ResortLife

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.

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.

In September 1885, a prospector named Noah Kellogg was combing the hills above Milo Creek in Idaho's northern panhandle when the jackass he had been grubstaked with wandered off. When Kellogg tracked it down, legend says the animal was standing on a glittering outcropping of galena, a lead-silver ore, gazing across the canyon at another. That chance discovery became the Bunker Hill and Sullivan lode, one of the largest of its kind in the world — and the town that grew up nearby took Kellogg's name.

Happy Friday from the hill above the village. If you have been waiting for the perfect fall weekend in Sandpoint, this one might be it.

Did you know today's Schweitzer — Idaho's largest ski area, with 2,900 acres and ten lifts overlooking Lake Pend Oreille — spent its first two decades as a non-profit corporation owned by hundreds of local stockholders? The modern destination resort that millions of skiers know was built one ownership era at a time, and each new hand on the wheel left something lasting on the mountain.

On opening day, December 4, 1963, Schweitzer Basin had exactly one way up: a mile-long double chairlift that carried skiers from the new day lodge at 4,700 feet to 1,700 feet of vertical above. A T-bar was added a month later, and that was the whole mountain. Dr. Jack Fowler of Spokane, the avid skier whose idea it was, had spent the late 1950s driving to The Big Mountain in Whitefish, Montana, eyeing a closer alternative on every trip past the snow-laden Selkirk slopes.

Did you know that October is one of the quietest — and prettiest — months to be on Schweitzer Mountain? The National Weather Service has Sandpoint sunny and 72 degrees today, with a mostly clear night dipping to 44. Up on the mountain it's cooler, of course: sunny and 59 at Schweitzer today, with a 42-degree overnight low. Thursday looks much the same — partly sunny and 72 in town, mostly sunny and 58 up top — before a front rolls through on Friday with a chance of rain showers.