn lanes from Sun Valley Road onto both Dollar and Saddle, and left-turn lanes from Dollar and Saddle back onto Sun Valley Road.
The estimated cost of the closest option to what the council chose is about $828,000, a fraction of the roundabout figure the city had been carrying since 2023. Newland's firm expects the final design to be ready in 2027, with construction slated for that year or spring 2028.
So the intersection the city has been formally studying since 2022, with a signed engineering contract and $3 million in federal money sitting behind it, is still at least a year from breaking ground. The intersection that caused this summer's detours is, for the most part, already rebuilt.
| Highway 75 & Elkhorn Road | Sun Valley, Dollar & Saddle Roads | |
|---|---|---|
| Managed by | Idaho Transportation Department | City of Sun Valley, with S&C Associates |
| Triggering event | Highway capacity project underway since 2024 | Traffic signal failure, November 2022 |
| Status as of September 2026 | Elkhorn intersection substantially rebuilt; Serenade-to-Trail Creek Bridge segment may extend into 2027 | Council chose a design direction September 3, 2026; final design due 2027 |
| Construction timeline | Target: October 31, 2026, except one remaining stretch | Not slated before 2027, possibly spring 2028 |
| Cost | $28.5 million for the full corridor | Roughly $828,000 for the preferred option, partly funded by a $3 million federal grant |
What This Means If You Use Both
If your daily route runs through Elkhorn Road, the worst of it is behind you. The detours, the flaggers, the 24-hour closure, all of that was designed to end by this fall, and by every account it did what it was supposed to do. The one asterisk is the far end of the corridor near Ketchum, where paving and signal work around Serenade Lane and the Trail Creek Bridge may carry a lane shift or two into next spring.
If your route runs through the Dollar and Saddle intersection instead, nothing changes this year. The stop signs that have been standing in for a real signal since late 2022 will keep doing that job through 2026, through the coming winter, and likely through most of 2027 while the new design goes through final engineering. Construction, when it starts, probably means another season of turn-lane work at one of the two roads everyone in town already treats as the main way in and out.
Two entrances, two agencies, two timelines. One just closed out a very visible, very compressed construction push. The other is still filing the paperwork for one that hasn't started.
For more on what's happening around town this fall, or if you're weighing how these kinds of infrastructure timelines fit into your own plans for the Wood River Valley, Wood River Properties keeps a close eye on the local details that don't always make the headlines. Reach out anytime.
