A Night in the Ice Hotel

I didn’t expect my wife, a person who lives in a perpetual state of cold, to be the one excited about spending the night in a hotel made entirely of frozen materials, but she was positively gleeful at the prospect. With all the job uncertainty in the air, and not knowing what will be going on during my summer vacation, Jess and I decided to take our holidays during my February break. To me, this sounded like heaven. This winter has been brutal, and I could picture myself lying somewhere warm, water lapping at my feet and the sun on my skin; the only ice I would see would be the one filling the bucket of beer by my cabana. All set to buy our cruise tickets, we had to admit to ourselves that it was not wise to spend money on an elaborate vacation right when I was planning on leaving my job. So we began to look elsewhere for something to do with our winter break. One Groupon and one 9 hour drive later, we were pulling into our ice hotel outside of Quebec City.

Staying at an ice hotel after a long drive is a great idea because there is nothing more invigorating than trying to drag your roller suitcase over yards and yards of snow and ice. It really gets the blood flowing. At least we didn’t have to drag it all the way to our room, because the rooms there don’t really have doors and it is too cold to change in them anyway. Instead, we put them in lockers inside the only heated building in the complex, the one that held the showers. It is the kind of amenity that you would only expect in the classiest of hotels, like the YMCA or a dutch youth hostel. After checking in, we were briefed on what our stay would be like and then headed (booted and coat-covered) towards the main hotel building.

I have to admit, the building itself was quite lovely. I am not sure what the style should be called. Nouveau Inuit? Pre-Aslan Narnian? The two main rooms, the chapel and the bar, had a kind of vaulted ceiling that reminded me of some sort of viking mead hall (albeit it, one that had been chipped out of the side of a glacier). It was constructed out of a mix of ice blocks and packed snow in the style of igloos, though with a level of engineering and artistry probably not seen in the arctic. There were plenty of places to sit, but they were all carved out of ice, hard and un inviting. They had draped reindeer skins and animal pelts over them, which added to the charm, but didn’t really make them any easier to sit on.  The hotel itself was open for tours prior to 8 o’clock and so we were able to wander through the maze like structure and walk through all of the rooms. Many of the rooms contained elaborate ice carvings and engravings in the walls in different themes. Some seemed bizarrely out of place, like the ones that emulated warm, exotic locales, but others were quite beautiful and were lit up with colored lights that played along and through the shimmering surfaces.

After getting lost several times, we finally made it back to the bar where we were given a block of ice, a chisel, and a hammer. Our hotel host wearily asked the group to please be more original than to just make a big cup for a giant cocktail, nevertheless that is what most others did before heading over to the bar. Our hotel stay included a drink and it was served in its own little glass made out of a block of ice. It is an odd contradiction to engage in frozen activities while aiming for warmth, but that is what everyone did. We huddled around fireplaces and stomped our feet while sipping out of awkwardly shaped ice cups.

The contrast of warmth and cold didn’t stop in the bar. After finishing our drinks, we went back to the locker room to change into swimwear. Bracing ourselves in hotel bathrobes we opened the door to the outside and made a frigid dash to the spa area. There is something strangely satisfying about sitting in a hot tub surrounded by snow. There isn’t a spa in the world that can emulate the natural stillness of snowflakes floating down on the evergreens. Once we became wrinkly as newborns, we sprinted for the sauna to dry off. As relaxing as it all was, I soon realized that the real value of the spa ritual seemed to be that it was meant to elevate your body temperature for bedtime. This is especially useful if your bed is a literal block of ice.

I once saw a movie where someone was locked in a meat freezer overnight by the mob. Sleeping in the ice hotel is much the same. Our room consisted of a bed frame made of ice and a mattress on top. There was also an ice night stand and a candle in a candle-holder made of, you guessed it, ice. Before heading out to sleep, we had to attend a mandatory orientation to help us avoid ending up like the guy in the meat freezer. We were each issued arctic expedition quality sleeping bags and were instructed on all the techniques that were necessary to keep moisture out and warm dry air in. The end result left you looking like a man from another mafia movie who was tightly rolled up in rug and thrown into a river. After getting the whole spiel from the hotel staff, Jess and I changed into our recommended sets of long underwear, put on our winter coats, and sprinted to our icy room.

When we got to our room, we quickly pulled our sleeping bags, and began the long process of cinching bungees up and down the bag, pulling on the hood section, and tightening cords until we were wrapped up so tightly that there was barely any room to move. Everything was covered except for my nose and mouth. I am not sure how long I lay there. It seemed like a while. I might have even dozed for a few moments, but the problem is that this sleeping bag deal didn’t suit my sleeping style. If I had been the kind of person that can lay still all night, preferably on their back, I probably would have slept quite well. Unfortunately, my sleeping style can only be described as “rotisserie,” and lying there - unable to turn or move around - made me slowly start to lose my mind. Finally, around 2 in the morning I saw up in bed, unzipped the bag, and trudged back to the locker area. I was hoping that it would be empty enough that I could just crash on one of the couches, but unfortunately there was a concierge type person there who didn’t seem too keen on the idea. So I stayed up until about 4, when I was so exhausted that I was sure that I would finally be able to go to sleep, ice or no ice.

I didn’t bother with the sleeping bag cocoon techniques. I just crawled in, burrowed down, and went to sleep. Not feeling so constrained, I promptly fell asleep. Of course, I woke up about 2.5 hours later, freezing my tiny butt off. Jessica was also up. We decided that we both needed to go back to the sauna. We stayed there until we could feel our toes again and then went into the showers to get ready for our day in Quebec City (an absolutely charming town, by the way). As I pulled my sweater on in the locker room, one of the other guests asked me how my night went. 

“Not very well,” I told him.
“Really?” he said. “I slept great! I only woke up from the cold once or twice!”

In the end, I think that sentence seems to sum up the ice hotel experience. In no other hotel in the world would you preface the fact that you woke up several times from being cold with the sentence “I slept great!” You do a lot of things that you could be doing in a lot warmer places, but the setting somehow makes up for it. Am I glad I did it? Absolutely. Would I ever do it again? I would rather be rolled up in a rug and thrown into a river.