Think moon landing, Woodstock, and the best days of Bryan Adams’ life.
For cottager Henry Holmsten, born in Turku, Finland, it was equally a time of great upheaval, with some fate woven in. “I came to Sault Ste. Marie as a four-year-old,” he says. “My family immigrated to Canada in the summer of 1969—the same year that the camp on Wart Lake was built, ironically.”
Fittingly would be the other way to put it. While it would be years before Henry and his wife, Rebecca, would set eyes on their cottage-to-be, how more appropriate could it have been? It was constructed by another Finn, out of logs, the same material Henry’s father specialized in as a builder, and, better yet, it already had a sauna. “It was 50 years old and buried in the mud, but I saved it,” says Henry of the outbuilding. “I picked the whole thing up with 50-ton jacks, poured new pads, and replaced all the rotted logs. It was the first thing I did.”
As Henry speaks, we have yet to reach Wart Lake, an illnamed beauty in the Algoma hills north of the Sault, and I have been struggling to take notes. We’re on the Mile 38 Road, named for its proximity to a railway milepost, although it doesn’t feel accidental that this number is also applied to the bore of a gun barrel. Every few metres, we’re jounced by a rock or a rut, and my pen leaps away from the page or leaves an illegible scrawl. We pass a sign saying “Yield to Logging Equipment” but don’t encounter any traffic at all during the hour-and-a-half ride (crawl/bounce) in from the highway. Eventually, we reach a speck on the map called Summit—a former whistle stop near the highest elevation on the Algoma Central Railway—and Henry stops to talk on his CB radio. “Finnegan Lodge, you got a copy?” he says. He repeats the phrase. “Usually,” he says, “I pick her up here.”
In the moment, I’m picturing an Irish resort and a mysterious woman requiring a lift, but it soon becomes clear that Henry is trying to contact his wife, who is awaiting us in the cottage, the name of which is actually “Finn-Again.” “The original owner was a Finnish trapper named Alvin Maki, but we didn’t want to just call it the Maki camp, so went with a play on words,” he says. We keep driving, as the road thins and climbs, and he tries Becky again on the CB. “Finn-Again here,” she replies.
There are only 15 occupied cottages on the sprawling lake, which allows for plenty of privacy and independence, but the Holmstens also use two-way radio to communicate with their neighbours. One channel even works like a phone, except that only one person can talk at a time so you have to say “Over,” like a trucker or soldier.
After parking at the cottage of friends Terry and Alison Miskimin (the only camp on Wart you can actually drive right up to) and slithering through a narrows in Henry’s 14-foot tinny, we finally reach Finn-Again, which has the blue cross of his native country flapping from a pole on its dock. The cottage name is hydro-cut (Henry’s term, alluding to some kind of high-tech way to etch letters in metal) into a long, two-handled saw blade, of the kind once used to manually buck up logs, mounted above its porch.
Henry is a builder of high-end custom homes in the Ottawa area, although he got his start swinging axes and hammers for the log and timber-frame abodes his dad built around the Sault. Broad-shouldered and six feet, two inches tall, you can easily picture him rolling up his sleeves—when given the chance. “These days, I’m lucky if I can put the tools on 10 per cent of the time, because I’m too busy dealing with architects and engineers and clients,” he says. “Up here, I cannot put the tools down.” Alison and Terry have dubbed him Piss and Vinegar, for his habit of showing up at their door at a painfully early hour, raring to go on some project. His typical attire at the cottage is a set of coveralls with a carpenter’s pencil jutting out of one pocket, although his go-to footwear seems to be a pair of Crocs. Becky on this day is sporting a hoodie with “Spruce-Quintet Campers Association” on its chest and nine member lakes on its back, Wart Lake included.
Both Henry and Becky are now 60 but each seems younger—limber, smooth-skinned. The pair met in high school and wed while still in their teens. Their first marital home? The sauna outside Henry’s parents’ house on Nettleton Lake in the Sault. “It was the guest room portion of it where we lived,” says Henry. Still, they spent their first two married years in a structure built for steam and availed themselves of that opportunity daily, or near-daily. As they do to this day— both at their Dunrobin, Ont., home, where they built a sauna in the backyard that replicates the one at Nettleton Lake, and here at the cottage, where it is an even more tempting option, given they lack plumbing and can leap into Wart to complete a cleanse. “We like to go sauna out here more because of the lake,” says Becky.
“Go sauna,” I’m learning, is how many Finnish-Canadians—and many non-Finns, like Becky, who have become hip to the language— describe a trip to the steam box. Also, you need to pronounce the place correctly. “It’s sow-na, not saw-na,” says Henry. The couple sees many health benefits in the practice—less joint pain, improved circulation, great sleeps!—but for them, especially Henry, it’s a custom that verges on a religion. “There’s a saying that is difficult to translate, but the way my grandfather told it to me is ‘When the dark angels sing, the day’s sorrows are forgotten,’ ” he says. The angels in this case, of course, being the rocks, and that sharp but soothing hiss they make when splashed with water. “The internet is inundated these days with stuff about how it’s good to get your core temperature up and all that, but for me it’s about the culture of it. In Finland, we say that you build the sauna first, then you build your house and family around it.”
That might not always happen in practice, but when Henry’s family moved into a rented house in Sault Ste. Marie in 1969, the first thing his father built was a cedar log sauna in the backyard. The first house Henry and Becky inhabited in Ottawa was framed before the sauna took shape, but the latter was the first thing they made operational—ahead of the kitchen. In cottage country, it’s probably more common. “I know lots of people who will get a property and build the sauna first, then the main camp after,” says Henry.
While some might rush to get a sauna in place, enjoying one requires preparation and patience. I follow Henry as he clomps down a wooden walkway, in his coveralls-Crocs combo, to get things going for a steam bath we won’t enjoy for a couple more hours. He’s already split up kindling—“I make a bucket for the day in my woodshed”—which he now arranges in a firebox he designed himself, tenting it over some curls of birchbark. “This was my job as a kid, when my grandfather visited from Finland,” he says. “It’s what slows me down when I’m up here. And I refuse to start it with paper.” Each time he goes for a hike in the bush with Becky, she brings along a basket for the natural fire-starter he harvests from the forest floor. “The amazing thing about birchbark is it will light a fire even if it’s wet.”
Blaze begun, we return to the cottage, which I enviously notice has two can-crushers on an exterior wall—one for regular, one for tall boys—and its own fire going inside, in a Savoy woodstove that originally belonged to Henry’s parents. It’s a chilly evening, just 11°C, with drizzle to boot, so the sauna is feeling more and more tempting, even to a claustrophobe like me. Night has come on by the time the three of us finally get in there, and I’m slightly anxious at f irst, especially when Henry tells me to breathe through my mouth. What will happen to my nose? I wonder. Permanent sinus damage? I pinch my nostrils, but Henry says that’s not really necessary— it’s just easier to control your breathing this way, and if you only breathed through your nose, that could cause some burning. Finally, I relax, as he tosses water onto blue rocks harvested from Lake Superior, whose cobble beaches afford a density and smoothness of igneous stone that are ideal for sauna usage. Henry, who until now has been providing nearly non-stop narration, becomes pensive. Becky is still chipper but more chilled, if that’s the right word when the temperature is 80°C.
The languor breaks when Henry tells me to stand up and reaches for a bundle of leafy birch branches called, in Finnish, a vihtä. My host played linebacker in high school; for his basketball team, he has shared, he swung his elbows in the paint. I know he’s pretty good at swinging an axe from the stacks of kindling he has amassed. “It really gets the blood flowing in the skin,” he tells me now, brandishing what looks, to me, through the mist, kind of like a club. “I believe there’s huge health benefits to this. I don’t pretend to understand the science behind it, all I know is it feels frickin’ great.” My reaction is more of a recoil, particularly when I get the vihtä to the gut (a whack on both back and midriff is recommended), but I admit it does feel oddly invigorating.
So does our plunge in the lake. Pores cleared, sweat pouring off our brows, we pad to the end of the dock. Henry dives in. Becky flops from the ladder. I opt for a feet-first jump, plugging my ears to avoid water entrapment—and get water up my nose. The temperature is 15°C. It feels frickin’ great.
This part of Wart Lake is spring-fed and clear, dominated by a high cliff where A.Y. Jackson set up his easel in 1920. At that time, Wart didn’t have such an unflattering name, as the title of Jackson’s painting proves: October Morning, Algoma (Wartz Lake). The “z” seemingly got dropped around the time of the Second World War, either as a cartographic oversight or because it sounded too Germanic, depending on which local historian you ask. Whatever the case, I find it interesting that both “war” and “art” are contained in the surviving name; it’s basically a portmanteau. It’s definitely a site worthy of capturing in oils, or watercolours, or name your medium. As for conflict, you won’t find much among its current residents.
The Holmstens and Miskimins are particularly tight. They even have a separate walkie-talkie system between their two camps. Henry has known Terry since they were kids and introduced him to the sauna lifestyle while they were still in grade school. Years later, Terry started coming to Wart at the invite of his father-in-law, who was a member of a male-only hunting clique that owned a camp, Last Chance Lodge. “Probably,” says Alison, “because it was their last chance to escape their wives.” The place is now owned by Terry and Alison and retains some of the original hunt-camp character, in particular a row of beds that looks like you might find seven dwarfs in them. But it’s changed too. Women are now welcome; it smells better; there’s a garden that yields vegetables.
Henry and Becky visited their friends at Wart in 2017 and were so taken with the setting that they immediately started looking for an opportunity for themselves. A year later, they learned the Maki camp might be available and made a pitch for it, even though Al, who was 83 at the time, “had a hard time letting go of it,” says Becky. It helped that Henry spoke to him in Finnish, and that the Holmstens were willing to give Al and his wife some extra time to say goodbye. “Even though we took possession in August, we let them stay until October,” says Becky.
The morning after my first sauna at Wart Lake, we boat over from FinnAgain to Last Chance, where I get a second chance to steep in steam, although, as in the first instance, it’s not an immediate fix. First we hang out in the feminized den of sportsmen, chatting and eating, then tour the garden, where pole beans are climbing on a trellis, then we chat some more, and think about possibly playing a board game. Terry talks about a chore he needs to get going on and decides to put it off until first thing the following morning. Alison seconds the decision. “Then we’ll have coffee, read a book, play cards, and get drunk.”
The cottagers come up at least once a winter, riding in on snowmobiles, and, of course, firing up their saunas. While Terry and Alison feel it’s enough to let the frosty air cool them after, the Holmstens go a step further. They will either jump in the snow or go right in the lake, through a square hole they cut in its surface. “You can use a chainsaw but that ends up spitting oil into the water, so I have an ice saw I got that was made in Finland,” says Henry. “You auger the four corners, then cut it out with the saw.” The polar plunge requires some cojones, even for these hardened bathers. “Knowing there’s a warm room to run into again kind of helps,” says Becky.
It also helps that the sauna at Last Chance Lodge is state-of-the-art (“bougie for the middle of the bush,” as Alison describes it) and insanely solid, built from giant Ottawa pines that were felled in a 2018 tornado. Henry acquired the wood and designed the structure, while the Miskimins’ son, Mathew, spent hours with a drawknife. The new square-log sauna replaced one that had survived for threedozen years at the former hunt camp. It had been serviceable in its day, and the cement pad Alison’s dad poured for it in 1983 was still firm enough to support the new version, but it was definitely time for an upgrade. It was stick-framed, with mice living in the pink insulation, and stunk from the sweat of hunters. “Henry said the building didn’t breathe right, and he could smell mould immediately,” says Alison. “We were still using it, but it had lived its day.”
On this day at Last Chance, the women sauna first. We watch through the windows as they jump into the still-chilly lake, hear their muffled yelps. Then we saunter down, strip down, and step into the vapour. Terry recalls going to a cottage on Batchawana Bay, Ont., in high school, when he first started dating Alison, and tossing vodka on the rocks. (He’d hoped you could get a buzz through your pores.) “Stupid teenage stuff,” he says. These days, both he and the other Wart Lakers are more inclined to scent the air with spruce, pine, and berry oils. They will also sometimes heat up a foil-wrapped sausage on the stones and eat it with a dash of Finnish mustard.
It’s about 80°C when we step in, and it heats up to 85°C before we dash to the lake. It’s not the hottest these cottagers have experienced, but it’s also not necessary for them to push it. The main thing is to connect with each other, unplug from devices (even if you wanted to bring one with you, good luck), and commune in a cozy space. One that also just happens to get you clean, keep you supple, and work wonders on bug bites. “Takes the itch right out,” says Terry. Adds Henry: “Your pores open so much, everything just ejects.” (Bad news, it won’t help much with a sunburn.)
These two guys have been friends for more than half-a-century, and the sauna has been part of their connection since they met. They echo each other’s words, or don’t feel the need to speak at all. “Sometimes when you sauna with friends, you can solve all the world’s problems,” says Henry. “Other times, you sit stone silent.”
The cottager is happy to introduce others to the tradition; for him it goes well beyond a spa-type luxury. He likes showing off the two saunas at Wart Lake that, each in their own way, are examples of recycling and rebirth. “One resurrected from a muddy grave, one saved from the tornado logs,” he says. Each provides a great sweat but, more important, these are places to bond and heal. “No matter how bad things can get, there’s a place amongst friends and going sauna that releases pressure in life,” says Henry. “It maintains a sense of balance, friendship, and community like no other.”
Jim Moodie wrote his first piece for CL in the summer of ’99. He has a camp on Panache Lake, Ont., which counts a high population of Finns.
This story originally appeared in our Early Spring ’26 issue.
5 tips for authentic sow-na
Kawarthas cottager Alan Jalasjaa was introduced to the tradition of sauna at the age of six months, when he was placed in a “plastic, baby-blue basin that sat on the low bench with some water,” he says. While he doesn’t remember that baptism, the host of the sauna podcast “Kivia” says it’s not uncommon for Finnish families to bring babies and toddlers into the steam room, as long as it’s not too hot or for too long. “That’s where you start the indoctrination, not just to the heat, but the whole social aspect, which is the bigger part of sauna,” says Jalasjaa.
1. All good with the wood
There’s a reason you build a sauna with wood. “If it’s made out of tile or metal, it’s going to be too hot,” says Jalasjaa. Cedar is popular for its fragrance and tolerance to moisture, but other softwoods, such as pine and spruce, are common and cost less. Hemlock won’t give off as much aroma, but it rivals cedar for durability and warp-resistance. Alder and aspen can make good bench material since they don’t conduct much heat. Further to that point, bare wood is the way to go; as cottager Henry Holmsten points out, “you’ll burn your ass on a varnished bench.”
2. Bring the heat
The traditional heat source is a woodstove, and many will say the experience it provides is unrivaled, even if it requires some effort and time to reach temperature. The simpler options are electric or gas-fuelled stoves, although the latter is still not widely used, says Jalasjaa. “Wood is more authentic, but electric has been around for 80 years and it’s a close second,” he says. “It offers convenience; you just set the temperature and walk away, and it heats up quicker.”
3. Rock and a hot place
The stones—or kivia, in Finnish—are key. “If it’s an electric heater without rocks, you’ll feel like you’re in a toaster oven,” says Jalasjaa. The rocks should be “the size of a loosely closed fist.” Without rocks, he says, “you won’t get the steam.” The Finnish word for this is löyly, pronounced “low-loo.” “There’s a lot of misinformation, especially when you go to a gym, that you can’t put water on the rocks, and nothing can be further from the truth,” he says. “A Finnish sauna is not a Finnish sauna without löyly.”
4. Give yourself a good rinse
It’s equally important to have a lake or a river—or a shower, if you lack either of those—to cool down, in order to “complete a thermal cycle,” says Jalasjaa. “So you’re heating up, cooling off, then resting. The heat is only one portion of it.”
5. Design for relaxation
As for sauna design and construction, there are many options, including prefab and barrel versions. Jalasjaa isn’t a huge fan of barrels, as their relatively cramped quarters mean you can’t tier benches and your feet are apt to get cold in winter, but they are more affordable; you can get one for about $5,000. A proper room will cost at least $12,000, and if it’s custom-built, with an antechamber for changing and relaxing, it could climb as high as $30,000 or more. Jalasjaa says more important than size or architecture is the communal enjoyment of the space. “Even an ugly, old-looking sauna can be a good sauna experience.”
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