Sandpoint moments

By Ben Olson
Reader Staff

It doesn’t matter if you were born and raised in Sandpoint, or just moved here last year — we all have those “Sandpoint moments” that tend to stick with you forever.

Some years ago, after the city of Sandpoint tore up the roads from the Cedar Street Bridge all the way to Connie’s, the normally busy downtown corridor was blocked off and inaccessible to vehicles. With the pavement stripped away, Cedar was just a few blocks of dirt and gravel. As the sun bent lower toward Priest River, those spending time at Eichardt’s and Idaho Pour Authority across the street suddenly emerged from their watering holes to observe the new world of downtown Sandpoint. They carried beers in their hands, standing in groups of three or four, sometimes hollering at someone they knew across the street. Occasionally, a group of locals would appear on a surrounding rooftop, also with beer in hand, taking in the scene below. 

Before long, an impromptu soccer game sprung up in the un-asphalted Cedar Street. For those short weekday hours, we locals owned the streets again, and I’ll never forget the bittersweet feeling when I woke the next day to see they had paved over our little dirt patch. That was a Sandpoint moment.

Photo by Woods Wheatcroft.

Prior to the pandemic, my partner Cadie had to move out of her rental because someone purchased the home. After staying in limbo for about six weeks while figuring out where to live — this was back when you could actually find a rental, much less an “affordable” one — she secured a new place and we amassed the troops to help her move the 10 blocks over to the new place. One of the loads was a tricky one, involving moving an upright piano in the back of our friend Jake’s big red truck. With Jake also being Reader Editor Zach Hagadone’s younger brother, everyone lent a hand as we hoisted the beast into the bed and strapped it down, secure for the short ride over. As Jake pulled away, we hopped in the back and began playing the piano as he rolled down the street. Oddly, it was Zach’s second time playing a piano in the back of a moving vehicle, having done the same while moving his own piano — in the same truck — some years before. 

The look on the faces of passersby made it worth all the effort. That was a Sandpoint moment.

Last winter, during an especially cold stretch, the river froze adjacent to south Sandpoint, ushering in that rare period of time when the temperature was cold enough and the snow light enough to facilitate ice skating. Someone lugged a couch out onto the ice and it became a focal feature of the week or two of ice skating. People used it to lace up their skates, pose for funny pictures and generally just hang out on a couch suspended atop frozen water. Sandpoint photographer Woods Wheatcroft snapped a pretty iconic shot of that couch, as many of you may have done as well. That was a Sandpoint moment.

A few winters back, we had a freak snowstorm in early May and Schweitzer received eight inches of snow overnight. The mountain had been closed for more than six weeks, but we hiked up the hill on a day filled with sun, snow, wind, calms and everything in between. The run to the bottom only lasted five minutes, but it was one of my favorite runs ever. We surfed over an untouched field of powder down The Face, looking out over the town and lake below. A fellow hiker hooted from his perch atop Chair 1, watching us finish our run before starting his own. When we finished, we shared a beer on my tailgate and talked about the experience before driving down the hill and back to our lives. That was a Sandpoint moment.

Once, we were out at a local venue listening to music when a storm blew through town, knocking the power out across the city. Instead of stopping their set, the band just unplugged their instruments and played by candlelight, and the crowd couldn’t get enough. That was a Sandpoint moment.

Sandpoint moments are not always clean, sterile instances. They are often times in which stuff just goes haywire. These moments might not be memorable to anyone except a single person, but that person treats them as waypoints of Sandpoint life that serve to remind us why we live here, why we love our little home in the mountains, why we want to grab a hold of Old Sandpoint for as long as we can before it’s taken from us by those who have an insatiable thirst to transform this place into something they feel it’s destined to become.

Sandpoint moments are funny stories you tell at the bar with old friends. They’re embarrassing anecdotes that humble you. They’re life lessons and cautionary tales, sometimes with a humorous ending. They’re the run in your stockings, the crack in your windshield, the stain on your favorite shirt. 

What are your favorite Sandpoint moments? Don’t have any? Well, it’s high time you go out and start collecting them.