Quebec, Canada
Hot tubs in the snow. Frozen shot glasses. And an entire hotel made completely of ice. This was a night to remember.
And one I’ve been planning for a very long time. The very first activity ever placed on my bucket list was ”Spend the Night in an Ice Hotel.” I must have been around 14-15 years old and had both thought to create a bucket list and watched a Travel Channel special about the ice hotel in Sweden around the same time. Now, I am happy to report that along with “See Willis Nelson in Concert” and “Visit the Eiffel Tower,” I’ve got another item to check off the list!
The Hotel de Glacé - North America‘s only ice hotel is located in Quebec, Canada and has been on my radar for years. It is part of the Valcartier Resort complex which also features a regular hotel, a spa, a winter playground (tubing and sledding park), an indoor water park, an outdoor water park (weather permitting) and tons of restaurants, bars, shops and activities.
This is high season for Valcartier - as the world famous Winter Carnival is taking place in Quebec’s Old Town just thirty minutes away. We were lucky to get a room - especially during the week of Valentine‘s Day (though - let me be clear - the ice hotel is in no way conducive to the romantic rendezvous one might expect from a fairytale frozen castle).
We arrived in Quebec in late afternoon and went straight to the “regular“ hotel for checkin. They gave us both a regular room and an ice hotel room. The ice hotel is open to the public for tours throughout the day and you can’t actually access your ice hotel room until 9:00 p.m., after the tours are finished and the hotel is closed to the public. Also, there are no showers or toilets in the ice hotel - for obvious reasons - though a few heated port-a-potty are offered on site.
Guests can come and go from the ice hotel and the regular hotel at any time during the night for bathroom facilities, to change clothes or to warm up. The regular hotel also serves as a back up plan for those who cannot make it through the night. In fact, I heard many of our hallmates leave in the night and most of the rooms were empty in the morning (even though Josh and I left promptly as 8:30 a.m.)
With several hours until we could visit our ice room, we decided to book an evening pass to the Winter Playground. Guests who access the park after 2:00 p.m. are given a $10.00 discount and we were treated with a nearly empty park and no wait times on any of the snow slides.
As as you may be aware from knowing us and/or reading our previous posts - Josh and I are not athletic or even outdoor types. But we try. And yesterday we tried really hard. Tubing (sliding down hills of snow while seated in an intertube) was something I had done as a kid once or twice and really enjoyed it. However, those hills look (and feel) a lot more scary in your thirties.
Something about the nature of intrusive thoughts - “what is my insurance coverage in Canada?”; “Will my trial next week be continued if I’m in a full body cast?” - really take away from the in-the-moment feeling of the wind blowing on your face as you careen down a hill of ice toward a mound of not-so-soft looking snow.
We played it safe and stayed on the three green level slides all day. Were we the only adults without children in this area of the park? Yes. Did we mind? No. We were way more scared of dying on the bigger slopes.
To be honest, I had way more fun than I expected to have. But I was glad when it was time to go back inside for our 6:00 pm ice hotel safety briefing. The briefing lasted about 30 minutes and basically went over best practices for how to survive the night (keep your clothes for the morning in the bottom of your sleeping bag so they stay warm. Bring a new pair of socks to put on right before you get in your sleeping bag so they are completely dry. Tie your sleeping bag liner around your shoulder while you shimmy into your sleeping bag so it doesn’t get scrunched down in the bottom, etc. . .).
They repeatedly told us that the cold is not the enemy. Humidity and moisture are the enemy. Staying dry and not getting too hot were two main topics. Surprisingly enough, the staff said the main reason people leave the hotel in the middle of the night is not because they got too cold but - get this - because they got too hot! Crazy, right?
We made our way to the ice hotel around 8:30 p.m. and treated ourselvets to a self-guided tour of the entire ice building. It really did look like something out of a fairytale. All the different rooms had themes with intricate carvings, photo op stations and wall decorations etched right in the snow. The bar was Game of Thrones themed. The Chapel was full of nods to Greek mythology. One room was full of Christmas trees with a hidden ice slide. Another was ocean themed with giant whale and a jelly fish chandelier.
There are really no words to describe how impressive the public areas were. The detail of the designs and the science of how it all comes together was fascinating. Our room was a basic room, but for the guests willing to splurge, the suites were truly magnificent. Each one is designed by a different sculptor and features a unique theme. We saw a wild west room, a dragon room, a carnival room, a waterfall room, etc. . . Some even had fireplaces inside the room. Made completely of ice. It was incredible.
Our room was very basic. A queen-sized block of ice topped with a thick mattress pad in a room with snow floors and snow walls. There was also an end table made of ice. None of the rooms had doors, just curtains that went about 4/5 of the way to the floor. The hallways were lit all night so the room never got very dark. It was, however, surprisingly quiet.
Before bed, we spent an hour or so in the ice bar socializing with our hallmates and drinking cocktails out of glasses made of ice. I had a beautiful, but morbidly named, “Accident on a Snow Mobile” - a gin drink garnished with a spring of evergreen and squirt of bright red grenadine.
After drinks - and a few goes on the hidden ice slide in the Christmas Tree room - we retired to our “regular“ room to change into swimware and robes (per the recommendation at the safety briefing) for a hot tub and sauna session.
The ice hotel is next to the regular hotel, so the walk is only a 2 minute walk. However, two minutes in the snow wearing nothing but a robe and a swimsuit is pretty intense. The hot tubs were located outside the ice hotel in a little ice garden. There were five separate coves and each housed its own large hot tub. Since most people weren’t nuts enough to get in a hot tub in the snow, there was plenty of room. We had our own tub for basically the entire time. After an hour of relaxing we left the hot tubs for a quick steam in the sauna to help dry off. Then it was back the regular room for our final stop of the night.
We dressed in our mositure wicking long-johns (which would serve as our pajamas for the night) and over that our coats, outwerware and snow pants (to be taken off in the ice hotel room). We packed a small backpack with clean socks and an extra sweater each.
We brushed our teeth and took care of all the bathroom needs we had since it would be the next morning before we had access again (without using a port-a-potty or going through the snow). Then we headed out into the snow to our ice hotel room around midnight.
The majority of our safety briefing was spent going over the process of getting into bed - which I thought was stupid at the time - but suddenly I wished I had paid better attention.
Basically, each person in the room is given a big duffel bag. Inside the bag is a subzero mummy-style sleeping bag, a sleeping bag liner and a pillow. Once these items are unpacked you start the process of going to bed.
First you are supposed to take off your outerware then your boots. Once your boots are off, the floor is lava. So you have to stand up on your bed to climb into your sleeping bag liner. I forgot that you’re supposed to put your new socks on first, so I had to redo this step. Once in the liner, you can fill your sleeping bag with outerware or extra clothes to take up excess space and to keep them warm (i did this, but Josh didn’t).
After that, you climb into your super tight mummy sleeping bag that looks exactly like it sounds. You zip up from the inside and then you are supposed to sleep.
That isn’t exactly what happened though. I immediately got too hot. Humidity and mositure are the enemy. I panicked. So I took off my hat and scarf. That didn’t work. So I took off my socks. But I was still hot, so I unzipped my sleeping bag a little and took my arms out.
Then I got cold. And I panicked about getting hypothermia. So I zipped my sleeping bag back up and put my hat back on. But that wasn’t enough, so I wiggled around until I shimmed my socks back on.
Then I got hot again. And panicked.
This continued for the next few hours while Josh snored away and couples whispered down the hallway retreating from the cold - or the hot - back to the real hotel.
Determined to make it, I finally found the sweet spot of draping (not wrapping) my scarf across my neck, laying on (but not wearing) my hat and scrunching my toes (but not my whole foot) inside my socks.
Somehow this did the trick and I drifted off to a surprisingly restful night of sleep. I woke up with Josh’s alarm clock at 8:00 am. At that point getting up out of the sleeping bags into the frigid morning air was just as scary as getting into those bags the night before.
We did it like a band-aid - as quick as possible even though we knew it would hurt.
All in all, I would say the ice hotel is a worth while once (is enough) in a lifetime experience. I went in expecting a magical, fairytale romantic night and came out on the otherside realizing this was more like a cold weather glamping experience. Still glad we did it, though!
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