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Idaho's gems: western lakes are no small potatoes

Boat/US Magazine, Sept, 2004 by Ryck Lydecker

From the air, the lakes of northern Idaho spread like jewels across the Gem State's panhandle country. The crystal clear waters of remote Priest Lake hang like an expensive pendant just below the international border, seemingly put there solely to reward boaters willing to venture that far into the mountains.

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Fifty miles to the south, as the bald eagle flies, lies Lake Coeur d'Alene. Its bays, coves and inlets trace a cobalt work of natural beauty created, you would think, just to amplify every mood of the boatbuilder's art, from Euro cruiser to classic cutter, from jet boat to mahogany motor launch.

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Geologic forces sprinkled smaller lakes around the region--Hayden, Twin, Hauser, Spirit--as if to be semi-precious accents to the landscape. But in between Priest and Coeur d'Alene lies an azure ornament, larger, wilder and, some would say, more beautiful than the rest, Lake Pend Oreille, or the "ear pendant," according to 19th Century French fur trappers.

Unlike many lakes of the American West, Pend Oreille is a natural water body, the sculpted product of long ago glaciers. Forty-four miles long and six miles at its widest, the lake, pronounced "Ponderay," is ringed by mountains and mantled by heavy forests of white pine, fir and red cedar around much of its 200-mile shoreline.

With its deepest sounding at nearly 1,200 feet, it is the fifth deepest lake in North America. Its northeast-southwest orientation to the prevailing winds, combined with the surrounding landforms, can make it a lake of ocean-like moods. In fact, it even has its own "offshore" weather buoy, courtesy of the U.S. Navy, which boaters can consult via the Internet.

This is a wilderness lake within easy reach of western boaters. It is also a lake with secrets, both real and imagined.

Jewel in the Crown

Big boat sailor Mike Alfano, who lives an hour away in Spokane, WA, has sailed Lake Pend Oreille for 25 years and knows it well. Extensive racing and cruising in sailboats here prepared Alfano and his family for a score of extended saltwater cruises. They've sailed the premier cruising grounds of the Pacific Northwest, Washington's San Juan Islands, parts of British Columbia's Vancouver Island and into Desolation Sound.

"Want to know what those places look like?" he asks, swinging the bow of his Caliber 38 to parallel Pend Oreille's rocky, fjord-like eastern shore. "It looks like this." He nods to the steep, sparsely forested cliff face that drops into the lake from 5,000-foot Bernard Peak. "Only I've never seen those guys out there," he adds, pointing to a group of white shapes moving slowly across the rocks about 300 feet above the mast.

Image-stabilized binoculars prove "those guys" to be mountain goats, part of a herd or 50 or so animals that roam the rocks under the protection of the Idaho Fish and Game Dept. Local celebrities of a sort, the goats often come right down to the water's edge and, for lucky boaters, will occasionally strike a postcard perfect pose on Steamboat Rock.

With guests aboard for a brief tour--you can't get to the "goat rocks" by land--Alfano is motoring the big cutter on a flat calm June evening that's turned the Lake Pend Oreille Yacht Club's weekly race into a drifter. Less than 25 yards from shore, the depth sounder reads a double-take inducing 300 feet. Much of the way on the three-mile trip back to Last Mango's western shore homeport of Bayview, the sounder logs depths of over 800 feet.

But head up the lake from Bayview and once around Cape Horn, a steep-sided trench over 1,000 feet deep stretches for 20 miles or more to the northwest. This is Idaho's answer to an underwater canyon on the Continental Shelf.

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Float-at-Home

At the top of the lake, where the Pend Oreille River drains to the west, lies Sandpoint, the popular tourist destination most people associate with this lake. It's a city of 8,000 with first-class arts and entertainment plus upscale shopping as well as commercial marinas, launching ramps and a waterfront city park with a big sandy beach and public marina.

Smaller towns like Hope, on the eastern shore, and Garfield Bay, south of Sandpoint, offer private marina facilities and the state of Idaho provides a dozen free tie-up sites for boaters on both shores. Much of the shoreline is state and federal land, and open for recreation.

Tiny Bayview (pop. 500) at the south end, however, is headquarters for serious boating, with over 850 boats kept at seven marinas and about 100 more among the town's unique "float houses," according to Gary MacDonald who operates Hudson Bay Resort, a full service marina and family business for over 50 years.

"Bayview has the largest group of floating homes outside of Seattle," says MacDonald whose 210-slip marina includes 20 examples of what elsewhere might be called "houseboats." These are actually stationary living structures floating on raft-like platforms of western red cedar logs, usually with additional air flotation tanks.

Idaho's gems: western lakes are no small potatoes

Boat/US Magazine, Sept, 2004 by Ryck Lydecker

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