Metal roofing in Rathdrum, ID

Rathdrum surprises people. It sits on open prairie at 2,211 feet, lower and flatter than the mountain towns north of it — and it carries an 87 psf ground snow load, roughly double Coeur d'Alene's 43 and half again more than Sandpoint's 56 (University of Idaho, *Ground Snow Loads for Idaho — 2015*). Prairie does not mean mild. It means the snow arrives and sits, with no terrain to break the wind that drifts it into valleys and against north walls.

That load is why shingles struggle here. Snow packs, melts against a warm deck, refreezes at the cold eave, and dams until water backs up under the courses. A smooth standing-seam panel sheds it before any of that can start, and snow guards decide where it lands. Rathdrum runs its own building department on the 2018 IBC/IRC, so design is engineered to the parcel, not to a county average — and with Kootenai County up 17.3% between 2010 and 2020, a lot of Rathdrum's roofs are young enough that the next one should be the last one.