Sandpoint: Where the Selkirks Come Down to the Water
Near Sandpoint, Idaho
Sandpoint, Idaho sits on a narrow peninsula in the northeastern corner of the state, cradled between Lake Pend Oreille and the forested slopes of the Selkirk and Cabinet mountains. It is a small city, fewer than fifteen thousand permanent residents, perched at a geography so striking that the lake, the mountains, and the town seem almost improbably well-matched. The name comes from the physical fact of the place: a sandy point of land extending into the lake.
The Kalispel people, whom French-speaking fur traders called Pend d'Oreilles for the large earrings they wore, had lived here for thousands of years when the explorer David Thompson arrived in the early eighteen hundreds to establish a trading post. The Northern Pacific Railroad came through in eighteen eighty-two, and a timber economy built itself around the rail connection. A succession of lumber companies, including the Humbird Lumber Company that operated from nineteen hundred to nineteen forty-four, drove the local economy for decades.
When the timber gave way, as it does in mountain towns with extraordinary landscapes, Sandpoint found its way toward something else. Today the town is known as much for its cultural life as its natural setting. The Festival at Sandpoint, a nonprofit outdoor concert series that has run since nineteen eighty-three, has become one of the largest music festivals in the Pacific Northwest.
Schweitzer Mountain, the ski resort that opened in December of nineteen sixty-three on the slopes above town, draws skiers and snowboarders across terrain that receives consistent snow from Pacific storms. During World War Two, a naval training station near the south end of the lake processed nearly three hundred thousand sailors through basic training in thirty months. The lake's depth and quiet make it the Navy's primary site for acoustic submarine testing to this day.
Sandpoint is a town that keeps collecting layers of history without quite becoming the place any of them would have predicted.
