SchweitzerResort

When you stand on Schweitzer and look down at Lake Pend Oreille shining below, you are looking across a homeland far older than the resort, the town of Sandpoint, or Idaho itself. For thousands of years this lake, its rivers, and its mountain shores belonged to the Kalispel people, an Interior Salish people whose own name, Ql'ispé, means lake or river paddlers, as the Bonner County Historical Society explains. Fur traders called them Pend d'Oreille, French for hanging from the ear, after their circular shell earrings.

Did you know that Schweitzer began with a hike in ski boots? On Memorial Day in 1960, Spokane dentist Jack Fowler, his son Tom, and Spokane architect Grant Groesbeck backpacked into Schweitzer Basin and skied the South Bowl. Their first idea was a modest one, little more than a shack and a rope tow, but standing in that big, snow-filled bowl, the three men could already picture something far larger: a ski area close to home for the people of Sandpoint and Spokane.

If you are heading up the mountain for the first time, or you have been skiing Schweitzer for years, there is a good chance your day starts with a stop at Alpine Shop. The family of shops in downtown Sandpoint and in Schweitzer Village has been helping visitors and locals get outside in every season, with honest advice, a fitting room instead of a shipping label, and staff who would rather listen first and sell second.

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.

Before skis ever touched Schweitzer's slopes, the vast homeland of the Schitsu'umsh — the Coeur d'Alene Tribe — stretched across more than three and a half million acres of the Inland Northwest. It was a country of grass-covered hills, camas prairie, forested mountains, lakes, marshes, and rivers: from the southern end of Lake Pend Oreille in the north, along the Bitterroot Range to the east, down to the Palouse and the North Fork of the Clearwater River in the south, and westward to Steptoe Butte and just east of Spokane Falls.

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.