Worldandnation: Guests rarely give this hotel a chilly reception

QUEBEC, Canada -- It's 1 a.m. and you can't get to sleep. The room is so cold you can see your breath rising like a volcanic cloud. The bed is so hard it feels like a slab of rock. A hot bath would be nice, but there's no running water in this hotel, let alone tub, sink or toilets.

Time to complain? Au contraire, this is exactly why you came.

Since it opened Jan. 1, dozens of hardy souls have spent a night -- nobody stays more than one -- in the Ice Hotel Quebec, North America's first hotel made entirely of snow and ice. So many reservations have been received through the end of March, when the 22-bed hotel will start to melt, that occupancy for the first year is expected to be an almost unheard of 95 percent.

For $100 a night, guests can sit on chairs made of ice, belly up to a bar made of ice and watch a movie (mercifully short) in a theater made of ice. And when bedtime rolls around, layers of wood, animal skins, foam and plastic can't quite disguise that the bed rests on legs made of ice.

Why would anyone pay good money for what could well be the coldest, most uncomfortable night's sleep of their lives?

"People with money look for wild things now, extreme sports, new stuff," says Francis Leonard, the hotel's co-owner. "Going to the cinema is boring -- they want to say, "I slept in the Ice Hotel and I survived.' "

Indeed, on the night before the grand opening, with the outside temperature hovering around 0, the 10 guests appear more excited than if they were at a luxury resort on the French Riviera. Among them are an Australian journalist and her boyfriend; a family of four from the Montreal area and two married college students from Cleveland.

"I wanted to go to Florida to visit my grandparents but he refused," Mary Markey says of her husband, Dan. "I said, "If we're going to go somewhere cold, we're going to be REALLY cold.' "

On a whim, Susan and George Clarke drove 280 miles from Maine to Quebec City.

"We came specifically for this," Susan says. "We've slept in a lot of places but not one of these."

So far, only one guest has failed to make it through the night. That was a woman who became claustrophobic in the mummy-style sleeping bag. Staff members took her to their offices, where she finished her slumber on a sofa bed.

Will anyone in tonight's crowd wimp out? The betting is on a journalist from Florida. Stay tuned.

Although Inuits and other inhabitants of the world's frozen climes have long built structures of snow and ice, it wasn't until a decade ago that some Swedes realized there was money to be made by offering a taste of the Arctic lifestyle.

Since then, thousands have driven seven hours from Stockholm to stay in the world's first ice hotel in the tiny village of Jukkasjarvi.

Four years ago, Canadian entrepreneur Jacques Desbois read about the place and went to check it out for himself. If a hotel in such a remote location could be a success, he figured, why not one close to major population centers of North America? Quebec, two hours from Montreal and the self-proclaimed "snow capital" of Canada, seemed the perfect location.

While they agreed it was intriguing, lenders were cool to the idea.

"Try financing a block of ice," says Leonard, the co-owner, "No bank wanted to finance it. If you go bankrupt, what are they going to take back?"

Over the next few years, Leonard, Desbois and another partner went ahead with architectural and engineering plans. As a Sept. 1 deadline loomed to make the molds and ship them from Sweden, the Ice Hotel Quebec finally got $535,000 in loan guarantees from CSN, a confederation of Canadian unions. The government of Quebec kicked in $85,000.

Work began in early December behind Le Manoir, a convention center and restaurant by the spectacular, 272-foot-high Montmorency Falls.

Since normally snowy Quebec had yet to see the white stuff, 4,500 tons of artificial snow was trucked in from a ski resort and blown over the huge molds set on giant skis. Once the snow hardened, the molds were pulled out and voila! -- the shell of the Ice Hotel was in place.

Guests check in at Le Manoir, where they're queried about the clothes they brought. The Floridian's garb of leather boots, tights, wool pants, sweater, vest and down jacket is deemed insufficient: Next stop is a room upstairs to be outfitted with rubber boots with liners and bulky jacket and pants made from a cold-resistant material.

"It's not very sexy," jokes Sylvia Suarez, a hotel guide. "When we go to Florida we get happy because we can take off all this stuff."

From Le Manoir, guests trudge up an icy path to the hotel, where they enter a lobby with reception desk, chairs and "lamps" -- all carved from ice. The main corridor, with walls soaring to 16 feet, features large ice sculptures of native birds and animals, along with an ice chandelier lighted by fiber optics.

Each of the six rooms is unique. There's the "Salvador Dali Room," with a Dali-esque design carved into the wall, and a "Traditional Room" with a grandfather clock hacked from a single block of ice. While guests in Sweden put their sleeping bags directly on ice, here the beds are wooden platforms set on ice blocks and covered with deer skins. Those are topped by a thin, foam mattress wrapped in plastic to keep humidity from seeping through the sleeping bags.

Still, there's no doubt it's going to be pretty darn cold. The inside temperature stays at a constant 26 degrees. Water in a plastic glass freezes within minutes. Reporters trying to take notes must stop every few seconds to breathe warm air on their pens so the ink will flow.

In addition to the movie theater, the hotel has two small art galleries. Few guests linger at these: Most head for the bar, where straight shots of vodka are served in glasses made from blocks of ice with the center drilled out.

After cocktail hour at the hotel and dinner at Le Manoir, it's time for what everyone wants to know: how to survive the night.

The key is layering, which improves insulation and increases warmth. An outer layer of sleeping bag, an inner layer of liner and a layer or two of clothing. Wear too many clothes, the guide warns, and you'll start to sweat, which will make you feel even colder. Instead, body heat will eventually warm up the bag.

"The bag needs a few minutes to get on the job," he says.

Another critical piece of advice: "It's important to have the head and neck protected."

The sleeping bags have hoods that can be tightened around the face but guests are instructed to also wear a hat or scarf to bed.

And finally, these reassuring words: "If you feel unable to spend the whole night in there, there's a guard with a c-phone. Call him and he'll bring you inside and you'll end up in a nice warm place."

After changing in Le Manoir's restrooms, everyone crunches back up the hill in a minus 10-degree wind chill and prepares for bed. Each party is given a cellular phone with a number to call.

Outer layers of clothing come off in record time. However, getting into the sleeping bag and liner takes considerable dexterity.

By the time you're in the liner, the sleeping bag itself is twisted and it proves hard to get the hood on. Thus a wool scarf must suffice.

It doesn't. As minutes drag into hours, the face and nose grow colder and colder. In an effort to get sleeping bag or liner around the head, you begin flopping about like a mummy gone berserk. At last, in exhaustion, you fall into a fitful sleep.

Then you wake up one more time and discover it's 7:30 a.m. You've slept better than you realized.

"I feel fine," says George Clarke, a nursing student from Maine. "I like sleeping in the cold. I sleep with the windows open at home."

Clarke, though, wonders what happened to his wife. When he patted the sleeping bag next to his during the night, she wasn't there.

Constance Fortin looks decidely unrested. At 3 a.m. she had to take daughter Tess, 7, to one of the portable toilets outside. Her feet never warmed up again.

"I told my husband, don't ever take me to Antarctica because I will get divorced," she says.

Over breakfast -- hot -- at Le Manoir, there's general agreement that it took longer than usual to get to sleep; that faces were cold throughout the night and that noses still look unusually pink. But no one regrets having come.

Not even Susan Clarke.

Around 3:15 a.m., while her husband snoozed soundly, Clarke realized she was so cold she would never doze off. Since they were late arrivals, they didn't know they were supposed to have a phone to call for help. So she got dressed and ventured out into the frigid night.

"I thought, I have the keys to the truck and if I can't find anybody, I'm going to start up the truck and sleep in there. I'm not taking this anymore."

Instead, she ran into the guard, who escorted her to the sofa bed in the staff headquarters. Thus a guest from snowy Maine, not Florida, became the second person to cut short her Ice Hotel stay.

"I'm 53 and I should know better," Clarke says. "I can't believe I didn't have the right clothing."

Aided by a huge amount of free publicity, the hotel has attracted so many guests it will unexpectedly turn a profit this year. However, the owners plan to pour the money into next year's version, to be built a half hour from here at Duchesnay.

Covering four times the area of this year's hotel, the new one will have room for 95 guests and will offer a range of winter activities, including dog sledding, snowmobile tours and cross-country skiing. Eventually, the owners hope to open ice hotels in western Canada and the western United States.

Despite Susan's experience, the Clarkes say they'll be back next year. For their second night on this trip, though, they'll do what most Ice Hotel guests do -- go to the opposite extreme and stay in the luxurious Chateau Frontenac, considered the finest hotel in Quebec if not all of Canada.

Says Susan: "At least it'll be warm."

- Susan Taylor Martin can be contacted at susan@sptimes.com.

Back to World & National news

Contact the Times | Privacy Policy
Standard of Accuracy | Terms, Conditions & Copyright

Special Links

Susan Taylor Martin

From the Times wire desk

On his watch

On his watch

From the AP
national wire
From the AP
world desk