Did you know that the big lake you can see from Schweitzer on a clear day has its own lake monster? Lake Pend Oreille, spread out below the Selkirks, is home to the Pend Oreille Paddler, a mysterious creature said to surface as a long, dark shape moving with an undulating motion and a wide wake. Locals do not tell the story with fear, exactly. Over the decades it has become a piece of living heritage, retold on docks and beaches and passed along to every new visitor who asks what might be hiding in that deep, dark water.
Reports of something large in the lake were already circulating when a sighting was reported in 1944. That date matters, because the south end of the lake was then home to the Farragut Naval Training Center, now Farragut State Park. Submarines took practice dives in the lake during World War II, a practice that continued into the Cold War years, and many locals have wondered ever since whether those early shapes were really military craft on test dives. Other perfectly ordinary explanations have been offered too, from waterlogged trees to a sturgeon of enormous size, the kind of prehistoric-looking fish that can startle anyone in a small rowboat.
The legend got its name in the 1970s. Sightings began again, and in 1977 a young girl playing at Sandpoint City Beach was said to have survived an encounter that reporters dubbed the Pend Oreille Paddler. The name stuck, even after a wonderfully deflating discovery in late 1984. The creature in a much-discussed photograph turned out to be a 12-foot papier-mache catfish, made for a play that had appeared in Sandpoint in October 1974. A lesser legend might have ended right there. The Paddler simply swam on, friendlier in the retelling than it had been in the first alarming reports.
North Idaho College professor James R. McLeod took the story seriously enough to investigate it. In 1983 he created a cryptozoology club at the college in Coeur d'Alene, and his student researchers interviewed locals and chased down the documented sightings. McLeod later published his work in a 1987 book on the mysterious lake and its monster. His own suggestion was grounded in the lake itself: the Paddler could be a real deep-water fish, possibly a giant sturgeon. Research shared by the Bonner County Historical Society reached a similarly open-ended conclusion after years of charting sightings, most of them between the Green Monarchs and Bayview, in the deepest part of the lake.
And still the sightings came. On Memorial Day in 1985, Coeur d'Alene teacher Julie Green reported giving chase to a gunmetal-grey object a few hundred yards from her boat, and a photograph taken on March 29, 2007, from Grouse Mountain by River Journal photographer Jay Mock renewed the conversation once more. That 2007 image is described as the final officially documented sighting, yet the Paddler hardly feels finished. It lives now in museum research, newspaper series, high school reporting and lakeside conversation. Next time you ride a lift at Schweitzer and look out over Pend Oreille lying calm in the morning light, keep an eye on the surface. North Idaho would be delighted if you spotted something.