Spokane to Coeur d'Alene: The Inland Northwest Corridor

The drive from Spokane into the Idaho Panhandle along Interstate Ninety is one of the more abrupt transitions in the northern tier. Spokane sits on the Columbia Plateau, a landscape of volcanic basalt and wheat fields that extends for hundreds of miles south. The moment you cross into Idaho, the terrain changes: forested hills rise, Lake Coeur d'Alene appears to the south, and the landscape shifts from agricultural plateau to the forested mountain terrain that continues east across Montana.

Coeur d'Alene is named for the Schitsu'umsh people, also called the Coeur d'Alene Tribe, the name is French, a rough rendering of a phrase said to have been applied to the tribe by French-speaking Iroquois, who saw them as shrewd traders. The French word coeur means heart; d'Alene means awl or pointed tool. Sharp-hearted, roughly.

Their territory centered on this lake and the surrounding forests and rivers. The lake itself is among the most chemically contaminated bodies of water in the United States. The Bunker Hill mine and smelter complex, which operated from the eighteen eighties through the nineteen eighties in the Silver Valley east of here, released over seventy years of lead, zinc, and cadmium into the Coeur d'Alene watershed.

The lake's sediments are still heavily contaminated. The Coeur d'Alene Tribe has been in the center of Superfund negotiations and cleanup efforts for decades. Spokane, thirty miles west, is the largest city between Seattle and Minneapolis, a distinction that is either impressive or sobering depending on your relationship to large open spaces.