Pend Oreille [pronounced Pond Or Ay] means “looks like an ear” in French, which is what the lake look likes from orbit.  Despite its name, it was not a French explorer who discovered this crescent shaped lake in 1809. It was a Scot by the name of Finan McDonald, his Canadian-Indian friend Jaco Finlay, and the Thompson Family, a family traveling west with 13 children.

David Thompson, the family’s patriarch, worked for the Hudson Bay Company, the famed Canadian merchant trading company. Thompson, however, was a cartographer. In fact, the maps which he made of the area were so accurate that they were still being used by Canadian government officials as late as the early 1910’s. Today Thompson’s face can be seen on Canadian stamps.

Eleven cities surround Pend Oreille Lake: Sandpoint, Hope, East Hope, Kootenai, and Glengary, Clark Fork, Bayview, Talache, Algoma, Dover, Careywood, and Cocolalia.  In terms of size, Pend Oreille is the second largest lake in the Western U.S., measuring nearly 148 square miles with 111 miles in perimeter, and 43 miles in length.  In depth, the lake is the fifth deepest lake in the U.S.  At its deepest point the lake drops 1,158 feet from the surface. 

The lake is thought to have formed when glaciers melted near the end of the Ice Age. The lake was the Navy’s second largest training ground during the Second World War, and is still used today to test naval submarines.