French Ghosts, Russian Nights, and American Outlaws: Souvenirs of a Professional Vagabond
The Swedish word for people who come to the Icehotel, 120 miles north of the Arctic Circle, to spend the night is tokig. It means “crazy.”
The room temperature is 23 degrees. The walls, beds, chairs, light fixtures, even the glasses used in the bar, are made of ice. You can’t unpack your clothes because they’d freeze, and the thought of getting out of your sleeping bag to go down the hall to the toilet is enough to keep you awake all night.
Those inconveniences aside, every winter, thousands of people come to Swedish Lapland to sleep in a hotel of snow and ice. The number of rooms varies from year to year, as does the décor, because in the spring the building melts into the nearby Torne River, to be reconstructed in the fall as the spirit moves the ice artists.
The Icehotel—something of an international concept, having spawned similar frozen hostelries in Japan, Norway, Canada, and Romania—was the brainchild of Swedish entrepreneur Yngve Bergqvist, who wanted to find a way to attract winter visitors to a frigid and remote but singularly beautiful place. It began as a humble igloo housing a 1989 art exhibit, where a handful of intrepid souls spent the night and woke up raving about the experience.
In 1994, Absolut Vodka of Sweden came here to shoot ads featuring supermodels like Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell posed in scanty haute couture on minimalist ice chairs and staircases. The campaign was so cool and so successful that Forbes named Absolut the number one luxury brand in the world, ahead of Tiffany and BMW. People from Tokyo to Berlin started wondering how they would sleep and what they would dream about on slabs of Swedish ice.
On a plane to Stockholm in January, I told the buttoned-up business man next to me that I was headed north of the Arctic Circle. He loosened his tie and said, “You’re not going to one of those ice places, are you?”
From Stockholm, I flew more than 800 miles north to Kiruna, an iron mining town beneath Sweden’s highest peak, 6,965-foot Kebnekaise. There, a bus waited to take my fellow travelers and me 10 miles east to Jukkasjarvi, set among snow-coated pine forests and lakes. With a population of 700, it has almost as many sled dogs as people. Along with boisterous 30-something Brits, who outnumber all other nationalities and age groups attracted to the Icehotel, there were Japanese, Germans, and Danes, as well as a few honeymooning couples who planned to spend their nuptial night in a suite of ice.
The sun was setting in delicate Easter egg shades of blue and pink when I arrived about 2 p.m. (In the middle of winter the sun rises about 10 a.m., I later discovered.) The temperature was minus 22. Where the snow had been left unplowed, it came up to my knees; the air was so dry that it scoured my lungs with every breath; my feet were cold, my cuticles were cracked, and my hair was a static electric mess.
I checked in at the reception building. Parked at the door were kick sleds that look like chairs mounted on skis, used for moving luggage and sightseeing in the village. There were Absolut Icehotel ads on the walls, blooming amaryllis in the windows, Swedish minimalist egg chairs, and a wood-burning stove around which people in snowsuits clustered. The receptionist told me to go immediately to the adventure center next door to check out winter gear like theirs.
I got stout lace-up boots, ski gloves, a funny fur hat with earflaps, and a snowsuit under which I was advised to wear several additional layers, starting with thermal long johns. So attired, I looked something like a clown made out of balloons. I squeaked when I walked, but the outfit kept me toasty during my Icehotel stay.
At the adventure center, I booked a three-hour snowmobile expedition for the next day and a 90-minute dogsled ride for the morning after that. In all, I planned to stay at the Icehotel for three nights: first in a heated cabin, then in an ice chamber, and finally in the lodge, which has all the modern comforts, including a thermostat.
No one, it seems, stays in the Icehotel proper for more than a night. It’s camping in the cold at five-star prices, much like an extreme sport you have to psych yourself up for. Afterward, you receive a diploma to prove you’ve done it. I learned all this by taking the tour for people staying in the Icehotel.
This sprawling, single-story, igloo-like edifice had an arched entry and double doors covered in reindeer skins, illuminated by a chilly blue light. Beyond the hotel entrance was the grand hall, supported by round ice columns about a foot in diameter, decorated with a fiber-optically illuminated ice chandelier that shimmered like diamonds in the dimness. Packed snow corridors burrowed off the grand hall, leading to the domed ice bar, heated luggage room, and toilets, and to the ice chambers.
Like Room 316, where I stayed the next night, most rooms were small and plain. Standard doubles had curtained doorways and two-foot-high ice-block platform beds cushioned by thin mattresses and reindeer pelts. The suites were grander, individually decorated by 35 artists, with sitting areas, sculptures, bizarre fiber-optic lighting fixtures, and furniture, all in ice, of course. One had a Japanese theme, another African. The Shakespeare suite surrounded guests with ice-sculpted scenes from Macbeth.
After I was settled, I wandered into the unheated art center next to the hotel. There, Swedish graphic designer Mats Indseth, who created the Shakespeare suite, was chiseling away at a bust of the Bard, intended for a full-scale ice replica of London’s Globe Theater, where dance, drama, and musical productions were to be staged. Indseth said he finds Torne River ice an exceptionally malleable, beautifully clear medium for sculpture.
The Torne supplies the 8.8 million pounds of ice used in the construction of the hotel, which is also composed of a highly insulating combination of water and snow blasted onto metal frames that are later removed to make the meter-thick walls and ceilings. The result, once smoothed down and decorated by artists, amazes and enchants most visitors, who can tour the facility during the day. The ice bar is open to everyone until the wee hours of the morning. But after 7 p.m., only hotel guests are allowed to wander the halls, dazed, probably, by the prospect of their impending hibernation.
The tour guide told my group the routine: Once you check in for a night, you drag or kicksled your bags to the luggage room, where you’re given a locker. For the rest of the day, you’re basically homeless, because the ice rooms are too cold and forbidding for anything other than sleep (and even that’s questionable). When it’s finally time to retire, you strip to your long johns and grab a sleeping bag designed for temperatures as low as minus 13 degrees; you take it to your chamber; settle in, and wait to nod off.
If you’re lucky, the next thing you know it’s 7:30 a.m. and an Icehotel staff member is at your bedside with a cup of warm lingonberry juice. Most guests follow it with a stint in the sauna.
That’s the ideal Icehotel overnight, at least. Actually, I met one young Englishman who told me he enjoyed 10 uninterrupted hours of slumber in an ice chamber, but his girlfriend said he could sleep like a puppy anywhere. A front desk clerk told me she frequently finds Icehotel refugees sprawled on couches in the reception building. Most people who make it through the night arise with the hollow-eyed look of life-sentence prisoners and practice responses such as, “It was an experience. I’m glad I did it,” leaving unsaid the obvious, that they’d never do it again.
But, happily, there’s more to the Icehotel than a bad night’s sleep. If you’re lucky enough to be there under the right conditions, there’s the aurora borealis, or the northern lights, a phenomenon caused by electrically charged solar particles drawn into the earth’s magnetic field. For the brave, there’s a sauna that is run by a German nudist on the premises of the Icehotel where you can sit in a hot tub outdoors, then take a numbing dip in a hole cut through the ice of the Torne River.
Above all, there’s Arctic Sweden, a vast, low-lying winter wonderland of pine trees and birches, so sparsely populated that thousands of square miles are used for rocket and aircraft testing and research on global warming and the ozone layer.
Together with parts of Norway, Finland, and Russia, the region is home to the vigorous Sami people, gatherers of cloudberries and herders of reindeer, whose history in the frozen north of Europe dates at least to the first century. About 17,000 Samis live in Sweden, where,