Rivers
& lakes, Bald Eagle watching, Silverwood Theme Park, Schweitzer
Mountain Ski Resort...
After living twenty years in two other ‘so-called’ dream towns , New
Orleans and Orlando, we found Sandpoint, Idaho five years ago.
Arriving on the shores of Lake Pend Oreille, the west’s second largest
freshwater lake, we discovered the little town we had chosen to live
in stood under the slopes of a very active ski resort: Schweitzer
Mountain. At that time, the cascade of national articles on both
Sandpoint and Schweitzer was just a trickle of fluff pieces in smaller
and regional publications. What followed was truly astonishing. First,
Sunset magazine named Sandpoint the Best Small Town in the West,
followed by National Geographic Adventure placing Sandpoint in its Top
10 Adventure Towns. Not long after Outside Magazine put Sandpoint on
its list of America’s Top Dream Towns. Since then, there have been
many more, from USA Today to the New York Times. Most recently,
AskMen.com also placed both Sandpoint and Schweitzer on its Top US
Resort Towns, and this year, Schweitzer Ski Resort finally broke into
Ski Magazine’s Top 25 Ski Resorts, being voted in spring as the
Pacific Northwest’s Favorite Ski Destination by OnTheSnow.com.
With the kind of positive press that Sandpoint, Schweitzer, and Lake
Pend Oreille have been receiving recently, you might have expected a
great influx of people moving to the area, and relatively speaking,
growing from roughly 6,000 to 8,000 inhabitants is, percentage-wise, a
pretty
big increase in eight years. But let’s be honest, he town
still has fewer than 10,000 people; a small number by most standards.
One of the things that made North Idaho so appealing was the relative
low cost of owning homes...
Sandpoint & North Idaho's economy
has been hit by high gas prices, lumber mills closing, loss of jobs in
construction, and declining home sales. Yet, the numbers show we are aren't
doing so bad. Read this and judge for yourself...
Rivers
& lakes, Bald Eagle watching, Silverwood Theme Park, Schweitzer
Mountain Ski Resort...
Besides
having four wineries within a day's drive, Sandpoint has seven wine bars,
and just the scenery to take in the bouquet...
