Placing bets on a snow mound melt

If penguins migrated through the Idaho Panhandle, they’d have the perfect layover in Wallace.

Across the river from the Wallace Inn sits a pile of snow so high it’s visible from Interstate 90. Sure, it’s cratered and crusty, but that doesn’t mean the pile can’t be good for something other than gawking: The Wallace Business Community Association is taking wagers on when the snow will be gone in a contest called The Big Snow Melt.

“We figured we’d do something in the spirit of who Wallace is,” said Scott Lasley, owner of the Silver Pine Trade Post on Cedar Street and member of the WBCA’s board of directors. “So a few of us got together and decided to turn this adversity, all this snow, into something good by having people guess when this $50,000 pile of snow is going to melt.”

The $50,000 figure comes from city administrators’ estimates of what it cost to clear Wallace streets this winter and dump the snow onto the pile.

For $5, entrants buy a date – any date – and the person who picks the right date gets to split the pot with the WBCA.

“If more than one person has the right date, they share the pot,” Lasley said.

Lasley and other Wallace merchants worry that rising gasoline prices will keep some day-trippers away this summer. So “any money that comes back to us will go toward advertising and promoting Wallace,” he said.

So far, there’s $200 in the pot. Dates may be purchased until the end of May.

The most popular days so far are in June and July, Lasley said, although he wouldn’t be more specific. The latest date picked so far is in October.

Wallace, like the rest of the Inland Northwest, was buried in snow this winter.

“The city crews were working round-the-clock to clear the streets, and they hauled all the snow out here,” Lasley said. “The snow is compacted by bulldozers used to push it up into a pile. It’s hard as a rock. It’s like an iceberg.”

Locals named the tallest spike on the pile Dante’s Peak, after the disaster movie starring Pierce Brosnan and Linda Hamilton, filmed in Wallace in 1996. The round, more accessible plateau is known simply as Mount Wallace.

Entrants are not allowed to influence the snow removal process. In other words, it’s against the rules to shovel the snow into the dun-colored Coeur d’Alene River rushing by at flood level.

“I don’t know how to figure it out,” Lasley said. “There are just too many variables to the formula. If it rains a lot, it’s probably going to melt faster. If it gets hot, like it was this weekend, it could go faster, too.”

Added Lasley, standing on top of the pile: “It’s a nice view from up here. It really is something else.”