People have been living in homes made of snow for millennia of course, but it’s rather more recently that the idea of spending a night in a room made of snow and ice has caught on in the world’s ski resorts.
These days it’s possible to do just that at dozens of locations in the Alps, Canada and Scandinavia, often surrounded by beautiful ice carvings, and sometimes with surprising facilities to enjoy – a hot tub in an igloo for example.
The ice hotels and igloos are built from scratch at the end of autumn each year, usually a huge task involving thousands of tonnes of snow and ice, and are normally ready to rent anytime from mid-December to early-January, up until they begin to melt away in April. So the one you book into will always be unique, especially built for that season.
Apart from the unique experience of a night staying in a structure made of snow, there can be a few unexpected advantages. For one thing, you’re likely to find you’re located at the top of the ski slopes, which means you’ll have first tracks next morning when everyone else is queuing at the bottom of the mountain for the first lift up.
You’ll also be away from light pollution, meaning you’ll get a fantastic view of the stars, presuming it’s a clear night, or if you’re at a northern most location perhaps the Northern Lights, if you’re lucky, before you turn in for the night.
But what’s it like to sleep in an igloo or ice hotel? Or to try to …. They do vary, but typically rooms are essentially empty (except for any ice art) apart from a bed frame, with reindeer skins on it for insulation. Doors are also an animal skin flap; limited light comes from minimal LED lighting. You’ll need to wear thermal underwear, a hat, socks, and, if you want, gloves, and wrap yourself up in a thermal sleeping bag. Temperatures are a few degrees below zero, and the thick ice walls deaden any sound. Your chance of a good night’s sleep really depends on how quickly you get used to sleeping in thermals in a bag with a hat on – if you can adjust to the strangeness of that you can get a good kip, otherwise it may all seem a bit too odd for you to be able to drift off. But at least you can brag in the après-ski bar that you’ve done it.
If you’re booked on a package holiday, or travelling independently, you can usually add a night in an igloo or ice hotel room to your stay. If you don’t want to sleep over, it’s also a popular option to visit for an evening meal then head back down the mountain to your comfy warm hotel bed.
> Igloos
Igloos are the commonest form of snow accommodation in the Alps, popping up every year on the mountains above many of the continent’s top resorts.
Usually created as a network of individual igloos linked by tunnels under the snow, some are built the traditional way, with snow blocks gradually closing inwards to form a roof, others with the more modern idea of inflating a giant room size balloon, covering it in snow, waiting for that to freeze, then deflating and removing the balloon!
Alongside individual resort creations, one award-winning Swiss company, Iglu Dorf, has a chain of igloo villages in half a dozen resorts from the Alps to Andorra. It offers much more than just plain old igloos, creating designer romantic igloos, and installing hot tubs in some of its igloos too.
The company was established by Adrian Günter, a former ski and snowboard instructor, back in 1996, and uses around 3000 tonnes of snow at each of its locations, creating snow villages that cover around 1200m2 each. Seen then as a ”daring idea”, nearly two decades later igloo villages are ever more popular, attracting around 8000 overnight guests between them, and hosting many other people for visits and meals – one recent season alone Iglu Dorf reported it served 4.5 tonnes of cheese fondue during the winter!
Always innovating, the company has different themes for its ice and snow carving art each winter and from village to village.
Recent themes have included Tales of the Arabian nights, and movie-inspired carvings including a King Kong igloo, a Charlie Chaplin room, and Jurassic Park dinosaurs in one of its restaurants.
> Ice Hotels
Ice hotels have been with us for more than 20 years now, and the original ICEHOTEL in northern Sweden is a truly amazing structure.
Located at Jukkasjärvi, a short distance from the city of Kiruna (which you can fly into, or take a direct 12-hour sleeper train from Stockholm), the ICEHOTEL is rebuilt each autumn on the shore of the vast frozen Torne River.
Now a methodically planned, major business, this spectacular structure is made from ice blocks and pre-formed snow sections, created using specially designed wooden arc-shaped frames to produce the required shape on which the snow freezes in place. The ice blocks are cut from the River and stored in a giant refrigerated hangar. They are amazing things – about 1.8m long and 0.3m2, in varying shades from clear to blue with beautiful natural patterns in them – it is only once you visit that you can appreciate how much work is involved in its construction.
The beautiful building is a big part of the hotel’s overall appeal as are the ice sculptures that fill it. Of course these take time to create, but also need to be ready when the hotel opens in December, so they’re made in advance by ice sculptors who fly in from around the world to work in giant sub-zero art studios beforehand. You see it is quite an operation.
The hotel comprises around 40 bedrooms, sleeping up to 80 people. There are also various public rooms, including the popular ice bar and an ice chapel. There’s also a warm, dry room where you can change and use the bathroom.
In addition to the Hotel itself, many people spend a holiday here staying in one of the adjacent log cabins, dining in the Hotel’s restaurants, or just spending one night of their stay in the Hotel itself.
The Torre River’s ice is thick enough to carry cars, although most people use the river as a snowmobiling route for the 16km or so to the shops and facilities of Kiruna. Snowmobiles constantly whizz past, often towing families in little sleighs behind. The odd dog sled team and cross-country skier also pass by.
This is also a great location for spotting the Northern Lights, due to low levels of light pollution in the area, and its northerly latitude. It’s also a top spot for getting married using the ice chapel. The concept is reported to be particularly popular with Asian couples, who believe that a child conceived beneath the aurora borealis will be particularly lucky in life.
Over the years other ice hotels have been created in other northern regions, but none has quite matched the original. ICEHOTEL has also launched a chain of ice bars in cities around the world, modelled on the ice bar in the Hotel, where coloured vodkas are served in ice tumblers – fortunately it takes two or three drinks before body heat thaws a hole in them! They’re then cast on a growing pile of discarded ice glasses ready to melt back into the River in the spring, along with the rest of the hotel, which is entirely gone by June.
If you want to ski on your trip, the nearby city of Kiruna does have a small ski area, but there are bigger areas, including Björkliden (bjorkliden.com) and world-famous Riksgränsen, around 90 minutes to 2 hours away, good for a two-centre holiday.
Another ice hotel in the region is the Lainio Snowhotel, close to the ski areas of Levi (45km) and Ylläs (20km) in northern Finland. Covering an area of 20,000m2, some 1.5m kilos of snow and 300,000kg of crystal clear, natural ice are used for the construction of this 30-room hotel, which was first built in 2000. It features many of the same attractions as the original ICEHOTEL, as well as ice slides.
If you head to the Hôtel de Glace in Quebec, first created in 2001, and similar in many ways to the Swedish original, you’re located 10 minutes from Quebec City and, thus, very close to ski areas, including Stoneham, Mont-Sainte-Anne, and Le Massif.
> Variations On The Theme
Hot Igloos from Iglu Dorf are in fact heated igloo-shaped tents, which allow you to stay on the mountain, but in a cosy furnished all-weather tent with “winter grade insulation“. Each is luxuriously equipped with a wood-burning stove and double bed, and directly connected to the igloo village. They’re available at Engelberg-Titlis, St Moritz, and Zermatt, all in Switzerland. Transparent windows allow users to look up at the starry sky above, and, as at the ICEHOTEL, guests can combine a warm night in a hot igloo with a colder one in a genuine igloo.
A Glass Igloos is a relatively new idea, becoming increasingly popular in Scandinavia. Shaped like a traditional domed igloo, it has a glass roof, with the bed placed directly below so you can lie back and look up at the starry sky, and hopefully the aurora too.
Best known is the Kakslauttanen Centre in northern Finland, only 15 minutes from the ski area of Saariselkä (which is included in the Inghams brochure, who offers stays at Kakslauttanen as an add-on). For 2014–15 Kakslauttanen is creating new family-sized four bed glass igloos, to add to the existing doubles, as well as its traditional igloos.
Whitepod was launched around a decade ago as a kind of luxury gourmet eco camp in the snow, originally above the resort of Villars, Switzerland, but now it’s perched in its own private ski area of Les Cerniers, close to the Swiss section of the Portes du Soleil, with its own drag lift and a 700m vertical.
The ex-NASA pods have wood-burning stoves, luxurious fittings, and there’s a mountain hut serving gourmet meals on-site.
Finally, you can, of course, make your own igloos, the old-fashioned way – or dig a snow hole to sleep in. The mountain guides in many ski resorts, including at CairnGorms in Scotland, offer this as an option – either for fun or as a survival camp activity.
Most organised is the Swiss resort of Adelboden, which offers enthusiastic igloo lovers the chance to build their own as part of an organised weekend in mid-March each season. Equipped with shovels and snow saws, the igloo builders set about creating the shelters in which they will spend the night.
Building one yourself can be a bit primitive compared with the options listed above, but at least it’s the real deal, harking back to the days long before people had the idea of putting a hot tub in an igloo! Plus, you have the added satisfaction of knowing you’ve built your home for the night yourself.
