Schweitzer Mountain Resort

Before the holiday rush, Sandpoint's late-November and December calendar is already taking shape — and it's full of the small-town traditions that make the season here special.

The Festival of Trees returns on Saturday, November 28, with its Charity and Cheer Window Walk — a community fundraiser whose decorated windows light up downtown. Friends and Family Day at The Hive on November 28 brings photos with Santa, cookies and cocoa, Christmas crafts, a fourth-grade gingerbread competition, and the first public viewing of this year's festival trees.

Summer's last hurrah came and went over Labor Day weekend, and it was a big one. Schweitzer's 33rd annual Fall Fest closed out the summer season September 4-7, filling the village with live music, more than 80 regional brews, ciders, and wines, scenic chairlift rides on the Great Escape Quad, and a full slate of family activities from the climbing wall to the summer activity center.

The conifer that breaks the rules. The western larch — tamarack to old-timers — is an evergreen that goes deciduous every fall, dropping its needles after turning them a brilliant gold. It's the largest of the larches, and in late September and October it sets the Selkirk high country ablaze with color.

Why does it drop its needles? Before shedding, the tree pulls nutrients back into storage — an adaptation that reduces snow damage to branches and protects against insects and fire. Come spring it flushes chartreuse-green new growth, the sign of late spring in the high country.

Some places a town just adopts. For generations, the sledding hill off Pine Street has been where Sandpoint learns to love winter — and on Saturday, October 24, the community gets to celebrate it properly. The Kaniksu Land Trust hosts the Sled Hill Grand Opening from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., free and open to all.

Expect live music, food, games, a pumpkin patch, and demonstrations from the Kaniksu Folk School — a thank-you to the community that showed up to protect the place. With the first phase of the master plan complete, it's finally time to celebrate together.

Sandpoint is getting its own film festival. The first annual Sandpoint Idaho Film Fest runs October 17-24 — a week of independent cinema across eleven categories, including documentary, animation, action sports, and locally made narrative work, competing for eighteen awards.

The week opens October 17 with a free Film Crawl starting at Matchwood, followed by a Local Idaho Filmmaker Showcase at the Little Panida Theater on October 18. October 19 brings a Sandpoint Cinema takeover in Ponderay, and October 20 goes dark with R-Night, an evening of dark films at Idaho Pour Authority.

Priest Lake has worn three names, and each one tells a story. In 1846, Jesuit priest Pierre-Jean De Smet mapped the lake and named it Roothaan Lake, for his superior in Rome. In 1865, Captain John Mullan — building the road that would bear his name from Walla Walla to Fort Benton — renamed it Kaniksu, from the Kalispel word for "Black Robe," the name Native people gave the Jesuit missionaries. The name that stuck honors the Jesuit priests who kept a base camp at Kalispell Bay in the 1840s.

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.