September 29 – LAKE PEND OREILLE – After donning their drysuits and donning their fins, North Idaho dive teams are ready to soar above nearly 1,100 feet of cold, dark water to complete a somber mission.
The culverts are minuscule compared to the lake itself, which is almost as deep as the Empire State Building is tall. It is not their job to think about what lies beneath them; rather, it is intended to bring a loved one or friend home to their families who have been lost in a boating accident or kayaking trip gone wrong.
But the dive teams – at least in Bonner County, Idaho – are not called to rescue anyone who is still alive. Instead, they are called upon to complete a so-called recovery.
“It's tragic,” said Bonner County Sheriff's Office. said Phil Stella. “But we restored the victim's family, and that's literally why we're here.”
The teams have been lucky in recent years, they said. But there are others that remain underwater and will probably never be found.
Although the divers are more than experienced enough to find and extract someone from the lake, they are no match for the depths of Lake Pend Oreille, the deepest lake in Idaho and the fifth deepest lake in the US.
It is located at the southern tip of the glacier-carved Purcell Trench, which was further excavated by the ancient floodwaters of Lake Missoula. At its deepest point, the lake is 350 meters deep – a bottom so far underwater that even a diver or his equipment cannot reach it.
“It's a little intimidating,” said Colton Inge, a Bonner County sheriff's deputy and diver, as he sat on the sheriff's boat as it bobbed on the surface.
He pointed to a nearby hill.
“You come from us there, offshore, and it will be 220 meters,” Inge said. “… In many cases it's just way too deep.”
A deep dive for divers like Inge is 30 meters, he said. “That's less than a tenth of what this place is capable of.”
When Inge returned from a six-meter dive during team practice earlier this month, his counterpart, Garrett Johnson, jumped into the water.
“I grew up here on this lake, diving and spearfishing,” Johnson said after climbing 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 depths of 80 feet to help rescue four victims of a fatal boat crash in 2022.
“We see a side of things that not many people get to see,” Inge said. “It's really good to be the person who brings a loved one back to their family.”
A deadly depth
Newman Lake resident John Arthur Key was 67 when he decided to go boating with his friends during the day in 2017, 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 returned to the lake and saw his boat floating above 1,100 feet of still water, he wasn't on it.
Because Lake Pend Oreille runs through both Kootenai and Bonner counties, both teams will assist in the lake's restoration. But there was no recovery from Key's body. The depth made it impossible for both the naval and diving teams.
The area they had to search was hundreds of feet outside Kootenai County's sonar capabilities, said Jonathan Traw, deputy marine supervisor for the Kootenai County Sheriff's Office. They searched for two more days, even though they suspected his recovery was unlikely. The Marine team has a sonar cable that is 300 feet longer than the lake itself, but because it has to be towed behind the boat, it doesn't sink quite far enough. The deeper the sonar goes, the slower the process is, he said.
“We couldn't get it deeper than 600 feet, so we couldn't look for him,” Traw said. “The depth is the biggest challenge.”
Key is one of four people listed in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System who have disappeared in Lake Pend Oreille. Sean Eich, 31, was last seen in 1997 while diving with a friend. Bonner County Sheriff's Cpl. Bob Howard told the media at the time that the extreme depth of the lake, 400 to 600 feet in that area, made the search for Eich difficult.
In 2003, 46-year-old Spokane man Michael Allen Wagar was piloting 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. According to the Charley Project, all three jumped into the water to escape the fire, Wright without a life jacket. The other two were rescued, but Wright slipped beneath the surface and the depth prevented his body from being found.
Traw's team recovered a body from the surface of Lake Coeur d'Alene in an area with a maximum depth of 60 feet, meaning the person was in a spot shallow enough to float back up, said he. When a body begins to decompose, gases build up in the body, causing the body to float to the surface of the water.
Lake Coeur d'Alene's depth reaches 200 feet, a fraction of that of Lake Pend Oreille, making recovery much easier for dive and sonar teams. The shallower the spot, the more likely a person's body will rise through the water, Traw said.
“A human body is naturally relatively naturally buoyant. We have found bodies that we found on the surface because they had not drowned, so their lungs were still full of air and they could float,” he said. “When you drown, you run out of air in your lungs. You sink to the bottom.”
But if someone sinks below a spot that dive teams and sonar can't reach, chances are they will stay there forever, Traw said.
A difficult water area
In addition to the depths of the water, the challenge also lies in the search itself. If divers do not have an accurate point where the person was last seen, even if it is shallow enough where a body can be recovered, the search can take several days.
Witnesses also cannot remember where in the lake the disappearance took place, are afraid of getting into trouble or are too panicked to give officers a detailed report from the water.
“It wasn't done in a nefarious way, or it wasn't done on purpose, but people are excited and have gone into the water to help save their loved one… And so when they get to shore, they're in a different location ,” Traw said. “Without that precise point last seen, it's almost a needle in a haystack. Even with our sonar, and especially with our divers, it's a needle in a haystack.”
It's more like a needle in miles of pitch-black water.
“I patrol Lake Coeur d'Alene a lot, but this lake is weird how deep water has that effect,” Traw said. “I can easily sit on a jet ski on Lake Coeur d'Alene. I don't care. I was here once to patrol on a jet ski. It was just creepy.”
Stella, who also heads the province's diving team, said the lake becomes dark at an elevation of 80 to 80 feet. When his team left Sandpoint for diving training this month, they only dived to 25 feet.
“When you're up there, it's like wearing dark sunglasses… By the time you get to 30 or 40 feet, you really start to cut down on what you can see. The colors start to disappear. Then Actually, all the red tones are gone,” Stella said.
Johnson said diving in the dark is nerve-wracking, and he has searched in lakes much less clear than Pend Oreille, where “it's actually quite clear at the bottom in daylight.”
“When it starts to get dark, it doesn't really matter if it's day or night,” Johnson said. “It's always the same down there.”
Afterwards, divers rely purely on their flashlights and the skill of those around them to recover a body in total darkness. People's bodies tend to become iridescent underwater, Stella said, so that they will glow when hit by bright light.
Normally divers won't search further than 100 feet, he said.
“We can descend deeper if necessary, but we have to take into account oxygen, nitrogen and its depletion,” Stella said.
The deepest dive in Bonner County was about 50 meters, mainly because the search area was extremely narrow. Someone had jumped off a coastal cliff and never came back up.
“We knew there was a shelf (underwater), and our hope was that we would find it on a shelf,” Stella said. “In that case, we knew exactly where we were going.”
Divers must also consider the pressure underwater, which increases the deeper they swim. At sea level, atmospheric pressure is about 14.7 pounds, Stella said. But once a person is 30 feet below the surface of the water, they experience an additional 14.7 pounds of pressure.
“As I go down, a connection will occur every 30 feet – so we'll be burning through tanks super fast at 100 feet,” he said. “Divers have a very limited amount of time they can stay in the water, mainly due to nitrogen buildup.”
This means divers must decompress or stop occasionally on the way back to the surface so that the nitrogen they collect on the way down can slowly evaporate. If they don't, the gases can form bubbles that can make a diver sick, or worse, kill them.
In bad weather, when the waters of Lake Pend Oreille become choppy, the search is much worse. Stella said it's important to find the person they're looking for, but it's also important that he doesn't endanger the lives of his divers. The clear, warm day when Stella took his team for training was perfect diving weather as the sun sank six meters below the water.
“But we wouldn't do this search in bad weather,” Stella said. “Because, first of all, the integrity of the search, which is super hard to hold our boat. And secondly, the risk factor for us.'
Stella ordered his divers to change their fins and reminded them of the inherent darkness their duty entailed.
“None of this is morbid, remember,” he said.
But it's a task that only people built for recovery can do.
Johnson and Inge keep their diving gear in the back of their patrol cars in case they have to leave right away. They are used to seeing gruesome things like car accidents and murders. That's also why the Bonner County Sheriff's Office doesn't have non-deputy divers.
“We do that largely just because of the psychological toll,” Stella said. “We've dived with a lot of other people who aren't prepared for some of the things we have to do. Not everyone can do it.”
While a glowing face suddenly appearing for a recovery team in the darkness of Lake Pend Oreille may seem terrifying to some, for the divers that's “the goal,” Stella said.
“That's what we train for. As strange as it sounds, that's horror for most people,” Stella said. “For us, that is our mission.”
