When Schweitzer opened on December 4, 1963, almost everyone went home at dark. The new ski area above Sandpoint had a mile-long chairlift and a handsome three-story day lodge designed by Spokane architect Grant Groesbeck, but a day lodge was exactly that: a warm place to boot up, eat lunch, and thaw out before the drive back down the mountain. Staying overnight on the mountain was not yet part of the Schweitzer idea.
The first exception arrived quickly. In the summer of 1964, the Red Cricket Condo rose on founder Jack Fowler's property, and local histories remember it as the first condominium built in Idaho. Owners could wake up at the ski area years before anyone used the word village. The idea grew slowly. A master plan in the mid-1980s pointed toward destination facilities, but the owners of the day decided a full village was too risky. Even so, the Crystal Run condominiums, built in the 1985-86 season, introduced the ski-in, ski-out concept that defines Schweitzer lodging today, and in 1988 the area renamed itself Schweitzer Mountain Resort, a signal that it intended to be more than a day hill.
The real turning point came in 1990, with a ten-year plan to convert Schweitzer into a destination resort built around a village. That summer brought the Green Gables Lodge and a new Headquarters Day Lodge, and on May 27, 1990, the original 1963 lodge was deliberately burned and razed to make room for what was coming. It was a bittersweet bonfire: the building that had welcomed the first skiers made way for a mountain where skiers could stay.
Seattle-based Harbor Properties, which bought Schweitzer on December 31, 1998, built out that village vision. In 1999 the Green Gables was extensively remodeled and reopened as the 82-unit Selkirk Lodge, its steep roofs still the village's most recognizable silhouette. Construction began in May 2001 on the White Pine Lodge, a 75,000-square-foot building that opened in August 2002 with 50 condominium units, ground-floor shops and restaurants, and two floors of underground parking. Between the two lodges, the village finally had a heart.
The newest chapter opened in February 2022, when the 31-room Humbird hotel welcomed its first guests in the center of the village. Built with mass timber under a master plan launched in 2017, the boutique hotel is named for the Humbird Lumber Company, the mill that was the lifeblood of Sandpoint's economy in the early 1900s, and its exposed wood beams carry that timber heritage into the village's most modern building.
Today, visitors who linger over dinner in the village and watch the lights come on in Sandpoint far below are enjoying something the founders could only sketch. Schweitzer learned to stay overnight one building at a time, across six decades, and each lodge still tells its part of the story.