BAYVIEW — Oil drums, rotted metal, refrigerators, ovens, toilets, tires and boilers.

These are just some of the things the Lake Pend Oreille Idaho Club pulled from the depths of the Bayview area of Lake Pend Oreille. 

Thirty-five volunteers and U.S. Navy crews spent the first week of May cleaning and removing decades' worth of trash and refuse from beneath the float homes in Bayview.

“It is a communal effort to improve life for fish and people,” said Susan Keeney, a volunteer.

The bottom of the bay is prime spawning territory for kokanee salmon, which Idaho Fish and Game calls “the backbone of the lake." For years, residents, tourists and even the Navy dumped a myriad of garbage into the lake. 

Mountains of bottles, small islands of tires, household products, cars, boats and drums of gasoline and oil have made the bay's bottom hazardous for recreation and eliminated vital spawning locations for kokanee.

The cleanup aims to increase spawning beds. 

Pend Oreille kokanee faced a collapse from excessive predation during the 2000s, and this initiative is a part of an ongoing movement to rebuild the kokanee population.

In 2020, kokanee levels were the highest in decades, with an estimated 2.5 million adult in the lake, though still significantly lower than pre-1965 levels.

But the cleanup immediately makes a difference.

“The kokanee will right away have more places to spawn,” said Christine Sandahl, an Idaho master naturalist and volunteer. 

Past cleanups have already created more spawn locations.

“Eagle Point has already seen a spawning increase,” said Daniel Pugh, a volunteer and scuba diver.

The project is far from easy; some of the items in the lake weigh thousands of pounds, and the float homes and marina provide unique challenges to removing the trash. 

“The biggest challenge is that the garbage is next to the plumbing and electrical for the float homes,” said Jake Powlison, volunteer scuba diver and head of Jake’s Scuba Adventures. 

The strategy to remove the garbage was for divers to attach floats to the heavy objects, providing enough buoyancy so they wouldn't rest on the bottom but also wouldn’t float completely. 

Then, they push them away from the float homes and marinas to deeper water where a homemade or Navy barge can lift them to the deck and take them ashore. 

One of the biggest issues of this year's cleanup was the removal of several dozen oil and gasoline barrels that have been seeping into the lake for years.

“There was oil in them to this day. We had the Navy surround the operation and help clean up the remaining oil,” said Kevin Elmore 

The U.S. Navy Acoustic Research Department, which shares the bay with locals, attached an oil-slick pad to a large barge and contained the floating liquids in a small area. It was then absorbed with pads, removing the solution from the lake. 

This effort isn’t limited to a short week in May; for some, it's a year-round project.

“I love it, I live here, it helps the kokanee," Pugh said. "There are a lot of us here that dive here year-round to pick up trash."

The Idaho Community Foundation, the Kalispell Tribe of Indians, Avista, the Charlie and Jylan Johnson Fund, and donations funded the project.  

One goal for future cleanups is the removal of a large mass of sunken tires, dubbed “tire corner," that still resides on the northern part of the bay. 

According to volunteers, cleaning up will be a challenge. 

“Roughly speaking, we are going to have to order a semi to get all of the tires out of there,” said Elmore. 

Sandahl was proud of her fellow volunteers. 

“There is a group in this community that finds this important. They don’t want to complain about it, they don’t ask 'why me?' They want to do something about it,” Sandahl said. 

A U.S. Navy barge, with an attached oil slick pad, aids volunteer divers and salvage crews in pulling refuse from the lake floor.

    A backhoe moves lake trash from a trailer to a dumpster.
  

    Carter Sandahl leads a homemade barge covered in recovered refuse back to the shoreline for removal.
  

A U.S. Navy barge, with an attached oil slick pad, aids volunteer divers and salvage crews in pulling refuse from the lake floor.