My wife and I escaped to our haven up at Priest Lake this weekend. Winter is my favorite time to visit the lake because it has none of the summer crowds. The lakeshore road becomes a wonderful snowy trail along the water.
We spend the weekend cooking food, reading books by a wood fire, and taking walks with the dog. I have been coming up to Priest Lake since I was 16 and Sarah and I have been coming up here in the winter for the last 9 years. This year I brought along a book Sarah had given me for Christmas. The book contains a series of essays by the American Naturalist John Burroughs who lived along the Hudson River and spent much of his time writing about his adventures in the Catskills.
John Burroughs also was good friends with the other American naturalist John Muir. It seems the major difference between the two men was that of the difference between the pursuit of exotic wilderness adventures versus adventures in the familiar landscapes closer to home that exist at the edge of rural living. Burroughs essays focused on the rural and nature close to home starting with his back yard.
As I read his essays this weekend I compared them to others I had read by Muir and found myself resonating with the idea of the local places one knows intimately. In my backyard we watch deer and moose migrant through along with up to 29 bird species.
Years of returning to Priest Lake bring me a tremendous experience of peacefulness. It is a landscape I know in all the seasons of the year and one I have explored by boat, canoe, car, truck, motorcycle, and on foot. I have climbed the grassy mountains on the western shore and the rocky Selkirk mountains along the eastern shore. I have caught Mackinaw trout water 200 feet deep along Bartoo and Kalispell islands and tiny rainbow and cutthroat trout in the upper reaches of the creeks that feed the lake.
Within the greater region I have explored the entire Idaho Panhandle and it’s big three lakes of Pend Oreille, Priest, and Coeur d’ Alene since I was 11 years old. During my 20’s and 30’s I went further afield in my outdoor explorations but I always felt most happy to return to my home countryside. Like John Burroughs and John Muir I have friends that routinely travel to far off exotic places while I stay nearer to home. I am fine with that. There is an infinite variety of observations to be made and an infinite amount of gratitude to experience.
This year I noticed how the ice had frozen on the branches of trees along the lake. They looked like chandeliers.