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Winter Wonderland

By Kathryn Hoffman

Builders make a wall of ice for Canada's new Ice Hotel.

People are paying as much as $186 a night to sleep in the snow! On New Year's Day, North America's first Ice Hotel opened its doors to 19 brave-and bundled-guests. "It's like going back to nature," said Jean-Cristophe Jourde, one of the hotel's first visitors. The gung-ho group slept on beds of ice, nestled under fur blankets and in sleeping bags made for very cold temperatures.

Modeled after an ice hotel in Sweden, this hotel in Quebec, Canada, is made of 250 tons of ice and nearly 5,000 tons of snow. It has a movie theater, two art galleries and ice chandeliers hanging from the ceilings! The building has electricity and running water for the fully equipped heated bathrooms. (The toilets are not made of ice!) Workers built the hotel in about four weeks. Now local artists are helping with the final touches-carving sculptures and furniture out of ice blocks.

Say freeze! The Jourde family, right, and relatives pose for a picture on ice chairs.

"My first reaction was to touch everything," says Hélène Barbeau, who works for the hotel. "It almost doesn't seem real." There is even a fireplace made of ice at the main entrance. Do guests sit there to warm themselves? "You have to bring your imagination," Barbeau says. Or a very warm coat: it's about 26°F inside the building. Outside, it's usually around -3°F.

Still, the coldest hotel in North America is a hot place to stay this winter. It's booked almost through March. But that's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to customers. The 10-year-old Swedish hotel has about 30,000 visitors a year and is fully booked for the next few years.

Both ice hotels do all their business in the winter and must be rebuilt, block by block, every year. People looking for a room after March won't find much more than a big puddle.

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