Black Rock

I stood on Black Rock for the first time last night with my bike. It's been there on the northwest shore of Lake Pend Oreille my entire lifetime. Had heard of it but never even knew where it was until a couple of years ago.

While doing some research about the white settlement around Lake Pend Oreille, I ran across a little explanation for the site in a book about Bonner County place names, compiled by James Dahl, who was working on his Master's Degree back in the early 1970s.

I had also heard Vern Eskridge (0ne of our retired Forest Service engineers and museum volunteers) talk about Black Rock. He may have even been the one who told me the Army Corps of Engineers had improved the pathway along the lakeshore leading to the site.

This place sits on the edge of what was for a very short time, Panhandle, Idaho. That was back in 1903 when it was the town site for the Panhandle Smelting and Refining Co. The town included a hotel, office buildings and employee residences.

Lake Pend Oreille steamboats would transport ore from mines at Lakeview, Blacktail, Granite Creek and Trestle Creek to the 10-acre site where the ore was refined. Facilities included a furnace building, sampler building, engine and boiler houses, ore bins, bedding yards and the machinery to smelt coper, silver, lead and gold. The company's slag (scum from metal) pile on the lakeshore was known as Black Rock.

The Panhandle township lasted for less than a year. After filing a lien on a two-story frame building owned by the company for a debt of $537.30 in August, 1903, David E. Bigelow and the plat designer, I.H.M. Williams, declared the townsite vacated in February, 1904.

Just weeks later, according to a compilation by Bob Gunter, on March 1, 1904, the Panhandle Development Co. dedicated the townsite of Ponderay on the same site. So, the "Little City with the Big Future" was born, later becoming an official Idaho city in 1968.

For more than a century now, Black Rock has stood as a monument to the mining around Lake Pend Oreille. It can be spotted easily from the lake, and I had seen it before while cruising by on our boat. I heard only recently from a local doctor about the great biking trip to the site where there's a dock and well-worn trails leading up the hillside to the train tracks in Ponderay.

So, last night, Bill and I rode from home into town, walked our bikes across the Cedar Street Bridge to the beach and began the bike tour along the lakeshore bound for Black Rock. We arrived at the spot where a couple of teenagers were swimming off the dock.

I do think there's private property along the way, but those folks must turn a blind eye toward the many bikers, walkers and joggers who enjoy the spectacular lake beauty along with the peaceful trail through a wooded area, much of which has been known for years as Bum Jungle.

There's talk of developing that trail as a permanent bike path. I hope it happens, because in addition to beauty, the trail and remnants of the old Panhandle Smelter complex offer a glimpse of local history.