Find Wonder Here
The Ponderosa Center has found its home.
A permanent, year-round home for live performance, learning, and gathering — right in the heart of McCall.
In the Heart of McCall
The Ponderosa Center has secured a landmark agreement with Simplot to locate our facility on Simplot-owned land in the heart of McCall, just off Deinhard Lane, next to the Post Office and the Marketplace. After years of dreaming, planning, and adapting, we have a home.
It’s a few minutes from just about everywhere in McCall, with parking, existing paths, and a transit stop already in place. Inside will be a welcome center, a flexible performance hall, and a multipurpose innovation lab and meeting space. Our newly designed 14,900-square-foot center is built for how McCall actually lives — accessible, central, reachable year-round.
A First Look
Here’s what’s taking shape.
Why here, and not the lake
For a long time, the plan was the lakefront — and it’s easy to understand why. Everyone loved that idea.
But an auditorium doesn’t have windows. The whole point of this building is that the stage is the focus. Once we stepped back, we realized we’d been chasing a view that wouldn’t have mattered once you were inside. The new site is simply the right fit for what this place actually is — a room built to hold your attention, in the middle of the town it’s for.
Three partners, one roof
The Center won’t sit quiet between shows. Three McCall institutions will make it home, keeping the doors open and the calendar full year-round.
McCall Chamber of Commerce & Visitors Bureau
a daily presence that keeps the building active in every season.
McCall Music Society
live music throughout the year, on an intimate stage built for it.
McCall Ski Heritage Foundation
interactive exhibits celebrating McCall’s ski history, hands-on and made to explore.
Any season. Any weather. Anyone.
McCall is built around the outdoors — until fire season adds a layer of smoke to the outdoor concert, mud season makes everything challenging, or it’s five below and the kids are climbing the walls.
This is the place that works anyway. No gear, no lift ticket, no two-hour drive to Boise. Dress up if you want to, come in jeans if you don’t. Bring the kids, bring your parents, bring the friends visiting from out of town. Any season, any weather. There’s always a reason to stop and look up.
Stay close to what’s coming.
We’ll be sharing renderings, milestones, and the first events as they take shape. The best way to follow along is our newsletter — no noise, just the real story as it unfolds.