Farragut State Park, Idaho

A few folks have asked about our "summer place", so here's a little information.  We are at Farragut State Park in northern Idaho. In fact we are only 70 miles south of the Canada/US border.

Farragut State Park occupies the former site of the Farragut Naval Training Station. This relatively short-lived Naval Training Station was built during World War II and was the second largest training center in the world. Ground was broken in March 1942 and it was decommissioned in June 1946.  In spite of it's short life over 293,000 sailors received their basic training here.

Lake Pend Oreille

The park is located on the southern shore of Lake Pend Oreille (pronounced pond-o-ray) which is the largest lake in northern Idaho. It is 43 miles long and 1150 feet deep. The water is gin clear and very cold, as the lake is fed by snow melt.  We are told it will warm up in mid-summer.

Much Too Cold for Swimming!!

We have our campsite on their "Volunteer Row" which is separated from the camping loops by quite a distance. The Campground Hosts stay in the campgrounds, but we are the Interpretive Hosts so we are in a different area of the park. There are six sites in this area, but we are the only volunteers here right now. We are told that others will begin arriving in a week or so, but some won't arrive until the peak season in early July.

Our Site

As the Interpretive Hosts, Teri and I will be doing evening programs on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday evening, and some nature walks during those days.  The park has a lot of programs set up already, but we've been given a free rein to develop whatever we'd like.  We even have our own office which is stuffed full of exhibits, slides, furs, skulls, etc.

Our Office

As Teri described in the last blog, we'll also be monitoring about 50 Bluebird boxes in the park.  We did our first "official" run today, opening each box to see if there was a nest, eggs, fledglings, or ??  Today we found nests in about a third of the boxes, eggs in 5 boxes (total of 10 eggs), and a momma Mountain Bluebird sitting in a box. She didn't flush when I opened the box (she looked a little annoyed though...) so I quickly closed it up and we moved on.  Biggest surprise was a squirrel in a box.  I'm not sure who was more surprised, me or the squirrel!!

The weather has been cold and drizzly here the past week, with periods of sleet and snow mixed in.  It is supposed to clear off and warm up this week, so we'll try to get more pictures of the park itself.

Mark