The water question in North Idaho is never whether. It is which.
The big answer is Lake Pend Oreille, ten minutes east. Forty-three miles long, more than eleven hundred feet deep, one hundred eleven miles of shoreline, the fifth-deepest lake in the country. The Eagle boat launch inside Farragut State ParkFarragut State Park4,000-acre state park on Lake Pend Oreille.parksandrecreation.idaho.gov is the only major access on the whole south end, and it is close enough to trailer over after work on a Tuesday. The lake fishes like an inland sea: kokanee, mackinaw over thirty pounds, and the rainbow that set the state record.
If trailering is not the plan, Bayview is fifteen minutes. MacDonald’sMacDonald's ResortCabins, moorage, and a floating store at Bayview. Same family since 1951.macdonaldsresort.com has been running cabins, moorage, and a floating store there under the same family since 1951. Covered slips to forty feet, open moorage to fifty, rentable year-round, in a bay that also holds around a hundred of Idaho’s two-hundred-odd historic float homes. A working marina town the size of a gesture, with the Navy’s quiet acoustic research range across the bay for a story to tell at the dock.
For the evenings that do not need deep water, Spirit Lake’s town launch is about twelve minutes west and the Twin Lakes launches fifteen, kokanee and bass and pike water with the channel between the Twins freshly dredged. When the hard water comes, the same circle of lakes carries the Panhandle’s best ice fishing for perch.
South of here the water changes character entirely. Lake Coeur d’Alene runs twenty-five miles down to Harrison, and it is the one you take a whole Saturday for. The CedarsCedars Floating RestaurantFloating since 1965 at the mouth of the Spokane River, on 600,000 pounds of concrete-encased foam.cedarsfloatingrestaurant.com has floated at the mouth of the Spokane River since 1965, held up by six hundred thousand pounds of concrete-encased foam, and you tie up to it rather than park at it. Down the east shore there is a beach bar at Arrow Point and a marina counter at Harrison where the ice cream matters more than the menu. The resort’s floating green sits out there too, if you are the kind of boater who brings a seven iron.
The math behind all of it is genuinely lopsided: more than half of the surface water in Idaho is up here in the five northern counties, which hold something like a hundred and forty lakes between them. The visitor bureau likes to say fifty-five of them are within an easy drive of Coeur d’Alene, and while nobody publishes the methodology, spend a summer here and the number stops sounding inflated. Wolf Lodge Bay fills with bald eagles each winter when the kokanee spawn, which is the sort of thing that happens on this lake without anyone organizing it.
People who could afford water anywhere buy on this lake, and have for a long while. The reason they keep coming back is not the scenery, which plenty of places have. It is that nobody bothers them here. We are not going to point at anybody’s dock, because that would be a strange thing to do on a site that spends a whole page promising neighbors will not surveil each other. Patty Duke spent twenty-five years here doing summer theater and being somebody’s neighbor, which is about right for how this lake treats people. The relevant part for you is simpler: the lake holds quiet money and does not make a fuss about it, and the same is true of the ground we are selling.
Between trips, the boat lives well here. Six acres, give or take, holds a shop that swallows the boat, the trailer, and the winter cover without a negotiation, and three-phase power at every lot runs a hoist or a compressor like it is nothing. Public roads plowed by the highway district mean the tow vehicle leaves the driveway in February.
Deep water east, big water south, quiet water west, and a dry shop in the middle.
All of that sits on actual ground. See the fifty-eight on the plat →
