Skiing on the Surface of the North Idaho Panhandle
Story and photos by Tim Leffel



Exploring the towns of northern Idaho and the ski slopes on its jagged mountains, a visitor ponders the whiteness both on the slopes and off as the Panhandle region squeezed between two states continues to evolve.


USA travel story

As we made fresh tracks in the powder skiing down from one of the summits at Lookout Pass, our views were mountains in every direction, open ski slopes in front of us, and no towns or cities anywhere in sight. In this rugged part of Northern Idaho where silver mines once flourished, the biggest feeder city to the ski resorts is Spokane, WA. “Lift lines” are something that skiers in urban areas far away talk about. Not here.

We never saw a lift line in my group’s four days of skiing at three different Idaho Panhandle ski resorts. If there were six people ahead of us for a triple lift, that was as close as we got. It was just non-stop skiing in the day, good craft beers after the boots came off, and sleeping like a rock with filling dinners in the stomach before doing it again.

It’s hard to say who has the best skiing in Idaho, though some of these ski resorts near Spokane and Coeur D’Alene do get reliably dumped on with snow. Since they’re too far from any big city to pull in the crowds, it’s almost guaranteed that skiers and snowboarders will get in as many runs as their legs can handle. As soon as they get to the bottom of a run, they get right back on the lift. Silver Mountain is accessed by a gondola from the town of Kellogg and has a daily limit on the number of visitors, but only on a few holiday weekends do they ever have to turn people away.

Swishing Down Schweitzer

best skiing in Idaho

We started our Northern Idaho ski trips by checking into gorgeous Talus Rock, a family-owned B&B in the countryside near Sandpoint, with a view of mountains over a pond from the great room with fireplace. We got up early to hit the slopes and see how much of the huge 2,900-acre terrain we could cover. Schweitzer has a front bowl and a back bowl, with changing snow conditions depending on the sun’s angle. Several trails go on for more than a mile, one cruising trail stretching 2.1 miles. At the bottom of it is something that’s kind of a rarity in Idaho: a full-on ski village with two hotels, a residential village, and restaurants.

We hit the slopes with gusto, but went looking for places to make fresh tracks after warming up with a couple of long cruising runs to find our ski legs. Schweitzer is a favorite of advanced skiers, with 50% of the trails being black diamond or double-black diamond. There are options for skiing through glades and a few white-knuckle chutes with names like Misfortune, Whiplash, Triple Bypass, and Skid Row. There are plenty of wide slopes we had all to ourselves though, with more benign monikers like Have Fun and Vagabond.

best ski resorts Idaho - Schweitzer

We checked in to 32-room Humbird Hotel at the end, named after a lumber company that operated in the area for decades. At their Crow’s Bench restaurant we dined on potato and leek vichyssoise, game hen, and meatballs made from a mix of bison, elk and wild boar. Between courses, we could admire the architecture and unique design of the hotel, built with pressed timber beams and very little steel, the wood and stone providing a link to the past but with a very contemporary design.

One of the first clues that I was in a rural red part of the country was that there wasn’t a facemask anywhere in sight, even indoors. We were skiing in early March of 2022, when more than 4,000 Americans a month were still dropping dead from Covid-19 variants. “You’ll notice that every one of them is wearing a helmet on the slopes though,” a man from Seattle said to me in the Schweitzer lodge, “even though only about 40 people a year die in ski accidents. Logic goes out the window when political identities get involved.”

The next morning we went straight onto the main lift after breakfast and checked out the Schweitzer ski slopes we hadn’t made it to the first day. We still couldn’t cover them all because we had a date with Mick Duff’s Brewing Company in nearby Sandpoint for lunch. Owned by brothers Mickey and Duffy Mahoney, the 1926 brick building that used to be a post office would be my second home if I lived here.

Mick Duff's Sandpoint ID

Apparently some people are actually acting on that fantasy. At Mick Duff’s I ordered a Lake Paddler pale ale and got some context on the changing demographics of Sandpoint from Kate McAlister, president of the Sandpoint Chamber of Commerce. She has watched as the once-a-secret small town of 10,000 people has become a hotspot for transplants bringing their house sale money to a quieter place with a lower costs of living. A few of the newcomers are, in the view of some locals, upsetting the natural economic order.

“Someone selling a house in California can come here and buy something at the top of the market without blinking,” Kate says. “They’re spending the kind of money that most people here will never earn in their lifetime. That’s okay if they’re kind and they try to adjust. The problems come when they try to change where they’ve landed and they treat people badly. I’ve had to have a few direct conversations when someone has gotten nasty to a waiter, treating them like a servant.”

One newcomer bought a mansion on a mountainside, with beautiful views of the area, but in an area so remote that no cable lines reached it. She came by the Chamber office and City Hall repeatedly to complain about the lack of internet access, getting increasingly angry that the city couldn’t solve her problem. “Maybe that’s something she should have checked on before buying the place,” Kate said with a chuckle. “The lines still don’t go up there, but after a few months she finally gave up and stopped coming by. Maybe she wised up and got satellite service.”

Idaho was one of the fastest-growing states in the country in the pioneer days between 1900 and 1910, its population doubling to 325,000. Today the state has around 2 million people, making it one of the least populated, but it’s back in growth mode again. This time, however, it’s not desperate miners and railroad workers sheltering in makeshift huts. The new residents look more like the business owners who served all those workers, with plenty of money to spend.

On the way out we could see why Sandpoint is luring more than a few newcomers from elsewhere. With mountains always in view, we drove past Lake Pend Oreille, one of the big draws of the area in the summer months for boating and fishing. It’s easy to understand why people living in expensive areas now would start dreaming of a move after visiting. It’s clear while riding around in this area though that minorities are definitely in the minority. In the last census, 87.3% of the population of Northern Idaho was identified as Caucasian.

A Few Years of Supplies

I was watching for clues about another demographic that keeps moving to this Idaho Panhandle area though, one that is less likely to be found on the slopes or at condo building open houses: the survival preppers. These Ayn-Rand-loving, anti-government types gravitate to this region for building their doomsday shelters to get ready for the apocalypse.

They mostly keep to themselves on their acres of land with “No Trespassing” signs though. The main clue to their presence is the fact that these days gun shops, not brothels, are the most numerous businesses a visitor will spot. While I usually like to dig deep and get the real story when writing about a place, I was happy to stay on the surface on this trip, skiing powder instead of snooping into secret societies.

The preppers usually get back into the news when there’s some kind of community development proposal for them. The most infamous cropped up a decade ago, when plans for The Citadel got into the press. It was meant to be a giant medieval-style fortress on a hilltop in a sparsely populated area of the Idaho Panhandle, 70 miles from Spokane. All of the citizens would be required to own an AR-15 assault weapon and 1,000 rounds of ammunition “to defend the community” and the castle would store years of food supplies and a gun-making factory just in case.

As with most of these warped-utopia projects that tries to organize people who are anti-organization, it failed before it got started. It didn’t help that one of the leaders was a convicted extortionist and one of the funding mechanisms was meant to be a start-up gun company. When the hefty deposits failed to materialize, the project faded into history.

Wild History in Wallace, Idaho

Wallace Idaho

Our next destination was Wallace Inn, in a town with a colorful history that is still continuing. In what still might be the largest wildfire since the USA became a nation, a massive high-winds summer fire of 1910 ripped through a giant area including all of the Idaho Panhandle and well into Washington and Montana. It consumed 3.2 million acres of forest land, much of it newly protected National Park areas, but it also bore down hard on the town of Wallace, which was squeezed in between mountain ranges.

“Out of habit, some men fled to the Oasis Room, one of five brothels in town. Others crawled in holes dug in their backyards. When the Sunset Brewery started to burn, more than two thousand barrels of beer broke open, spilling suds into the street,” reported Timothy Egan in the book The Big Burn.

The town of Taft, named after the current president of the time after he derided their wicked ways, was even worse. The town supposedly had 500 prostitutes among its population of 2,500 and 30 saloons to serve the residents. “By contrast, there was just a single drugstore and one grocery outlet,” The Big Burn notes. “The hospital was portable, subject to the railroad’s need to keep men patched up and vertical.” It was an easy place for a criminal to hide since “a decent man would stand out like a cactus on an ice floe.”

Some who escaped the fires on the one train out of Wallace returned to the aftermath, joining the men who couldn’t fit on the train who fought the flames and survived. The city rebuilt, unlike some other towns connected to the mines and railroads, but very few of the original structures survived. It didn’t take long for Wallace to get back in the groove though and once again become a center of debauchery. We had plans to tip some glasses ourselves at City Limits Brew Pub, but it was closed that day, so we had a few cans of theirs at the hotel beside the indoor pool and then sampled some other brews while dining in downtown Wallace with our hotel’s owner and the man whose Historic Wallace business card has “Prime Minister” as his title.

Rick Shaffer regaled us with some of the history of Wallace, including the fact that this region was for a while the “silver capital of the world,” producing more of the precious metal from the mines here than anywhere else, more than $5 billion worth starting in the late 1800s. A photo on the wall of our next hotel showed some men beside a horse-drawn wagon in 1917 that was loaded up with “$86,000 of silver bars headed to the U.S. mint.” Brothels remained a fixture in Wallace and the last one didn’t close until 1988. The gambling halls had a few more good years until the FBI shut those down in 1991.

The town’s rebellious spirit and flouting of laws made elsewhere might have had something to do with the attention. In the 1970s, when the federal highway planners announced plans to build an interstate going straight through downtown Wallace, the locals found a unique way to fight back. They listed every downtown building on the national historic register. The highway builders couldn’t raze registered historic buildings, so the interstate went over the city instead, the whole thing an elevated viaduct.

Fresh Tracks at Lookout Pass

Lookout Pass ski resort

The valley where Lookout Pass is located is so narrow that I could have thrown a rock over the parking lot from the lodge and hit the interstate highway. So there’s not much infrastructure at the base: just the means to get visitors up into the steep mountains for fast fun on the snow. The complex is not huge, with 1,043 acres of terrain and around 30 trails, but it got 35 feet of snow the year before we arrived and averages more than 400 inches of powder per year. It also has walk-up lift ticket prices that max out at $73 on holiday weekends and are only $52 on weekends with advance purchase—a price many Colorado and Utah resorts haven’t seen since the last millennium.

We arrived at a rare point in time when a lift was going up to serve a new peak with trails already cut, but it wasn’t in place yet. So we hopped in a Snowcat and rode to the top of the mountain, skiing down where nobody had gone ahead of us. Some of the slopes were groomed, some were just powder, and the youngest one in our group had a blast finding his own way through the trees.

We made a few more Snowcat runs on our own, with views at the top over the Bitterroot Mountains to Montana, then spent the rest of the day on the other trails, enjoying the long runs and the usual Idaho lack of crowds. We were right back on the interstate when we left the parking lot and headed down the road to Kellogg.

Silver Mountain ID

Family Fun at Silver Mountain Ski Resort

When we checked into the Morning Star Lodge in Kellogg, it was clear that we were in an ideal spot for skiing: it was just steps from the hotel’s check-in area to “the world’s longest single-stage gondola serving a ski area.” The development is also home to Idaho’s largest indoor water park, so we changed into bathing suits and joined the families from Coeur d’Alene who were on vacation. The visit marked a first: sitting in a hot tub while watching kids learn to surf after spending the day skiing while wearing gloves, wool socks, and several layers of clothing.

We got back into weather-appropriate gear and headed into downtown Kellogg to Radio Brewing Company. With taps that look like classic microphones and and an “On Air” sign lit up, it was a reminder that while Northern Idaho may be mostly rural and sparsely population, they’ve got some style—and some talented brewers. I had a Hepcat Pale Ale and enjoyed the retro vibe.

Idaho breweries

As we had come to expect by now, our last day of skiing after riding the gondola up to Silver Mountain’s lodge was better than any best day of skiing I ever had in the northeast USA. Snow conditions were close to perfect, nobody was crashing into anyone else, and we always went straight onto the lifts for a brief rest before whipping down the mountain again.

After shedding the ski boots and soaking up the late afternoon sun outside, we headed back down the gondola to Kellogg. We drove to the biggest city in northern Idaho, Coeur d’Alene, with a population of around 60,000 people. In the hot tub the night before, a father from there raved about all the great things for families to do there and the great sense of community. “We could use a little more diversity though,” he said and trailed off, looking around at all the lily-white winter bodies in the waterpark around us.

We checked into the swanky Couer d’Alene Resort on the lake and I caught a gorgeous sunset before we headed into town for dinner and one last beer together at Daft Badger Brewing. We had early flights out from Spokane, so we called it an early night. There are only so many days you can ski non-stop all day, with no worries about avoiding lines or beating the crowds by being the first ones on the lift. In Northern Idaho, some aspects of stepping back in time make for a great vacation in the mountains.

IF YOU GO:

The Ski Idaho website offers a wealth of information and links out to all ski hill sites in the state, but follow these links to go directly to Schweitzer, Lookout Pass, and Silver Mountain.

Perceptive Travel editorEditor Tim Leffel is an award-winning travel writer and blogger who has experienced 10 Idaho ski resorts. He is author of several books, including The World's Cheapest Destinations, Travel Writing 2.0, and A Better Life for Half the Price. See his long-running Cheapest Destinations blog here.






Related features:

Mining the Past in Southwest Montana by Tim Leffel
A Wealth of Open Spaces at the Ski Resorts in Idaho by Tim Leffel
Evolving Views of History at the Whitman Mission Historical Site by Teresa Bergen
"Progress" in Colorado: A Visit and a Goodbye to a Rapidly Changing Place by Julia Hubbel


See other travel stories from the USA in the archives.




Read this article online at: https://perceptivetravel.com/issues/0123/idaho.html

Copyright © Perceptive Travel 2023. All rights reserved.


Also in this issue:



Books from the Author:

Buy A Better Life for Half the Price at your local bookstore, or get it online here:
Amazon US
Amazon Canada
Amazon UK
E-reader versions




Buy The World's Cheapest Destinations: 26 Countries Where Your Travel Money is Worth a Fortune at your local bookstore, or get it online here:
Amazon
Amazon Canada
Amazon UK
Kobo



Buy Make Your Travel Dollars Worth a Fortune: The Contrarian Traveler's Guide to Getting More for Less at your local bookstore, or get it online here:
Amazon
Kobo






Sign Up