The divers of Lake Pend Oreille plunge into one of the nation’s deepest lakes to bring tragedies to the best conclusion possible

LAKE PEND OREILLE — After strapping on their drysuits and sliding into their fins, the dive teams of North Idaho are ready to float above nearly 1,200 feet of cold, dark water to complete a somber mission.

The divers are miniscule in comparison to the lake itself, which is almost as deep as the Empire State Building is tall. Their job isn’t to ruminate on what lies below them; rather, it’s to bring home to their families a loved one or friend lost in a boating accident or a kayaking trip gone wrong.

But the dive teams — at least in Bonner County, Idaho — aren’t called out to rescue someone who’s alive. Instead, they’re called out to complete what’s called a recovery.

“It’s tragic,” Bonner County Sheriff’s Det. Phil Stella said. “But we’ve made a recovery for the victim’s family, and that’s literally why we’re here.”

The teams have been lucky the past few years, they said. But there are still others who remain below the waters and will likely never be found.

While the divers are more than experienced enough to search for someone and pull them from the lake, they are no match for the depths of Lake Pend Oreille, Idaho’s deepest lake and the fifth deepest in the U.S.

It sits at the southern tip of the glacier-carved Purcell Trench, which was gouged farther by the ancient Lake Missoula floods. At its deepest, the lake is 1,158 feet — a bottom so far underwater that not even a diver or their equipment can touch.

“It’s a little intimidating,” Bonner County Sheriff’s deputy and diver Colton Inge said as he sat on the sheriff’s boat while it bobbed on the surface.

He pointed to a nearby hillside.

“You’ll be from us to that, offshore, and it’ll be 700 feet,” Inge said. “… A lot of cases, it’s just way too deep.”

A deep plunge for divers like Inge is 100 feet, he said — “That’s less than one-tenth of what this place is capable of.”

As Inge returned from a 20-foot dive during team training earlier this month, his counterpart, Garrett Johnson, leapt into the water.

“I grew up here on this lake, diving and spearfishing,” Johnson said after he climbed onto the boat. “And I thought it would be cool to learn to dive.”

Both were welcomed to the Bonner County dive team in 2018, and both swam to 80-foot depths to help recover four victims of a deadly boating crash in 2022.

“We see a side of things that not a whole lot of people get to see,” Inge said. “It’s really good to be the person that brings a loved one back to their family.”

A deadly depth

Newman Lake resident John Arthur Key was 67 when he decided in 2017 to go boating with his friends during the day, according to The Charley Project, a missing persons database. After his friends left for the beach, he planned to sail back to Bayview.

When Key’s friends went back out to the lake and found his boat floating above 1,100 feet of silent water, he wasn’t on it.

Because Lake Pend Oreille crosses through both Kootenai and Bonner counties, both teams will assist in recoveries from the lake. But there was no recovery of Key’s body. The depths made it impossible for both marine and dive teams.

The area they needed to search was hundreds of feet outside Kootenai County’s sonar abilities, said Jonathan Traw, the Kootenai County Sheriff’s Office marine deputy supervisor. They still searched for two days, even though they suspected his recovery was unlikely. The marine team has sonar cable 300 feet longer than the lake itself, but because it has to be towed behind the boat, it just doesn’t sink far enough. The deeper the sonar goes, the slower the process is, he said.

“We could not get it deeper than 600 feet, so we weren’t able to look for him,” Traw said. “The depth poses the biggest challenge.”

Key is one of the four people listed in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System who have disappeared into Lake Pend Oreille. Sean Eich, 31, was last seen in 1997 while scuba diving with a friend. Bonner County Sheriff’s Cpl. Bob Howard told the media at the time the lake’s extreme depth, 400 to 600 feet in that area, made the search for Eich difficult.

In 2003, 46-year-old Spokane man Michael Allen Wagar was helming a 15-foot aluminum boat on the lake when it overturned in bad weather near Bayview. The lake is so vast, deep and isolated that the U.S. Navy uses it for submarine sonar testing from a base near Bayview.

Five years after Wagar went missing in the lake, 41-year-old Scott Wright and two others were fishing when their boat caught fire. All three jumped into the water to escape the blaze, Wright without a life jacket, according to the Charley Project. The other two were saved, but Wright slipped beneath the surface and the depths kept his body from being found.

Traw’s team recovered a body at the surface of Lake Coeur d’Alene in an area with a maximum depth of 60 feet, meaning that the person was in a spot shallow enough to float back up, he said. When a body begins to decompose, gases accumulate inside and can cause the body to float upward to the surface of the water.

Lake Coeur d’Alene’s depths reach 220 feet, a fraction of Lake Pend Oreille’s, making recoveries much easier for dive and sonar teams. The shallower the spot, the more likely it is that someone’s body will rise through the water, Traw said.

“A human body is relatively naturally buoyant. We’ve had bodies that we’ve recovered on the surface, because they didn’t drown, so their lungs were still full of air, and they were able to float,” he said. “If you drown, you have no more air in your lungs. You sink to the bottom.”

But if someone sinks below a spot that dive teams and sonar are unable to reach, there’s a high probability “they will be there forever,” Traw said.

A difficult body of water

Beyond the depths of the water, challenge also lies in the search itself. If divers don’t have an accurate point where the person was last seen, even if it’s shallow enough where a body could be recovered, the search can last for multiple days.

Witnesses also might misremember where in the lake the disappearance happened, might be afraid of getting in trouble or be too panic-stricken to provide officers with a detailed report from the water.

“It’s not done in a nefarious way, or it’s not done on purpose, but people are amped up and they went into the water to help rescue their loved one … And so when they make it to shore, they’re in a different location,” Traw said. “Without that accurate point last seen, it’s almost like a needle in a haystack. Even with our sonar, with our divers, especially, it’s a needle in a haystack.”

Rather, it’s like a needle in miles of pitch-black water.

“I patrol a lot on Lake Coeur d’Alene, but this lake, it’s weird how deep water has that effect,” Traw said. “On Coeur d’Alene lake, I can be on a jet ski perfectly fine. I don’t care. I came out here to patrol on a jet ski once. It was just eerie.”

Stella, who also leads the county’s dive team, said the lake tends to get dark around 80-90 feet. This month, when his team sped out of Sandpoint for dive training, they were only diving at 25 feet.

“When you’re there, it’s kind of like wearing dark sunglasses … By the time you get to 30 and 40 feet, you’re really starting to cut down on what you can see. Colors start going away. Then you’re down to greens. All reds are gone, really,” Stella said.

Johnson said that diving in darkness is unnerving, and he’s searched in lakes much less clear than Pend Oreille, where “it’s actually pretty daylight-bright on the bottom.”

“When it starts getting dark, it doesn’t really matter if it’s daytime or nighttime,” Johnson said. “It’s always the same down there.”

After that, divers purely rely on their flashlights and skill of their surroundings to recover a body in total darkness. People’s bodies tend to become iridescent underwater, Stella said, so they will glow when hit with a bright light.

Usually, divers won’t continue searching past 100 feet, he said.

“We can go down deeper than that if we have to, but we have to account for oxygen, nitrogen and running out of it,” Stella said.

Bonner County’s deepest dive was at about 153 feet, and that’s mostly because the search area was extremely narrow. Someone had jumped from a shoreline cliff and never came back up.

“We knew that there was a shelf (underwater), and our hope was that we’d find him on a shelf,” Stella said. “In that case, we knew exactly where we were going.”

Divers must also account for the pressure underneath the water, which grows stronger the deeper they swim. At sea level, atmospheric pressure is roughly 14.7 pounds, Stella said. But once someone is 30 feet below the water’s surface, they will gain another 14.7 pounds of pressure.

“As I go down, every 30 feet will compound — so we’ll burn through tanks super fast at 100 feet,” he said. “Divers have a very limited amount of time they can stay in the water. More so by nitrogen build-up.”

This means divers must decompress, or stop every once in a while on their way back up to the surface, to allow the nitrogen they accumulate on the way down to slowly evaporate. If they don’t, the gases can form bubbles that will make a diver sick, or worse, kill them.

In bad weather, when the waters of Lake Pend Oreille grow choppy, searching is much worse. Stella said it’s important to recover the person they’re looking for, but it’s also important he’s not endangering the lives of his divers. The bright, warm day Stella took his team out for training was perfect diving weather as the sun pierced 20 feet below the water.

“We would not be doing this search in bad weather, though,” Stella said. “Because one, the integrity of the search, which is super hard to keep our boat locked down. And two, the risk factor for us.”

Stella directed his divers to switch their fins, reminding them of the inherent darkness in their duty.

“None of this is not morbid, remember,” he said.

But it’s a task that people only built for recoveries can do.

Johnson and Inge keep their diving gear in the back of their patrol cars in case they have to leave at a moment’s notice. They’re used to seeing gruesome things, like car crashes and homicides. It’s also why the Bonner County Sheriff’s Office doesn’t have any nondeputized divers.

“We do that largely because of just the psychological toll,” Stella said. “We’ve dove with lots of other people that aren’t prepared for some of the things that we have to do. Not everyone can do it.”

While a glowing face suddenly popping up in front of a recovery team in the darkness of Lake Pend Oreille seems terrifying for some, that’s “the goal” for the divers, Stella said.

“We train for that. As weird as it sounds, for most people, that’s horror,” Stella said. “For us, that’s our mission.”