McCall is a resort town on the western edge of Valley County, Idaho, United States.

The route turns west at Payette Lake in McCall and ends at New Meadows in Adams County, at the junction with US-95.

[5] The McCall Municipal Airport is on the south edge of town, at an elevation of 5,021 feet (1,530 m) above sea level.

In the early 19th century, mountain men including the nomadic French Canadian fur trapper François Payette, Jim Bridger, Peter Skene Ogden, and Jedediah Smith passed through the area.

During the 1860s, miners temporarily named the settlement "Lake City", but only alluvial gold was discovered, so the temporary establishment was abandoned as most mining activity moved north to the town of Warren.

Tom, his wife, four sons and a daughter lived in the cabin located on the shore of the lake, near present-day Hotel McCall.

In June 1902, the Boydstun Hotel in nearby Lardo opened as a "place to stay and camp on Payette Lake".

In 1906, Charlie Nelson opened a tented camping area known as Sylvan Beach Resort along the west side of Payette Lake.

The beauty of McCall and Payette Lake drew attention from Hollywood in 1938 when it was selected as the filming location for the Academy Award-nominated Northwest Passage, starring Spencer Tracy, Robert Young, and Walter Brennan.

The film, released in 1940, was set during the French and Indian War of 1755–63 in eastern North America, Idaho's forests substituting for the woods of New England and the Upper Midwest.

The site includes a smokejumper training unit, paraloft, dispatch office, and the McCall air tanker base at the airport.

After World War II, a consortium of businessmen and doctors from Lewiston, 150 miles (240 km) to the north, decided that McCall and the lake were an ideal recreation site and thus the town was transformed from lumber to tourism.

The iconic Shore Lodge opened on 3 July 1948, at Shellworth Beach on Payette Lake.

One of Shore Lodge's first summer employees was University of Idaho student John Ascuaga of Notus, who worked as a bellhop learning the business from the bottom up and was to go on to found the Nugget hotel, convention center, and casino in Sparks, Nevada, one of the largest and most successful in the Reno, Nevada area.

[7][8][9][10] In 1965, a 1,000 acres (4.0 km2) peninsula 2 miles (3 km) outside of McCall became Ponderosa State Park, home to large old-growth trees.

The aging Nordic ski jump on the lower north slope, overlooking the bend in Highway 55, was removed in the 1990s.

Originally conceived as "Valbois" in the early 1980s, the project was revived as "WestRock" in the late 1990s and ultimately renamed "Tamarack" in 2002.

Tamarack opened for lift-served skiing on December 15, 2004, with a summit elevation of 7,660 feet (2,330 m) on West Mountain, up Rock Creek.

The slopes on Tamarack faced east, overlooking the Cascade Reservoir and Long Valley.

The resort went into bank receivership in February 2008 and ceased operations a year later, on the evening of Wednesday, March 4, 2009.

McCall experiences a dry-summer continental climate (Köppen Dsb) with cold, snowy winters and warm, relatively dry summers.