Original plungers: Older, sure, but still wild and crazy, too

COEUR d’ALENE — Not much has changed, Bryan Riba said, standing in the sand on Sanders Beach Monday as a frigid breeze rippled across a silvery Lake Coeur d’Alene.

Nothing, at least, has visually changed on the immediate shore front: Same marina, same houses, same low winter sun breaking through flat clouds, and the green spray of pine and fir on Tubbs Hill tilting toward the lake.

In reality, however, a lot has changed.

Riba, wearing a winter jacket, watch cap and running shoes, and his Coeur d’Alene High friend, Rob Langstaff, similarly dressed in hat and coat, are 40 years older.

It has been that long since the two men, former Viking athletes, dreamed up the idea of a polar plunge — jumping into a frigid, snow-fringed lake wearing nothing but Speedos — and persuaded their athlete pals to join the crazy stunt.

“We’re the originals,” Riba said.

The two men and their families have returned this year to Coeur d’Alene to take part in the event they started as high schoolers. They will be doing it on a shoreline devoid of a sawmill and an interstate highway, prominent features when Riba and Langstaff were teen pals in 1978. And under the gaze of a lakeshore condominium that wasn’t there two years after Saturday Night Live first aired on television, and when Steve Martin’s “Wild and Crazy Guy” album hit the record stands.

The friends were enamored with Martin’s skits and humor.

“We were thinking about something wild and crazy to do,” Riba said.

Langstaff lived near Sanders Beach along with another friend, Brian Hunt.

The lake, its edges crusted with snow, had always been a centerpiece of the young men’s lives.

It was obvious:

“Let’s jump in the lake!” Riba and his buddies decided.

So they did.

That’s how five young Coeur d’Alene men, including Hunt, Pat Mitchell and Ken Kohli, all of them on the Vikings swim team except Langstaff — he would a year later become a state champion runner — ended up barefooted in the sand and snow, barely dressed, holding hands before plunging in and emerging from the breath-grabbing water of the big lake.

“It was a wild and crazy thing to do,” Riba said.

The tradition that began with five teens has since exploded into an annual event that on New Year’s morning sees as many as 1,000 people on the beach, with at least a third of them fighting for a place in the icy spray.

Others who attend are support people who provide blankets, towels and clothing to the plungers while cheering them on.

It wasn’t that way in 1978.

The first Polar Bear Plunge actually took place on Thanksgiving, before being moved the following year to New Year’s Day.

Langstaff recalls that the men chose Sanders Beach instead of City Beach because a couple of them lived nearby and therefore they were close to heat and sustenance to quickly alleviate the cold shivers.

“So we could get warmed up,” he said.

They also left cars running on the curb with heaters pumping a warm soliloquy into cabs.

“Those were the very early logistics,” Langstaff said. “Now it’s not that easy.”

After their first few winter lake jumps, the men occasionally came back to do it again, but for the most part, their lives took them elsewhere. Langstaff and Riba attended the Air Force Academy, where they both competed as athletes. They live in Oregon and Illinois, respectively. Mitchell lives in Coeur d’Alene, Hunt lives in Norway and Kohli, who became a lumberman, died in a small plane crash more than a decade ago in Montana while checking stands of timber. A ski run on Schweitzer Mountain — Kohli’s Big Timber — is named after him.

Langstaff and Riba brought their families back to Coeur d’Alene for the 40-year plunge anniversary. Nancy (Woods) McEwen, also a state champion Coeur d’Alene High runner and friend, flew up from Florida to attend the anniversary although she did not take part in the original plunge.

Depending on how today’s event goes, Langstaff and Riba might consider returning for another landmark.

“I’m talking them into a 50-year reunion,” Riba said. “We’ll be senior citizens.”