Metal roofing in Priest River, ID

Priest River sits where the Priest meets the Pend Oreille at 2,124 feet, and carries a 73 psf ground snow load (University of Idaho, *Ground Snow Loads for Idaho — 2015*) — heavier than Sandpoint's 56, twenty-five miles east. River valleys collect cold air and hold it; the snow that falls here stays frozen on the roof for months rather than cycling off in a thaw.

This is the town that logs built — Italian tie-hewers for the Great Northern in the 1890s, annual log drives down the Priest from 1901 through 1949, the fastest-growing town in North Idaho by 1920. That history left a housing stock of roughly 1,700 people's worth of older frame homes, many with the shallow pitches and deep eaves that ice dams punish hardest. Standing-seam metal sheds the load before it can refreeze at the eave, and lasts 40–70 years in freeze-thaw that takes asphalt apart in fifteen.