Lake Coeur d'Alene

The lake bottom near the city of Coeur d’Alene is a steamboat graveyard, stocked deliberately. More steamboats operated on Lake Coeur d’Alene than on any other lake west of the Great Lakes, and when the era ended the retired boats were set on fire and sunk as public entertainment: the Spokane went down at the 1914 Independence Day celebration, and the Georgie Oakes, “Queen of the Lake,” was ceremonially burned in 1927. The Flyer declined to cooperate with its own funeral; the upper works burned as planned, but the wet hull would not sink and had to be rammed several times before finally settling in 138 feet of water.

The depth contours follow the lake’s river-valley origins. A sinuous deep channel runs down its length, reaching 210 feet, while side bays like Wolf Lodge Bay and Beauty Bay open off the main stem as shallower pockets. The map shows the contour lines swinging around each point and doubling back into every cove, tracing a shoreline that seems to go on far longer than the lake itself, and pinching together where the old valley walls drop steeply underwater.