Living Through the Wild Boomtown of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho
There is something strange about watching the place you grew up become the place everyone wants to move to.
For most of our lives, North Idaho felt like one of those corners of the world people discovered almost by accident. Coeur d'Alene was a lake town. Rathdrum was surrounded by prairie. There were roads you avoided because you knew exactly when school let out, swimming holes that belonged to summer, fields that seemed as though they would always be fields, and enough familiar faces around town to make the whole region feel much smaller than it actually was.
And then, somewhere along the way, our quiet corner of Idaho became a boomtown.
Not in the old-fashioned sense of gold mines, saloons and prospectors arriving by horseback.
Our version came with moving trucks, subdivisions, apartment complexes, construction cranes, traffic lights and houses appearing in places where we distinctly remember there being nothing at all.
The change has been extraordinary.
Coeur d'Alene itself has grown from about 44,000 residents in 2010 to more than 58,000 today. Kootenai County has grown from roughly 138,000 people to nearly 192,000 during that same period. And Rathdrum—the location of this RKP Membership shoot—has experienced one of the most dramatic transformations of all. Its population has nearly doubled since 2010, including a 43.6% increase just since 2020.
For people who grew up here, you don't really need the statistics to tell you any of that.
You can see it.
You can feel it.
You remember what used to be on the corner where the new building stands. You remember when that road didn't continue through. You remember looking across a field that is now an entire neighborhood. You find yourself giving directions using landmarks that don't exist anymore.
And occasionally you hear yourself say the most dangerously local sentence of all:
"That used to be nothing but fields."
The Wild West, Reimagined
That feeling became part of the inspiration behind this RKP Membership photoshoot.
We photographed our RKP Models in a field outside Rathdrum dressed in western-inspired clothing—boots, denim, leather, hats and pieces that feel a little rugged, a little rebellious and unmistakably connected to the American West.
Against the open prairie, it felt right.
Because there is something wonderfully contradictory about North Idaho right now.
We are living in one of the fastest-changing chapters this area has experienced, while simultaneously feeling fiercely attached to the things here that have always felt timeless.
The mountains.
The prairie.
The lake.
The farms.
Long summer evenings when the sun doesn't disappear until nearly ten.
Smoke hanging over the mountains in August.
Snowbanks lining parking lots in January.
Driving twenty minutes out of town and suddenly finding yourself surrounded by nothing but grass, pine trees and sky.
These things become part of you when you grow up here.
Maybe that is why watching a place change can feel so surprisingly personal.
When the Fields Start Disappearing
Our location in Rathdrum made that feeling impossible to ignore.
The Rathdrum Prairie has always been one of those wide-open North Idaho landscapes—the kind of place where the horizon seems impossibly far away and mountains rise in nearly every direction.
But the prairie is changing.
According to the USDA Census of Agriculture, Kootenai County had 139,705 acres of land in farms in 2017. Five years later, that number had fallen to 107,727 acres.
Today, growth on the prairie is significant enough that the Idaho Transportation Department and the Kootenai Metropolitan Planning Organization are conducting a major transportation study specifically focused on how to keep people moving safely as the area continues to develop.
Those statistics sound clinical until you live here.
Then they look like excavators sitting in a field.
They look like a new road cutting through a place where you once watched horses graze.
They look like another Coming Soon sign.
They look like standing in a Rathdrum field with a camera in your hands and realizing that photographing open land suddenly feels a little like photographing history.
There Are Two Truths About Growth
It would be easy to turn this into a story about newcomers versus natives.
But that doesn't really capture it.
There are wonderful things that come with growth.
There are new restaurants and businesses. More opportunities. Creative people bringing new ideas. Families building lives here and falling in love with North Idaho for many of the exact same reasons we did.
We understand why people come.
How could we not?
Look around.
There is a reason this place is loved.
But there is another truth sitting right beside that one.
Growth comes with loss.
Sometimes it is the loss of something important—a farm, a stretch of prairie, an old building, an affordable neighborhood.
Sometimes it is much smaller.
The shortcut that isn't a shortcut anymore.
The empty beach that isn't empty.
Knowing you need a reservation somewhere you once simply walked into.
Realizing that the sleepy little town you have carried around in your memory doesn't entirely exist anymore.
And there is a particular kind of nostalgia that comes from living somewhere while it is changing.
You haven't left.
The place has.
So We Photograph It
Maybe this is one of the reasons photography matters so much to us.
Photographs don't stop change.
But they keep evidence.
They remember what the light looked like.
What someone wore.
Where the fence stood.
How tall the grass grew.
What the horizon looked like before something else occupied it.
Years from now, we may look through this RKP Membership shoot and notice things in the background we barely thought about while we were photographing it.
"Remember when that was all field?"
We probably will.
The western clothing in these photographs became our little nod to the North Idaho we know—the independent, imperfect, rugged place underneath the luxury resorts, new developments and national headlines.
Not because we believe everything should remain exactly as it was.
Places are living things.
They change because people change them.
But there are pieces worth remembering.
There is a character to North Idaho that cannot be manufactured after the fact. It lives in its open spaces, old farms, mountain towns, family businesses and people who have spent enough winters here to know that four-wheel drive does not make you invincible.
It lives in places like this field.
And right now, while Coeur d'Alene is becoming something new, we get the unusual experience of standing with one foot in both versions.
We remember the little town.
We're living in the boomtown.
And somewhere on the Rathdrum Prairie, underneath a huge Idaho sky, a group of girls in cowboy boots reminded us that the wild part isn't entirely gone yet.
RKP Membership — Western Editorial
Photographed by Rayla Kay Photography
Coeur d'Alene + North Idaho
