Ice Accommodations

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The Ice Hotel

Accommodations in one of the coldest parts of Sweden offer a frozen place to rest your head.

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By the time my companion Eric and I were seated on a Scandinavian Airlines plane headed for the northern town of Kiruna, however, I had stopped worrying about protecting Swedish sensibilities. I peered out the window and saw a sticker for a university located not far from our ultimate destination, the tiny village of Jukkasjarvi. "First Choice Scandinavia -- Great ideas grow better below zero."

Clipped exchanges Eric and I had with each other underscored our joint sense of trepidation. As the plane took off from Stockholm, he turned to me and remarked, "There's no going back." I nodded.

As our aircraft approached the ground 90 minutes later, Eric peered out at row upon row of snow-covered pine trees.

"It looks pretty white out there," he observed.

"Yup," I said.

We made our way out of the plane onto the snow-covered tarmac. While it was only 1:30 in the afternoon, the sun was beginning to set. But as I scurried inside the airport I felt . . . a dry cold. It was crisp, and chilly, but it wasn't the kind of wet, oppressive cold that seeps into your bones during Washington's worst winter moments.

Joined by Ice Hotel spokeswoman Camilla Bondareva and Lisa Svensson, then a program officer at the Swedish Embassy in Washington, we made our way to Kenth Fjellborg's sled dog kennel. Fjellborg comes from one of Jukkasjarvi's founding families (the fourth one to move to town, once the church was established in the 1600s). Since that tentative start, nine generations of Fjellborgs have eked out a living in the region, through farming, hunting and fishing.

"For them, 40 below was a problem. For me, that has been an asset," Fjellborg said. "That has been something people want. If you told my grandfather you're going to take ice from the river and people would come to stay in it, he probably would have thought you should go to the hospital."

Fjellborg grew up playing outdoors, and when he was 12, he became entranced by the dog sled tours that had just started going by his home. After finishing school, Fjellborg moved to raise dogs in Alaska and Minnesota before returning to Jukkasjarvi, where he started his own business in the mid-1990s.

Fjellborg provided our transport across the Torne River to the Ice Hotel, in the form of a 15-minute dog sled ride. As the sled skidded to a halt, the hotel's founder, Yngve Bergqvist, came out to meet us, swaddled in many layers, his face encircled with a sort of animal fur that gave him a haloed appearance.

"Welcome to Jukkasjarvi!" he declared, giving us a brief sketch of the town. It took about one minute, which was good, because we were standing outside and freezing after our sled ride.

"This is one of the coldest places in Sweden," he said. "It's a way of living."