Snow Angel Hill is a small, family-owned sauna in Parkland County, Alberta. Steeped in a long history of sauna enjoyment, this sauna is a culmination of generations of an explorer mentality, a love of Alberta nature, and a willingness to embrace rather than shelter from the cold.

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Garth Ford built cedar canoes during the eighties and nineties, and used them to explore Alberta rivers with his family. These rivers include the Athabasca, North Saskatchewan, Little Smoky, and Berland.

 

One of these canoes has been repurposed as a bookshelf in the relaxation room. His love of the canoe and of rivers has been passed on to the next generation. John's mother and father remember using tarpaulins create small riverside saunas with open fires and hot river rocks. After a long day on the river, it was a perfect way to unwind, mixing sweat and cold water before tucking into warm sleeping bags.

 

After much research during the early 80s, ‘taking every book on saunas out of the local library’, Jack decided to build his own sauna in a small wartime house in Stony Plain. With a cement cistern in the basement, he improvised by jackhammering a hole through the corner, lining the cistern with insulation, and using cedar to create a 4-person wood-fired sauna. The defunct water-tank was repurposed as a small family and friends’ sauna. Eyebrows were raised by neighbors as conservative small-town norms were broken by snow-rolling sauna lovers connecting with cold-winter days.

 

When the family moved to an acreage further west, another sauna was always on the cards. In similar fashion, he used basement floor space to create a slightly larger 6-person cedar sauna, installing a long chimney that imposed itself out of the steep east side the house. We grew up with this sauna, which has had very little updating since its original installation in 1994. The Co-op stove from the Stony Plain house made the trip and has had several glass and metal sheet replacements as over enthusiastic sauna goers were not sufficiently careful during the heating process.

 

For the last two decades, we have seen family, friends, parties, and bonding take place within the small wooder walls. We have also explored nearly every type of cold experience as a pairing to the sauna’s relentless heat: running in, sledding over, rolling in, and building with snow; constructing several iterations of the ice-dips, and famously making snow-angels on the south hill overlooking Albertan poplar forests and farmer’s fields.

 

There has always been an element of escalation present in our sauna, a fearlessness with which we co-exist with the harsh northern climate. Snow Angel Hill was born out of many casual saunas that escalated to rolls in the snow, jumping into freezing water, and most importantly, connecting to the nature that surrounds us.