In September 1809 — more than two centuries before the first chairlift — the first European trading post in Idaho rose on the Hope Peninsula. Finan McDonald, working for explorer and fur trader David Thompson of the North West Company, built Kullyspell House on the northeast shore of Lake Pend Oreille, near the mouth of the Clark Fork.

NOAA's Climate Prediction Center issued its official winter 2026-27 outlook on September 17, and the headline is a strong one: El Nino is here and strengthening, with better-than-90-percent odds of a very strong event through the heart of winter — with a real shot at the strongest event on record going back to 1950.

There is a Navy submarine base in Idaho. Not a recruiting office — an actual submarine test range. At Bayview, on the shore of Lake Pend Oreille, the Naval Surface Warfare Center's Acoustic Research Detachment has been quietly testing submarine and ship designs for decades.

Imagine Idaho's largest city in 1942. Not Boise — a brand-new Navy base rising out of the pine forest at the south end of Lake Pend Oreille. After Pearl Harbor, the Navy needed a safe inland site to train the flood of new recruits, and it chose the wooded shoreline between Bayview and Athol. Ground was broken in March 1942, and crews built a small city almost overnight.

Before skis ever touched Schweitzer's slopes, the vast homeland of the Schitsu'umsh — the Coeur d'Alene Tribe — stretched across more than three and a half million acres of the Inland Northwest. It was a country of grass-covered hills, camas prairie, forested mountains, lakes, marshes, and rivers: from the southern end of Lake Pend Oreille in the north, along the Bitterroot Range to the east, down to the Palouse and the North Fork of the Clearwater River in the south, and westward to Steptoe Butte and just east of Spokane Falls.

Good Sunday morning from the hill above Schweitzer. If you are waking up with us at The Village Overlook, take a look outside first, because winter is knocking on the mountain's door. Snow showers are dusting the upper elevations this morning at 32 degrees, feeling closer to 21 in the wind. The KOTX radar map shows a real fall front sweeping through, with widespread precipitation echoes stretching from Colville and Spokane through Coeur d'Alene and right over Sandpoint. Down in town it is raining, 44 degrees, with northeast gusts up to 37 miles per hour.

Before the smelters, before the billion ounces of silver, Idaho's Coeur d'Alene mining district began with a whisper of gold and one secretive prospector. For years, Andrew Prichard worked the creeks along the North Fork of the Coeur d'Alene River, quietly panning color out of a gravel bar that now bears his name. He told almost no one. But gold in those quantities cannot stay a secret forever, and when word finally broke in the fall of 1883, the rush was on.

October 10, 2026. Sandpoint wakes to 41 degrees and a sky that can't quite decide, with the National Weather Service giving us a 20 percent chance of showers after 11 a.m. and a mostly sunny afternoon high near 54. The KOTX radar is showing real shower activity this morning, with echo cells over the Colville highlands to the west and near the Canadian border to the north. Tonight is the interesting part: the snow level drops to 2,400 feet after midnight while temperatures fall to around 33, so the first dusting of white on Schweitzer's 6,400-foot summit is very much in play.

Schweitzer Mountain Resort is counting down to winter. The resort has announced a tentative opening date of Friday, November 27 for the 2026-27 ski season, conditions permitting, and unveiled a lineup of new programs, dining, and experiences for the season ahead.

Sandpoint exists because trains needed to cross Lake Pend Oreille. In 1882 and 1883, the Northern Pacific Railroad built a timber trestle across the lake's shallows and mudflats to meet a congressional deadline for the railroad's land grant — and a town grew around the crossing.