Lake Pend Oreille, Idaho's Inland Sea is 65 miles long and 15 miles wide at the widest spot at the North end of the lake and it can create its own weather. This wondrous feat of nature was formed by several glacial ice sheets.
Lake Pend Oreille is presently 1,100 + feet deep and at 2,063 feet above sea level. During the Second World War the largest Navel Base in the World, Farragut was here an Lake Pend Oreille. Presently it is an acting Sonar Testing Navel Base and the 4,000 acres of the base ground is a Idaho State Park with many wonderful camping and recreation spots. There is a Museum on the grounds with some very interesting history items to view. Home
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There
were two ice ages that left a clear record in the landscape of the
Northern Rocky Mountains. The effects of these two major ice ages formed
a North - South trough several miles wide and almost straight, running
from mid British Columbia, where it merges with the Rocky Mountain
trench to just below Sandpoint. This is known as the Purcell Trench.
This trench was formed by the Cordilliron ice sheet which formed many
different fingers or lobes which slowly progressed south, acting as a
massive trenching machine. The strength of this ice lobe was able to
split the earths crust and move the Cabinet mountains to the east and
the Kaniksu mountains to the west. Ice from 2 major ice ages flowed
south down the Purcell Valley far enough to form a ice dam at the Clark
Fork River at the present site of Lake Pend Oreille, impounding Glacial
Lake Missoula about 15,000 years ago. At its maximum filling, that lake
was 2000 feet deep at the ice dam, and it flooded the Clark Fork river
drainage of Western Montana to elevation of about 4350 feet above sea
level.
When
it filled to that depth the lake contained approximately 500 cubic miles
of water. Glacial Lake Missoula was so far as any one knows, the worlds
largest ice dammed lake. When the level reached that high of level it
floated the ice dam and it broke at the Cabinet Gorge, it drained
catastrophically. Glacial Lake Missoula thundered down across the
Rathdrum Prairie and the Pend Oreille River, across eastern Washington,
finally to the Pacific. This was known as the Spokane Floods, the
greatest of known geologic record. Imagine a wall of water 2,000 feet
high with 500 cubic miles of water behind it.