Circumnavigating Pend Oreille

“I think I want to paddle the entire shoreline of Pend Oreille.”

When I heard these words several years ago, my first thought was, “Oh my God, please don’t ask me to go.”

I have two very irrational fears, and one of them is deep water.

Fortunately, my wife Karen knows me well. She let me off the hook easy. Instead, she began eagerly planning the first of her circumnavigations with a friend of ours, Chris Celentano.

Lake Pend Oreille has a much wilder character than the rest of our local lakes. The 111 miles of shoreline is mostly uninhabited. The houses and docks that crowd the shoreline of Lake Coeur d’Alene are almost completely absent on the eastern shore of Lake Pend Oreille, and much of the western, replaced instead by steep terrain, trees and mountain goats.

As that first summer passed, I watched my wife’s excitement grow as the planned August departure date drew close. Discussions about gear, camping sites, paddle miles and freeze-dried foods gained momentum.

That first trip I worried a lot. The summer thunderstorms were intense, and I often imagined the worst-case scenario as I laid in bed at night and listened to the skies boom above me.

Then, midway through that first circumnavigation, Karen and Chris were forced to seek shelter from the thunderstorms underneath a bridge in Sandpoint as high winds and frightening skies pummeled them.

They received a call from Chris’s father, near 2 a.m., warning them of a dangerous lightning storm heading toward them. They walked up to the gas station just across the long bridge and watched as lightning strike after lightning strike approached them from the south.

After much deliberation, they pulled the plug.

Despite the heat exhaustion and horrific thunderstorms, Karen mostly remembered the Milky Way blazed across the night sky when they got a late start and were paddling past midnight the first night to reach their campsite. A shooting star leaving a brilliant line across the calm lake and swimming the cool waters during the hottest parts of the day were the memories which prevailed.

The beauty and adventure of that first trip set a fire to my wife’s soul and she began preparing for her next attempt.

It was two years before that next attempt happened. She invited Monty Aarestad. Monty had never paddled a sea kayak before, but he had the yearning for adventure as well as the drive to overlook the suffering. They began planning.

The previous attempt, Karen and Chris paddled counterclockwise around the lake beginning in Bayview. For this one, Karen and Monty would paddle counterclockwise.

I planned to meet them the first night in Green Bay with a barely warm pizza and our daughters. The paddlers eagerly devoured the pizza on the beach and we all slept under the stars before seeing them off in the morning.

The second night they slept on a dock along the north shore of the lake. Karen was the first to wake in the morning. She couldn’t budge the feeling that someone was watching her. The feeling grew until she looked skyward and directly into the eyes of a bald eagle watching her from a piling just a few feet away.

The third day they struggled into the wind after paddling over 30 miles. They were trying to paddle around Windy Point to reach the next decent campsite. Instead, when they could go no further, they set camp on a sliver of barren rock wedged against the Green Monarchs.

Karen remembers paddling as hard as she could into the wind that afternoon, with every ounce of drive she had left in the tank and looking to the shore to realize they were only moving inches per stroke.

That night they swam, waves crashing over their heads. Karen had taken her contacts out and while swimming saw a flesh colored rock which resembled a body. Knowing all the stories of disappearances and missing bodies on the lake she screamed. Monty came to investigate and the two of them laughed as the rock continued to lie still beneath the waves.

Paddling into Bayview the following morning was both a relief and a discouraging end to their adventure.

They paddled the entire shoreline in just over three days.

The following year Karen paddled with Chelsea Dickinson, on a lake overcome with smoke from wildfires. While sunrises and sunsets were orange, the rest of the day was gray and off-color. Breathing was strained, and the miles seemed to blend into each other, but here’s the thing about my wife. She understands that the best stories don’t come from everything going according to plan. Adventure is the unexpected, the struggle, so they endured.

Beginning in Bottle Bay they paddled clockwise to Sandpoint, then toward the Clark Fork Delta.

The two friends swam and laughed at the food they cooked for dinner at night, and they bonded in a way that can only arise when two people adventure together.

This paddle along the shores of Pend Oreille has become something extraordinary. I have given up on being the worried husband and have become the awestruck husband instead.

In a few years our oldest daughter will be going on this trip. She has been paddling since she was 3 and has a natural ability. Only the exhausting miles, 35 miles in one day the longest, have kept her from joining Karen.

Soon, though, she will have a memory of circumnavigating Lake Pend Oreille of her own, and then our youngest daughter after that.

What an amazing gift.