Every Lake
Coeur d'Alene Lake
Twenty-five miles of blue water in the Idaho Panhandle, with a floating golf green and wintering eagles.
- 37 ft · shore
- 73 ft
- 110 ft
- 147 ft
- 184 ft
- 220 ft · bottom
About Coeur d'Alene Lake
The lake takes its name from the Coeur d'Alene people — the French traders' name, "heart of an awl," for the sharpness of the tribe's bargaining. Their homeland wrapped the lake and the rivers that feed it, the St. Joe and the Coeur d'Alene, and the tribe still holds the southern third of the lakebed.
The city at the north end was a fort, then a steamboat port for the Silver Valley mines — for a time the busiest steamboat traffic west of the Great Lakes — and then a timber town. The mining left a legacy in the sediment that the lake and the tribe are still managing; the timber money built the lakefront that is now resort and marina.
Winter brings bald eagles by the hundred to Wolf Lodge Bay to feed on spawning kokanee, and summer brings the Ironman and the boats. The Coeur d'Alene Resort's floating green, on the fourteenth hole, is the lake's most photographed square of grass.
- Coeur d'Alene, Harrison, Hayden, Post Falls
- I-90 across the north shore, Highway 97 down the east side
- Wolf Lodge Bay and the St. Joe delta
Turn it in your hands
Live 3D of the actual cut files — drag to orbit, pinch to zoom. Every road you see is engraved on the real thing.
