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LEWISTON – Recent health and wellness science implies that a “cold plunge” may be good for the human brain, body, and bragging rights. But why spend money on a kiddie pool and 40lbs of ice when you can spend it on another fly rod and an elk tag?

Idaho is chalk full of natural cold plunges. Just ask your regional IDFG snorkel crew. Our four crews (based out of Nampa, McCall, Salmon, and Lewiston) spend their summer constantly alternating between hot, sweaty hikes and bone-chilling snorkel surveys. 

This year, the Nampa Research snorkel crew completed “extensive” surveys in both Clearwater and Salmon River basins. These survey locations are randomly selected in a manner that distributes sites “evenly” across all streams within a selected basin. This is done to create a spatially-balanced data set that represents the basin and its individual waterbodies as a whole. Because of this, a crew may be sampling a headwater tributary one day and a mainstem river the next. 

As the Idaho mountains would have it, headwater tributaries are fueled by snowmelt at higher elevations, providing our lowest survey temperatures at ~ 6 °C (42.8 °F). As that water moves down the landscape, warmer air temperatures, less canopy cover, exposure to sunlight, and an occasional hot spring cause water temps to rise. This creates a relatively more comfortable snorkel environment in temperatures ≥ 10°C (50 °F) lower in the basin. 

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