Lake Pend Oreille

The first position on the list of the best lakes to visit in Idaho is Lake Pend Oreille. With a surface area of 380 km2, Lake Pend Oreille in the northern Idaho Panhandle is the largest lake in the U.S. state of Idaho and the 38th-largest lake in terms of size in the country. It is 69 km long, 350 m deep in certain places, and has a volume of 43,939,940 acre-feet, or 54 km3, making it the fifth-deepest body of water in the country. The lake receives water from the Pack and Clark Fork rivers and empties into the Pend Oreille River and the Spokane Valley-Rathdrum Prairie Aquifer underneath. All but a small portion of the shoreline is uninhabited.

National forests and small settlements surround it; Sandpoint has the lake's highest population density. With the exception of the southernmost point, the lake's entire shoreline is uninhabited and located in Bonner County. The Farragut State Park, which used to be the Farragut Naval Training Station during World War II, is located near the southern tip of Kootenai County. A tiny portion of this park is still operational and used for U.S. Navy acoustic underwater submarine research.

Location: Bonner / Kootenai counties, Idaho