Saunas in Minnesota: Midwesterners Are Sweating it Out This Winter

Saunas in the state, part of a tradition with roots in the 1800s, have been especially popular since the pandemic as more people seek a communal experience.

WHY WE’RE HERE

We’re exploring how America defines itself one place at a time. For people in Minnesota, the sauna is a link to the past and a way to form new bonds.

Feb. 17, 2024

Jumping in a hole in a frozen lake during a subzero Minnesota winter evening is brutal. Your body spasms and you start to hyperventilate. Pain is sharpest in your toes and fingers as the skin turns bright pink. Teeth chattering uncontrollably, you ask yourself: What on earth was I thinking?

On the banks of Lake Minnewashta in Excelsior, just outside Minneapolis, the answer lies in a dimly lit, wood-burning barrel-shaped sauna a few feet away. Inside, a gaggle of strangers shared laughs, words of encouragement and audible sighs of delight on a recent night as we took turns cycling between the icy water and the steamy refuge cranked up to 190 degrees.

Minnesotans have begun partaking in a version of this ritual in droves as a tradition imported by the state’s Nordic settlers in the late 1800s has gone mainstream. Since 2000, and particularly after the Covid-19 pandemic, there has been an explosion of sauna ventures in Minnesota and the broader upper Midwest catering to the growing ranks that have come to love the freeze-sweat cycle ritual. While cold plunging is not obligatory — and some opt out — most of the new sauna venues encourage even mild forms of cold exposure, like dumping a bucket of cold water on your head.

Backyard sauna makers are struggling to keep up with demand. Watershed Spa, an upscale bathhouse in Minneapolis, often has a monthslong wait list for reservations. A handful of companies rent trailer saunas that can be delivered to homes and lake cabins.

There are floating saunas, sauna-themed gyms, meditative guided sauna sessions at upscale hotels and even portable tent saunas that can be transported on canoes. Among the offerings that launched this winter — which has been unseasonably mild in Minnesota — is Sauna Camp, which offers seasonal and day passes to use its 10 saunas by Lake Minnewashta.

Its slogan — “Winter is the new summer” — may sound like hyperbole, conceded the co-founder Luis Leonardo, a Guatemalan immigrant who moved to Minnesota in 2013 and was jolted by his first two bone-chilling winters.

“This is my favorite season of the year now!” exclaimed Mr. Leonardo, 44, a personal trainer who recently also started a sauna-themed gym. “You can’t pay me enough to get out of Minnesota during the winter.”

Many Minnesotans who have become sauna aficionados said they were initially enticed by reports of the physical and mental health benefits of regularly subjecting the body to extreme cold and heat. To newcomers, cycles of extreme cold and heat can be overwhelming at first. But with practice, it gets easier, and often induces a meditative state.

Those who have adopted it as a regular habit said they have come to deeply value the intimate bonds the crammed, sweaty spaces foster.

The pandemic turbocharged the state’s sauna industry as many Minnesotans built home saunas during the lockdown phase and later, starved for human connection, flocked to communal bathing gatherings, said Glenn Auerbach, the founder and editor of SaunaTimes, which covers the industry.

“These days I can throw a stick and hit a sauna builder,” said Mr. Auerbach, 60, who has a sauna at his backyard in Minneapolis and a second one at a lake cabin.

The seeds of this renaissance were planted in the late 1800s as immigrants from Sweden, Norway and Finland settled in Minnesota to take backbreaking jobs at mines, mills and farms. Communal saunas built in cities became gathering places for new immigrants, said Justin Juntunen, a descendant of Finns who moved to the state in the 1880s.

Many of those settlers bought farmland a few years after their arrival, Mr. Juntunen said, often prioritizing building rustic wood-burning saunas before they constructed homes.

“A lot of life happened in there: Babies were born there, families were grown there, stories were told there and the dead were prepared for burial there,” said Mr. Juntunen, 37, who in 2020 founded Cedar and Stone Nordic Sauna in Duluth, which offers private and communal sauna experiences. “This full spectrum of life happened in this small warm space.”

Sauna culture in Minnesota remained vibrant in the decades that followed, mainly among families who built them at homes and lakeside cabins. Several public saunas and bathhouses endured for decades in cities, until the AIDS crisis led officials to hastily shutter many amid concern that they had become popular meeting spots for gay men, Mr. Juntunen said.

The notion that saunas were places of “ill repute” was still widely held when John Pederson, a Minneapolis saunapreneur — yes, that’s what they call themselves — established a sauna co-op in 2016, a few years after building a tiny house that included a sauna. First-time guests often arrived with reservations.

“There would be eyerolls and jokes about being naked,” said Mr. Pederson, 41, who runs Thera Culture, which provides ritualistic guided sauna sessions at several venues. But soon, people were hooked. “I had a waiting list and I was hosting nearly every night of the week,” he added. (Nudity in communal saunas, once common, is not the norm these days in Minnesota.)

Darin Mays had never thought much of saunas until he moved into a house across the street from Mr. Auerbach, the SaunaTimes editor, who invited him over. The conversations the two had, dripping in sweat, felt singularly profound, said Mr. Mays.

“As we’ve become more technology-based, we’ve really lost that special aspect of having that human connection with people,” said Mr. Mays, 40. “Once people experience it, it fills their cup in a way they didn’t realize could be filled.”

The many hours he spent in saunas were cathartic and clarifying, Mr. Mays said, spurring him to stop taking a psychiatric drug for anxiety. After leaving a corporate job at a health care company in late 2020, Mr. Mays began building lightweight, translucent saunas — a venture that has fulfilled a childhood dream of “being an inventor.”

The passion for saunas has led him to make many new friends, Mr. Mays said, including Jen Gilhoi, an event organizer and workplace culture consultant in Minneapolis who last year co-founded a social group called Sauna and Sobriety. Ms. Gilhoi, 51, began hosting small gatherings in Mr. Mays’s backyard and soon found that they were a hit among others who struggled with substance use in the past.

“You can show up on your own and soon you’re in this very intimate environment with eight other people,” she said. “You can never do that in a bar.”

Intimate connections were not what drove Sarah Chapman Siedschlag, 47, to start spending a lot of time in saunas. After a breast cancer diagnosis two and a half years ago, she began looking for habits to make her mind and body healthier, she said. But the many hours she has spent in saunas since then have provided much more than that.

“You’re kind of in this vulnerable place, not wearing as many clothes, you’re in close proximity and you’re sweating,” she said. “Everything feels more open: Your body feels like it’s open, your heart and soul feel a little more open.”

On a recent afternoon, she shared a floating sauna in Duluth with a stranger: Peggy Zorbas-Gough, 64, a native of Duluth who recently moved back from California. Within minutes, the two were lost in the kind of easy, intimate conversation that is rare among strangers. They shared notes about having had cancer, talked about their children and at times sat in silence.

Ms. Zorbas-Gough said she began exploring the region’s sauna offerings last year as part of a goal to “do something every day that makes me feel uncomfortable.”

Cold plunging certainly fit the bill, Ms. Zorbas-Gough said. The cold-hot cycles have helped her, she said, “get out of my head.” Saunas became her “healthy addiction” this winter, she added — so much that she’s mulling a trip to Finland.