Some years ago, I built a cabin on a river up north. Later I bought the lot next to it to prevent someone else, say a bear hunter, from hauling a trailer and multiple dog pens onto it. But once I owned the property, I thought: Why not build something? A wood-fired sauna, I reasoned, would make winters more attractive, keep shower-loving guests from filling my holding tank, and my labor would create, ah-hem, sweat equity. Mainly, though, I thought it would be fun. 

The sauna didn’t begin with blueprints but a picture in my head. It would be a twelve-foot square including a narrow deck, all under a hipped roof – like a lookout tower cabin except mine would rise only a few feet off the ground. I pictured heavy snow blanketing the sauna, a warm light falling from its tiny window, smoke pouring from the stovepipe. There would be a cedar-lined hot room with a stove and a small dressing room with hooks for hanging clothes. Afterward, my friends and I would stand outside on the deck, steam pouring off our skin, and discuss jumping in the river. 

John Hildebrand on the lower part of the Yukon River.

Building a sauna is like building a small house. To cut expense I salvaged timbers that had broken away from an upriver dam. I ran cedar fence boards through a planer to smooth them then cut a ship-lap edge with a table router.

“But why,” my wife cried, “do you need a small house just to sweat in?” 

Good question. The answer goes back to my first sauna experience many years ago when I spent a summer going down the Yukon River in fifteen-foot canoe. The trip ended short of the Bering Sea at the Yupik Eskimo village of Pitkas Point where the Andreafsky and Yukon Rivers meet. A week of wet coastal weather had left me cold and filthy.  Most older cabins in Pitkas Point lacked running water, but the village had a community laundromat with showers and an electric sauna.

I was watching my clothes tumble dry at the laundromat when some salmon fishermen filed into the men’s sauna at the end of a day tending drift nets. “Plenty of room,” said the last man, who held the door. I stripped and showered in the bathroom then entered the prickly heat of the sauna. I sat on the lower bench in a dense fog of conversation that would part unexpectedly when someone replied to a long, guttural speech in Yupik with “Okay with me” or “No kidding.” One of the men poured a dipper of cold water on the hot rocks and sent a vaporous wave of heat through the room that seared my throat and nostrils. The heat, one of the fishermen explained, was nothing compared to the inferno of the underground qasgig, the traditional Yupik steam bath. But I didn’t mind the scalding; it was the first time in a week that I hadn’t felt cold and alone.

So to answer the question: I was building a sauna to duplicate what I’d found long ago in Pitkas Point – warmth and fellowship.