Sauna in Winter & a Review of Mount Bohemia’s Nordic Spa
“There has to be a connection between sauna and happiness.”
–Eero Kilpi
What is a good definition of sauna? The question grows the more I explore and review places labeled as sauna. We had a wide variety of experiences during a recent January visit to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan for the combined events of Heikinpäivä and Keweenaw Sauna Week.
We arrived in the town of Hancock in time to take in events for Heikinpäivä, the annual midwinter celebration of all things Finnish-American. If you have sisu, the grit and guts to head north rather than south in winter, I highly recommend this event. In addition to lovely local craft sales, fun outdoor games and a parade down the main street, we attended a talk about sauna by Eero Kilpi founding member of the North American Sauna Society (NASS), current president of the Finlandia Foundation in New York as well as the foundation’s Lecturer of the Year. He also hosts the podcast The Upper Bench.
Mr. Kilpi’s talk “Sauna Lost and Found: Restoring Finnishness to a Global Tradition” opened with two different definitions of sauna. In the U.S., he says, it is essentially a small room with hot air. In Finland, it is a bathing space designed for high temperatures. Raised in Helsinki but a resident of the U.S for many years, Mr Kilpi described how shocked he was by one of his first American saunas. The dry, heated room featured a carpet, low benches (none near the ceiling), a stove with just a few rocks, all poorly maintained; the worst part was–no water for bathing. He shared a short video of his visit to North Dakota, Sauna Lost and Found, where he realized that inipi, Lakota sweat lodges, have more in common with the Finnish sauna tradition than the typical American sauna.
Mr. Kilpi is concerned that the word sauna is being stretched to fit things that have little connection to Finnish lifestyle and heritage. Sauna, he emphasized, is NOT a hot room alone; it is a bathing space that allows for sweating and rinsing several times. He emphasized the intangible spiritual and physical effects of this ritual, rooted in the fundamentals of fire, earth, air and water. He shared a picture of a sauna cottage in the woods, wisps of smoke coming from the chimney of its kiua, a lake just steps away for bathing. A place, he said, where one can stand naked outside and “feel at one with nature.” There is a growing movement to bring this meaning back to the word sauna, according to Mr. Kilpi. He lamented current trends that market sauna as part of a gym workout or a prestige item for the very wealthy. “We must fight the narrow minded approach to health benefits and architect-designed hotboxes.”
After the events of Heikenpävä, we drove 35 miles north and east to the fingertip of the Keweenaw Peninsula. We were headed to Mount Bohemia, a ski area that offers ungroomed runs through glades and down steep rocky cliffs for expert skiers. I can’t say much about the skiing since that was not the purpose of our visit but I will note that it was surprisingly busy for a remote area. We came for the Nördic Spå. The fake use of diacritics is a warning that the spa is pretty loose in using the term Nordic to describe its slope-side amenity.
We tagged in at $40 each for a day pass. The entire place is “cashless,” so all transactions had to be conducted by phone. Once we figured out how to do that and where the dressing rooms were and where to stash our stuff (no lockers), we explored the spa. It’s a totally outdoor area that features a heated pool, a hot tub, and a cold plunge pool all surrounded by a collection of outbuildings including several saunas that we sampled that day.
We started in the Herbal Sauna that had an automatic spigot that delivered occasional squirts of citrus scented water over the stove rocks while relaxing music was piped in. We also sampled the Himalayan Salt Sauna with brick walls of pink salt. However most of us spa goers gravitated to the Finnish Sauna, also called the Panoramic Sauna, because it features a big picture window with a view to the front side of Mount Bohemia. It was a big room (12X12 feet I estimate) with three side-by-side electric stoves. It was airy but hot at about 180 degrees. There were spouts providing löyly automatically and a warning that anyone trying to add water to the rocks would be slapped with a $500 fine. This sauna provided the best sweat and was an easy walk to the cold plunge pool with an icicle draped waterfall.
Overall, Mount Bohemia’s Nordic Spa provided a very relaxing afternoon once we found our thermic cycle routine: moving from the heated pool to the sauna to the cold plunge to the hot tub several times. We enjoyed a poolside pizza and the sun came out making the surrounding snow covered cliffs glitter. The place was casual, clean and we observed nothing but good Midwestern behavior. I was happy to see families there with their kids.
Enough sauna for one day? Not for us. As we drove home along the shore of Lake Superior watching small icebergs float off the frozen shore, we got a call from local friends inviting us to their sauna; it had just been awarded a NASS “Traditional Sauna” plaque by Mr. Kilpi.
We arrived in the dark to their cozy home nestled in a landscape of snow piled like thick frosting. The sauna is a log building over 100 years old that they had moved from a local farmstead to their property. It has been restored to perfection with a well stocked dressing room and a lantern lit sauna room. The wood fire was stoked to a satisfying 190 degrees. The room hummed with the sound of water boiling in a tank next to the stove. We relaxed into the heat and then cooled off several times. We chatted but mostly enjoyed the silence and finished with a wash and rinse with basins of water poured over our heads.
With our final sauna of the day complete, I stepped outside between deep snowbanks feeling peaceful, clean and warm. I gazed at the stars glittering like Christmas lights though the tree branches and realized–a definition of sauna may be difficult to put into words, but this–this feeling was it.
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