Idaho's gems: western lakes are no small potatoes

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.

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.

Each is architecturally different, from a Cape Cod cottage, to an A-frame chateau, to a lighthouse look-alike. Some are topped by widows' walks and the back sections of many float houses are actually boat garages.

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Walt and Jeanne Nicholson live in a two-story duplex float house at Scenic Bay Marina and Motel directly across the bay from MacDonald's. The marina has 200 open and covered slips, plus about 60 float houses. Like many of them, the back half of the Nicholson's house belongs to their 23-foot Bayliner Cierra plus a paddleboat, some water toys and Jeanne's kayak.

From their floating front patio or the top deck of their home, the view across five miles of open water is to the mountains that share the name of that "more fashionable" lake to the south, Coeur d'Alene.

"That lake is all about entertainment and style, and that's what draws most people to Coeur d'Alene," Walt Nicholson says. "But our lake has a reputation as a big, cold body of water that can get nasty at times and that tends to keep people away. We kinda like that, actually," he adds.

Run Silent, Run Deep

For all the comments and stories about the lake's weather, the Navy calls Pend Oreille "the quietest body of water in the world." And that's the reason the Naval Surface Warfare Center maintains its Acoustic Research Detachment at Bayview, home to the Navy's second largest recruit training facility during World War II.

The Navy deeded the 4,000-acre camp to Idaho in 1965 (it's now Farragut State Park) but kept a waterfront parcel in the middle of Bayview and in the 1980s developed a submarine research facility there.

"What we do here is all about quiet submarines," says CMDR Kevin Grundy, the officer in charge. "This is the premier research facility in the world used to determine the ways sound affects our ability to operate submarines.

"Submarine warfare has changed since the Cold War when the focus was on open ocean, deep water operations (remember The Hunt for Red October?). The quest then was for quiet propulsion systems," Grundy says. "Today we focus on inshore operations that rely on submarines like the smaller Virginia class. But these vessels need the stealth advantage of quiet operation just as much as the big boats," he notes.

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"Why are we still at it today? Well, you have to remember, there are still bad guys out there and they have submarines, too," he says.

To do that kind of work, the Navy has erected what Grundy calls the "largest underwater structure in the world" in the depths of Lake Pend Oreille. This is an assemblage of hydrophones and other test equipment designed to listen to and measure sound waves underwater as well as to generate noise pulses against one-quarter or one third scale models of submarine hulls. The whole grid is anchored to the bottom in a thousand feet of water and suspended by cables; it covers an area the size of a football stadium.

Actual testing is done under cover of darkness, Grundy says. That's because the equipment and procedures are classified, of course, but also because the lake is usually calm at night and there's little boat noise to corrupt data collection. "If a guy starts an outboard 20 miles away, we can hear him," Grundy reports.

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Although the facility is off limits to the public, the Navy has proven a good partner for Lake Pend Oreille boaters. Navy personnel monitor VHF Channel 16 and they can, and have, passed along mayday calls to local rescue authorities. On more than one occasion in recent years, the Navy dispatched its own boats to help in emergency situations on the lake as well. Although the Navy is very much a part of the community in Bayview, the super secret facility has generated its own local mythology.

"Yes, there are a few urban legends surrounding this place," Grundy says. "One is that we've got a nuclear submarine hidden here while the reality is that all of our test boats, which are just scaled-down hull tubes with no operating equipment anyway, are unpowered and unmanned.

"Another is that nobody has found the bottom of the lake and that the Navy is keeping it a secret even though the charts clearly show a maximum depth of 1,160 feet," says Grundy. "My favorite is the claim that there's a tunnel from here to the ocean that the Navy uses to secretly bring in full-size submarines. If that's true, I think they're still digging it."

But there's one more myth, and it's a legend that the Navy could very well have helped to spawn through its secret nighttime operations--the legend of the Pend Oreille Paddler, the lake's very own monster.

It Came From Beneath the Lake

"Well, I've never seen it but I've talked to people who say they have," reports Al Leiser, the assistant manager of Farragut State Park who has lived in Bayview for a dozen years. "There have been reports of people seeing a dark shape surfacing on the lake over the years but I don't know of any documented evidence like a fuzzy picture of a creature sticking its head up and cruising around the lake, Nessie-style."

The lake monster legend first surfaced in 1944 in the Farragut Naval Training Center newspaper, according to an Idaho guidebook. The name, Pend Oreille Paddler, adopted in about 1977, seems to have more to do with local poetic license than any particular characteristic of the creature.

One theory, that the Paddler is really huge sturgeon that come to the surface occasionally, is discounted by the fact that these fish only live in the shallow, warmer waters of the Clark Fork River that feeds the lake. According to The Insider's Guide to the Idaho Panhandle, some people think that the Navy "might be taking advantage of a gullible public and releasing 'monster' sightings to cover up their secret submarine operations."

CMDR Gundy denies that, but admits, "I'm sure we helped that myth along." For his part, Leiser is more willing to suspend disbelief, if only for the amusement value.

"With a lake this size and this depth, it's possible that there is some large creature out there that we can't explain," he says, adding, "Hey, why not?"

But Mike Alfano ain't buying any of it.

"I've never seen the Paddler and never met anyone who has, but I don't believe there's a Loch Ness Monster, either," Alfano says. "I suspect these stories have to do more with alcohol consumption than any real phenomenon."

Then, as an afterthought, he adds, "But you know, every now and then, you'll see a really big roller come in off the lake. You can be sitting in your boat in the marina in perfectly calm conditions, and all of a sudden, the boat will start to roll, moving back and forth.

"You'll look up and there's nothing going on out there; no boats going by, no wakes, no submarines," he reports. "Nothing. It's really weird."

LOCAL KNOWLEDGE

For more information about boating on Lake Pend Oreille and in northern Idaho, contact:

www.Idahoparks.org/rec.boating.html

Bayview: www.Bayviewidaho.org

Sandpoint: www.Sandpointchamber.org

Couer d'Alene: www.Couerdalene.org

Priest Lake: www.Priestlake.org

Farragut State Park:

www.ldahoparks.org/parks/farragut.html

Naval Sea Systems Command weather buoy: http://lpo.dt.navy.mil/buoy_info.html

Scenic Bay Marina and Motel Bayview, ID

www.Scenicbaymarina.com

120 open and covered slips with transient dockage, short-term slip rentals and motel rooms with waterfront decks.

MacDonald's Hudson Bay Resort Bayview, ID

www.macdonaldsresort.com

200 open and covered slips, boat maintenance and repair services, fuel (gas and diesel), transient docks, store and cabins plus rental sailboats, canoes and outboard fishing skiffs. Can arrange PWC, pontoon and ski boat rentals.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Boat Owners Assn.
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