McCall...a resort town loved by too many.
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6/14/2017
McCall is a resort town and is a beautiful place located on picturesque Payette Lake and is surrounded by mountains. Summertime weather is relatively mild as McCall sits at just over 5,000 feet elevation, which results in comparatively cool summers and relatively severe winters with lots of snow and subzero temperatures. Lots of snow skiing and snowmobiling in winter. Most homes are vacation homes, and due to the cost of housing local workers often have great difficulty finding a place they can afford to rent or buy due to hign housing costs. Recently McCall passed a measure to add on a local option sales tax on top of the normal Idaho state sales tax. There is a worker shortage in McCall due to the cost of living which is the primary reason why the unemployment rate is low there. The cost of living is higher than most places in Idaho. On weekends the town swells with visitors, tourists, and summer home owners and the hiway coming from Boise gets bumper to bumper. The road is only two lanes and traveling it is sometimes hazardous, usually due to excess speed and poor decisions by drivers passing on the winding hiway which is often bordered by cliffs and a river a great deal of the way from Boise which is about 2 and a half hours away (except when the road is jammed then add another hour or more!!!) . Thousands of people clog this road on weekends during the peak seasons going and coming from Boise to McCall. All that said McCall is indeed a beautiful place in an area that has a shortage of similarly located towns that would have the quality and plethora of services found in McCall. That is why so many are drawn there...there just aren't any other towns like McCall in the area that have such a combination of scenic beauty and a vast aray of receational opportunities which has resulted in its popularity and an amazing infrastructure of services, shopping, building supplies, drug stores, grocery stores, doctors and a hospital and plethora of restaurants, etc., all that you would normally find in a town Several times the size of McCall...not usually what you would find in a mountain town of 3,000 residents. So that is McCall, kind of a paradise that is over used and over priced due to its proximity to Boise...also McCall gets something like 132 inches of snow each winter according to the national weather service....great for winter sports....which can be tough to deal with daily and a tough issue to deal with if you are considering living there fulltime during the winter.....I love McCall, I wish fewer people did!
Timber | Dufur, OR