Pend Oreille County Process Serving

Pend Oreille County, Washington — A Long River Valley Between Mountain Walls

Pend Oreille County is narrow, mountainous and organized around the river that gives it its name.

Newport anchors county government near the Idaho line at the southern end of the county's principal river-and-highway corridor. From there, the Pend Oreille River and State Route 20 lead north through communities including Usk, Cusick, Ione and Metaline Falls.

Mountains make that alignment almost inevitable. The valley provides the workable ground for roads, rail lines, homes and industry, while forest rises quickly on either side.

Timber and mineral processing once gave northern communities a larger industrial role. When private railroad service was threatened, local voters helped create the Port of Pend Oreille and preserve the line that became the Pend Oreille Valley Railroad—an unusually direct example of a rural county treating transportation infrastructure as something worth owning.

The Kalispel Reservation near Usk and Cusick is another central part of county geography. Kalispel tribal government and enterprises remain contemporary economic and political institutions in the valley.

Farther north, Metaline Falls and the international-border country feel considerably more remote than Newport despite sharing the same river corridor.

Pend Oreille County is shaped by a simple physical constraint with complicated consequences: there are mountains on both sides, so much of the county has spent its history learning how to live, work and move along the river.