Hot enough for you?

Tucked between massive basalt boulders on the south side of the Spokane River just downstream from Plantes Ferry Park in Spokane Valley, parents, children, teenagers and a Pomeranian dog were handling Monday’s heat by swimming in a pool of calm, somewhat cold water.

But just out of sight of the pool, three young men were diving off rocks that faced the river’s main current, then swimming from fast-moving water to the shelter of the rock.

“You get tired real quick,” said Curt Lang, who along with friends Scott Hontz and Richard Rogers took turns diving into the rushing water. They strained to swim back against the current but kept leaping back in.

“This is definitely the fastest water we’ve been in,” Rogers said. “We’ve just been checking out places to swim, and this is the closest and the cleanest.”

Though tempting in the 93-degree weather, the Spokane River’s fastest currents are dangerous, said Spokane County sheriff’s spokesman Sgt. Dave Reagan.

A 22-year-old man is presumed to have drowned Sunday evening in the river at Plantes Ferry after he got caught in fast currents. Sheriff’s dive teams were searching for his body Monday evening, and his identity has not been released.

Water levels typically aren’t this high and this fast in the fourth week in June, Reagan said.

“In a normal year, the water might be flowing low enough that it would be OK to swim,” Reagan said. “For now, people would be better off if they swam in a lake until at least July.”

That might be disappointing news for people looking to escape the relentless heat that has been blanketing the Inland Northwest for the last few days.

The high reached 93 degrees in Spokane on Monday, not enough to break the record of 100 set in 1925. Coeur d’Alene also reached 93. Moses Lake climbed to 102 degrees, beating its record of 99.

Today is expected to be even warmer, said Jeffrey Cote, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Spokane. Highs in Spokane are expected to near 1925’s 98-degree record, he said.

“It’s not typical heat,” Cote said. Temperatures are usually about 77 degrees in Spokane this time of year. But by the end of the week there should be some relief in sight: Temperatures are expected to cool into the high 80s, with the possibility of a few scattered thunderstorms.

“Of course, ‘cooling trend’ is still a relative term,” Cote said. “We’re still well above average.”

In downtown Spokane at Riverfront Park, children and parents dealt with the heat by frolicking in the jets of the fountain on West Spokane Falls Boulevard.

Jedd Breckenridge of Spokane and his friend Bo Mellinger, visiting from Montana, entered the fountain shirtless after taking a gondola trip over the Spokane River.

“The gondola was, like, 1,000 degrees, so we decided to cool off in the fountain,” Breckenridge said.

Neil Gifford, who lives downtown, ended a shopping trip by piloting his motorized wheelchair under one of the fountain’s pounding jets while his caregiver, Charlie Hillman of Spokane, looked on.

“The kids move so fast, I’m afraid I might hit one,” Gifford said before finding an opening and moving into the spray.

Some ways of escaping the heat didn’t involve water at all.

Susan Thorpe, the Coeur d’Alene Public Library’s youth services supervisor, spends her days in the library’s cool basement, where the children’s section is. She said more people probably would, too, to escape the hot days of summer, but the building is so small that even the low temperature can’t keep everyone comfortable.

Still, she said she often jokes about living there to escape the heat.

“Sometimes I have made the comment that I wish we had cots here, because it would make it a lot easier to sleep at night,” Thorpe said.