It is never a good idea to pause between a 194-degree sauna and the mind-bending frigidity of Lake Superior in February. As sweat cools on skin, the rational mind kicks in. Why submit the body to such unrelenting shock, it asks. I know this voice well. Yet here I am, on a cobblestone beach in Grand Marais, Minn., with precious heat steaming off my head, pausing to contemplate the wave-sculpted ice that appears to be growing toward the sky like stalagmites.
By the time the lapping waves hit my calves, my feet are already numb. The air temperature is 30 degrees Fahrenheit, a heat wave for February. So, I take the plunge, submerging myself into the 34-degree water long enough to feel the full-body electric tingle before hurrying back to the warm embrace of Sisu + Löyly Nordic Sauna (its Finnish name translates to “Grit +Steam”). With a red exterior and a dramatic perch on a jagged rock ledge above the lake, this 90-minute, $86 private experience makes me feel like I’ve been transported to a spa on the Baltic Sea.
Back in the sauna I ladle water onto the electric stove, which is a pile of rocks in a wire basket, and wait for the löyly to wash over me, relaxing every muscle. As I take in the bruised sky above a slate-gray winter lake, framed like a painting by the picture window, I realize that if I’m going to make it through this 750-mile-long, sauna-hopping road-trip, I’m going to need to drink more water.
The sauna boom
The culture of sauna — the only commonly used Finnish word in the English language — is exploding in the United States. The U.S. sauna market is projected to grow to $526 million by 2028, up from $390 million in 2023, according to the market research firm Technavio.
Steam baths have always been popular in Minnesota, where I live. Long before it was a state, the Ojibwe created sweat lodges for purification. And when Scandinavian immigrants settled here in the 1800s they brought sauna culture with them. My great-grandfather emigrated from Sweden to Minnesota in 1883. My family’s sauna has stood for more than half a century along the shoreline of Lake Vermilion, a 62-square-mile body of water known for its massive muskies.
There’s still some question about the health benefits that saunas provide, but one would be hard-pressed to find anyone in the upper Midwest who does not believe in the life-giving properties of the hot-cold, one-two punch, especially the ever-expanding cadre of saunapreneurs, like Duluth-based Justin Juntunen. With his business partner Joel Vikre, Mr. Juntunen created Cedar + Stone Nordic Saunas, a company with a tripartite business strategy: They host tens of thousands of people each year in their own sauna “experience” locations, including one on the rooftop of the Four Seasons Hotel in Minneapolis. They also design and build commercial sauna projects around North America. And they design and build private residential saunas that average $50,000 to $80,000 a pop.
My family’s old cabin sauna has gaps in the floorboards making it hard to heat in the winter. And I have yet to build or buy one for my own Duluth backyard. That’s why, one dark December night, I began to fantasize about a sauna-hopping adventure that would link the Scandi-chic saunas cropping up around Lake Superior. The world’s largest freshwater lake by surface area has become the beating heart of the hot-cold-seeking subculture in the United States.
I hatched a plan to make a U-shaped road trip around the westernmost tip of the lake, first hitting Sisu + Löyly in Grand Marais, then returning to Duluth, to steam in Mr. Juntunen’s floating sauna in the harbor. The following morning, my partner, Brian, and I would drive to Bayfield, Wis., to sample the Sauna Haus at Wild Rice Retreat, a destination spa nestled in the woods. Finally, we’d drive to Michigan to Takka Superior, a solitary sauna sitting on the tip of the Keweenaw Peninsula.
On Google, these places looked like Sistine Chapels of steam. But I wondered if they had what Glenn Auerbach, Minnesota’s original saunapreneur and the host of the Sauna Times podcast (he interviewed my parents in their cabin sauna) described to me as “spiritual patina.” It was a quality he told me that our family’s has in spades, “a magical space that emanates an earthy, real feeling, one in which people can have a life-changing experience.”
Considering Cedar +Stone, the most expensive sauna on this road trip cost $108 per person for a 90-minute public session, it had better at least be hot.
The floating sauna
The reigning crown jewel in Cedar + Stone’s growing inventory of community saunas is built atop a 40,000-pound barge that floats in a small slip off the Duluth Harbor adjacent to the parking lot of Pier B Resort.
It looks like an upscale Ikea toy boat, with sleek lines, a rooftop deck with jumping platform, and a back deck where sauna-goers can chill out. Roughly 50 yards down the pier is an enclosed plunge pool with a circulating pump that keeps the water from icing over and two ladders that descend into the frigid harbor water.
Inside the sauna, which comfortably fits 10, there are two powerful Iki Finnish stoves with a window to their fiery innards. Their steampunk look matches the industrial surroundings. Brian and I enjoy the 200-degree heat in silence, basking in the glow of the city lights through ample windows and feeling the sway of the barge, propelled by winds gusting up to 20 m.p.h. outside. We are soon joined by a couple from Minneapolis on holiday and Jordan Decker, the sauna guide who has come to löyly the rocks for us, using water laced with hot pepper essential oil.
“The biggest thing I try to drive home about sauna is to encourage people to listen to their bodies. There’s no right or wrong way to sauna. It’s just a matter of what your body needs,” Ms. Decker explains before quietly exiting, leaving us to breathe in the spiced-up steam.
“You know how a frog gets slowly boiled alive?” says our new sauna companion, a woman originally from Brazil. “I think that would be me.”
Brian and I make a break for the plunge pool, speed walking down the pier in wool socks provided by Ms. Decker, dodging unsuspecting hotel guests and feeling like high school kids misbehaving at their parents’ pool party. I descend the ladder feeling the icy hot daggers pricking my skin, until I can’t stand it any longer, clambering out and shivering in the dark to make sure Brian, who is still bravely treading water, doesn’t die.
Sauna chic
I sleep well that night and am still so relaxed the next morning that I forget to make coffee for our drive to Bayfield.
Our next stop, Sauna Haus, is in the middle of the 100-acre Wild Rice Retreat designed by David Salmela, a Minnesota architect renowned for his modernist Scandinavian style. Guests stay in one of three room configurations, all of which have light birchwood interiors and oversized windows overlooking the mixed hardwood forest and they can choose from a myriad retreats like the “Winter Generative Writing Adventure” with Pam Houston. (When we visited, the resort was offering day passes to the sauna for $20 a person, though it now is open only to guests; a two-night Resort Stay package for two starts at $758, with retreats extra.)
We make a beeline straight for the sauna, a stand-alone building that resembles a Finnish farmhouse. With wide, long benches, the sauna is large enough to host an intimate hot yoga class, but it’s midmorning and we have the place to ourselves. Through the small window there’s a distant view of Lake Superior and the electric stove is maxing out at 150 degrees. The warmth feels calming, but it’s not nearly hot enough to make a run for the lake.
That’s good because, while Wild Rice is adjacent to Lake Superior, it sits atop a steep cliff. Jumping into the lake would be a one-way experience. Instead, Brian and I cool off in Adirondack chairs clustered around a fireplace, enjoying the silence of the woods. Maybe it’s partially the bright sunshine on a bluebird day in early February, but the world feels brighter after a 9:45 a.m. sauna.
The sauna at the top of the peninsula
To drive an additional 215 miles to the tip of the Keweenaw Peninsula, which juts like a hitchhiking thumb into Lake Superior, merely to take a sauna seems off-kilter. So, we make a day of it, stopping to Nordic ski at Active Backwoods Retreat, a trail system near the Upper Peninsula town of Ironwood with almost 47 miles of groomed trails.
After skiing, we stop for the night at The Vault Hotel, a cleverly rehabbed boutique hotel that was once home to the Houghton National Bank, established in 1887, in the college town of Houghton. It has a basement speakeasy with thousands of pennies scattered below the glass-topped bar, hand-carved ice in the cocktails and mellow jazz in the air.
Our sauna appointment is at 2:30 the next afternoon, but we rise early and drive 48 miles to ski the more than six miles of Nordic trails at Keweenaw Mountain Lodge, a historic resort built under the Works Progress Administration in 1934. But a bad year for snow and the freeze-thaw cycle have turned the groomed ski trails into a block of ice that would be suicidal to attempt.
When we reach our last stop, Takka Superior (“Takka” means fireplace in Finnish), three miles west of Copper Harbor near the tip of the peninsula, we meet our sauna host Megan East, who is wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with the words “Cold Water Swim Club.”
“Our last guests jumped in the lake eight times!” she says, leading us down a private path to the sauna, which opened in August 2023 and was so popular that the owners Jason and Lynn Makela decided to keep it open all winter despite closing their adjacent nine-cottage resort, Fresh Coast Cabins, for the season. Then they collaborated with Mr. Juntunen to grow their Upper Peninsula sauna empire to include a sauna experience in Houghton within view of the town’s iconic Portage Lake Lift Bridge. Their urban addition, Takka Portage, opened in time for Halloween.
Takka Superior, which has a changing room, an interior cooling off area, and a sliding-glass door leading to a deck, sits so close to Lake Superior that waves from winter storms splash on the full-size window that frames the jagged shoreline and lake beyond. It offers private, $65 per person 75-minute sauna sessions.
Inside it’s 201 degrees Fahrenheit, the stove stoked with wood cut on the Makelas’ 23-acre property. The sauna temperature boils my blood in the best possible way and I’m ready to dive into Lake Superior after about 15 minutes of steaming.
To cross the ice-covered rocks to the shoreline, they’ve provided us each with a trekking pole and neoprene bootees that we use to access a perfectly round natural wading pool, formed by rocks that have been sculpted by bashing waves, then bridged by a layer of ice. The air temperature is 36 degrees, two degrees warmer than the water. I lower myself into the shallow water and linger as long as I can, lasting less than a minute.
The lake is so calm, the breeze is so light, and the sun is so brilliant in the blue sky that it feels like a surreal Midwest summer day. On the spiritual patina scale, this sauna rates about a nine. It would be a perfect 10 if our sauna never had to end.
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