Sauna culture wins Canadian converts as mobile businesses bring the heat to them | Canada Voices

Smoke wafts from a black wooden hut parked on Alfresco Lawn, a quiet residential street in the Beaches neighbourhood of Toronto. It’s a grey Saturday morning, the last of winter holding on. One by one, women appear on the street, dressed in a peculiar uniform: bathing suits under waterproof swim parkas, toques, mitts and neoprene booties.

There’s laughter, familiarity and anticipation as the women make their way across the beach, an empty expanse at 8:30 a.m. They disrobe, link arms and walk into Lake Ontario, a bracing 3 C.

The women bob and laugh and scream, holding out for what feels like an eternity in the icy waves. They emerge after several minutes exhilarated, thighs pink from the cold.

Back on Alfresco Lawn, the black box is waiting for them – a wood-fired sauna running between 90 and 110 C. The women disappear into the cedar chamber, into an intense cycle of hot and cold.

“Scandinavian countries have had this down for ages,” says Kristen Roderick, a ceremonialist who dips regularly with this group of women, “The EndorFINS,” an aquatic pun on the endorphin rush triggered by these freezing plunges.

“There’s something about giving yourself a gift of this rotation of cold and heat,” Ms. Roderick said. “You feel good. You’re in community.”

The smoking black box by the water is Sedar Sauna. The brainchild of two friends, home builder Matt van Steenburgh and marketing consultancy head Jason Wong, the sauna has attracted hot and cold enthusiasts through two winters along Lake Ontario. Every Saturday, the friends park their 10-person sauna on the waterfront in the city’s east end, moving to another lakeside spot in the west end one Sunday a month. The hour-long, pay-what-you-can sessions book up quickly, with more than 850 reservations made in the last three months. As temperatures climb, Sedar Sauna will close out the season with a spring potluck this Victoria Day weekend.

Everyone has their reasons for trekking out to the lakeside sauna. Some talk about the benefits of “contrast bathing” – waves of hot and cold – for circulation and the cardiovascular system. Others seek relief for aches, pains and inflammation. Ms. Roderick says the practice mitigated her menopause symptoms, including anxiety. People talk about the powerful mood boost of these mornings, about surges in dopamine, the brain’s feel-good neurotransmitter, with each lake dip, followed by deep relaxation in the sauna.

Some treat the practice as a reset button after trying weeks at work. Mothers of young children talk about giving themselves the gift of an hour, moving from sauna to lake and back, released momentarily from the demands of parenting.

More than anything, the lakeside sauna has generated a community, people at different stages in life doing something random and thrilling together. Many say the routine got them through winter – not cowering from the elements but rushing in headlong. “There have been a couple days this winter where it’s been minus 30 with wind and it’s been full,” Mr. Wong said. “There’s an excitement about doing the tough thing.”

Across Canada, sauna enthusiasts use the ritual to get through long, cold months with more grit and more joy.

In Northwestern Ontario, Finnish descendants have kept sauna culture alive, using wood-fired saunas on their camps year-round, cooling off in cold northern lakes in summer and snow in winter.

Thunder Bay’s Kangas, a public sauna house, has been an institution since 1967, initially catering to Finnish bush workers who bathed here, and today equipped with 18 private sauna rooms and a diner.

Beyond Ontario’s sauna belt, hot and cold immersion therapy is gaining traction across Canada.

At Blue Forest Shores in Head of Jeddore, N.S., visitors overlook treetops from a glassed-in, Finnish sauna, and can choose between a cold splash, shower or ocean dip as part of their hydrotherapy session. In Winnipeg, people can rent time in a cedar sauna barrel at Assiniboine Park. And in downtown Toronto, Othership, a popular studio of saunas and ice-baths attracts devotees of the longevity movement.

Micro Nordic spas featuring saunas are increasingly a perk at AirBnbs, including Hidden Haven in Swift Current, Sask., as well as at refurbished hotels like The Liberty Inn in Caledon, Ont., where guests get private access to a barrel sauna and cold plunge tub in the woods.

These traditions extend far past the Nordic.

Korean bathhouses, or jjimjilbang, have grown popular in Vancouver, Coquitlam, B.C., and Toronto, with numerous saunas and a communal room where people can sleep or socialize, wearing uniforms of cotton T-shirts and shorts.

Cavernous Russian banyas also dot the country, from Calgary to suburban Toronto; sauna goers use veniks, branches of oak, birch and linden, to stimulate circulation in the powerfully hot saunas.

Then there’s the DIY sauna set. Jonathan Kuhn and his wife Katriina Kuhn, who’s of Finnish descent, built a wood burning sauna out of aspen at their off-grid, lakeside retreat outside of Perth, Ont.

Mr. Kuhn has been documenting their projects online, including a winter practice of chain sawing holes in the lake for cold plunges taken between steamy sits.

The sauna lovers aren’t alone. With nearly 9,000 members on its Facebook page, The Sauna Society Canada connects people building saunas at home – wood-fired, electric, infrared, propane. Members quiz each other on everything from temperature gauges to the best stove stones.

Toronto’s Sedar Sauna might never exist were it not for a harrowing Dorothy and Toto origin story.

Mr. van Steenburgh had been struck with the idea of building his own sauna after a 2022 trip to Mexico, where he ventured inside a broiling temazcal sweat lodge. The intensity of the experience inside that concrete hut stayed with him; he wanted more.

The answer was sitting at his family cottage in Havelock, Ont., – a mobile tool shed that barely survived a brush with Mother Nature. In July, 2022, a tornado hit the area, plucking the tool shed 100 feet over a tree line before crashing it upside down on a nearby road.

“I thought it was pretty much garbage,” Mr. van Steenburgh said.

The body was in rough shape but the trailer still rolled. In October, 2023, the builder began refurbishing his shed into a Finnish-style sauna on wheels. Constructed with white cedar grown and milled in Ontario, the sauna is powered by a wood-fired stove surrounded by stones that radiate a steady, formidable heat.

The maiden voyage came on New Year’s Day, 2024, when Mr. van Steenburgh towed his mobile sauna to Toronto for the annual polar bear dip. More sauna weekends with friends followed at Toronto’s Cherry Beach and Humber Bay Shores. Every time Mr. van Steenburgh and Mr. Wong took the black box out, passersby were curious. They decided to open up the sauna beyond their circle, first through a WhatsApp group, then through a formal booking system this winter.

Given the demand, Mr. Wong and Mr. van Steenburgh hope to expand their model and put more saunas along Toronto’s waterfront. They’ve approached the city about extending, into winter, a permitting system already in place between May and October for kayak and paddle board businesses in the Beaches.

They point to sauna projects set along waterfronts in Stockholm, Wales and Duluth, Minn., home to many Finnish expats. In June, the pair will head to Helsinki for the World Sauna Forum, described by organizers as “the most relaxing business event in the world.”

The two have been delving into sauna cultures around the world, from Turkish hammams and Russian banya, to Japanese public bathhouses, or sento. “Every sauna culture develops for their environment and their people,” Mr. Wong says.

In high-octane Toronto, the groups crowding the sauna every weekend point to a desire for this simple ritual – to sit, single-mindedly with others, through blasts of steam and freezing waves.

Jessica Hein grew up outside of Sudbury with her Finnish Canadian family’s sauna practice. In winter, they heated themselves inside their wood-fired sauna, then rolled in snow or sat out in the cold air. In summer, they paired the sauna with dips in the lake.

“It was part of regular life, part of how we bathed and also a social experience,” said Ms. Hein, an artist and educator.

Moving to Halifax and later Toronto, she was missing the ritual, until she came upon the smoking black box in the Beaches last winter.

To her, the combination of steam, crackling fire and natural surroundings feel like an authentic Finnish sauna experience. Mr. van Steenburgh and Mr. Wong will pop in, tending to the stove and adding water on the stones to release hot steam. For the full sensory experience, they scent the water with essential oils – birch, pine, lemongrass, eucalyptus.

“Many North Americans think of a sauna experience as something you do at the spa, where you pay a lot of money and spend an entire day,” Ms. Hein said. “Whereas this is a practice that’s affordable, something you can do every week and build into your life. And that is how it’s done in Finland. It’s not extravagant. It’s part of life.”

Thanya Duvage was intrigued, spotting the sauna and lake dippers on Saturdays while strolling the boardwalk with her husband and young daughter after her ballet class.

She woke up on her birthday this past March determined to join the dippers.

The year felt significant: she had turned 41; her mother was 42 when she died of cancer. Ms. Duvage was feeling ever more conscious of time passing. She came to view the lake ritual as a form of baptism: “I wanted to start this year fresh and wipe away some worries, and some fears and some pain of the past.”

Working in the health sector, Ms. Duvage was also battling burnout. Living in Toronto, a city with a deep cultural fixation on work and self-optimization, Ms. Duvage found relief in the Saturdays by the lake. There was no competition, no box to check here. No one was measuring their time in the frosty waves. Some people didn’t dip at all, coming just to enjoy the sauna’s heat.

To Ms. Duvage, the little smoking hut serves as an anchor for a majestic lake too often overlooked by Toronto’s very busy people.

“It’s easy to live in the city at a pace that lets you ignore the real landscape of where we live,” she said. “It makes me feel humble to surrender myself to the lake in the cold.”

Surrender and resilience are recurring concepts in the contrast bathing community. People talk about mind over matter, about pushing through the panic, a brain screaming that it can’t take it, only to be rewarded with a dopamine bath afterward.

“When you go into 1 C water and muddle your way through it, you feel stronger coming out. Everything else is easy in a day,” says Rob Harvie, who’s been cold water plunging for five years.

“The internal chatter says, ‘I’m dying!’ And then you go, ‘Relax, it’s beautiful. Here comes the sun.’”

By this point, Mr. Harvie is able to hold out 10 minutes in the ice-cold waves.

“After years of doing it, it’s more like soaking in a bath. You kind of get used to it. I love this but I won’t do a cold shower,” jokes Mr. Harvie, a university lecturer who also runs a consulting and media services company.

Through winter, Mr. Harvie and his wife Mary Munro, Beaches locals, cold plunge nearly every morning, always at sunrise.

“You get a sense of awe. And that resets your mind,” said Ms. Munro, a retired bank executive who runs an executive coaching and consulting business.

Then there’s the endorphin rush: “I have an urge to say ‘Hello!’ and ‘Have a wonderful day!’ to almost anybody after I come out of the water,” Ms. Munro laughed.

On Saturdays, the sauna is a luxury add-on to the pair’s dipping ritual, as well as a social convener. Instead of racing off the beach and back home, people head into the warmth.

“There are connections made in there that you otherwise wouldn’t,” Ms. Munro said of the diverse, intergenerational group.

Montessori school teacher Alice Snaden joined in February after spotting the lake dippers in deepest winter while walking with her son. Ms. Snaden has been grieving her husband, Charles, who died two years ago after battling a rare autoimmune disease.

The Saturdays at the lakeside sauna have become a kind of neighbourhood embrace through the grief.

“The people that I’ve met here are spectacular,” said Ms. Snaden, who found she likes living in the area more since joining the weekly practice.

“In the last few months, coming out of this grief into this ritual and community has been the thing that’s made me go, I’m living life, I’m not just surviving life right now. I’m a part of something that is so alive.”

Inside the sauna, conversation flows easily, the heat opening more than people’s pores. Health, parenting, divorce, therapy – anything goes.

“I’ve walked in to throw more wood in the fire, and everyone goes, ‘Bet you didn’t expect to walk into that!’” Mr. van Steenburgh chuckled.

There’s a particular kind of laughter inside the sauna, says Ross Rheaume, who’s been a weekly regular since February, along with his partner Ilana Ben-Ari.

People are giddy, bracing for the cold waves outside. The cedar chamber is tight; sometimes an icy cold thigh squishes up against your own.

“I never laugh as much as I do in that sauna. It’s facing something together and it’s also just everyone trying to survive,” said Mr. Rheaume, a documentary filmmaker.

“It’s like you’re back in the school yard again and you have all this energy you’re trying to release. It might come in the form of a joke, or a song. We were singing Fleetwood Mac last weekend, the entire album.”

For his dash to the lake, Mr. Rheaume wears a dry robe – waterproof, fleece-lined and screaming magenta pink; Ms. Ben-Ari, a toy designer, is equally striking in her mint green version.

She fell in love with saunas while living and working in Helsinki in 2011. She can’t understand why Canada doesn’t embrace sauna culture with the same zeal as Finland, a fellow frosty nation.

Since March, she’s joined the EndorFINS every morning for a lake dip at sunrise. She remembers the first time she laid eyes on the women in the water, in the dead of winter: “I was like, ‘Who are these women? What is this coven? I was looking for a coven!’”

She befriended Martina Marek, a cold plunge legend at the Beaches who started the EndorFINS group. Ms. Marek grew up in Prague, where saunas are a regular part of life. She has spent nine winters dipping in Lake Ontario, braving the waves alone for three years.

Ms. Marek described the “misery” of those early solo dips. That turned into euphoria when the flock grew at the lake, everyone floating on a dopamine cloud.

“In life, not every day is sunrise and not every day is beautiful. But you take whatever it is. What I like with the girls is that we create joy. We forget about whatever’s happening and the girls start singing and having jokes,” she said.

“Imagine, my last year. Every morning, I am happy.”