Long said to be one of the world's most beautiful — never sourced.
Coeur d'Alene Lake is a 49.8-square-mile glacial reservoir in the Idaho Panhandle, 25 miles long and up to 194 feet deep, carved roughly 12,000 to 15,000 years ago by the same Missoula Floods that shaped neighboring Lake Pend Oreille.
Coeur d'Alene Lake sits in the Idaho Panhandle, officially classified as a glacial reservoir — the Purcell Lobe of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet dammed the Clark Fork River roughly 12,000 to 15,000 years ago, repeatedly filling and bursting through in the same Missoula Floods that carved the basin of neighboring Lake Pend Oreille. Downtown Coeur d'Alene, on the lake's north end, anchors the commercial base: Evans Brothers Coffee Roasters and Cedars Floating Restaurant, a 1965 institution that literally floats at the confluence of the lake and the Spokane River, sit alongside Resort Boat Rentals at The Boardwalk Marina. Gateway Marina & Resort covers the quieter south end near Harrison. The lake is widely, if never traceably, credited to a National Geographic ranking among the world's five most beautiful lakes — a claim repeated everywhere locally but never pinned to a specific issue. Coeur d'Alene covers the grocery run and the hospital.
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