A Feature for The Media Glen / Synexmedia.com

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Part One: In Which We Learn That Canadians Will Do Absolutely Anything in February

The road out of Whitehorse is called Takhini Hot Springs Road. You take it north, past the airport. Past the turnoff for Carcross. The pavement is a thin grey line under a sky that in February looks like hammered tin. Black spruce on both sides, loaded with snow, bent forward into the road the way old men bend forward when they walk. Twenty-eight kilometres out from downtown. Twenty minutes if the plows have been through. Forty if they haven't.

At the end of the road there's a hot springs. For forty-nine years it was called Takhini Hot Pools. Concrete pool, a changing room, a gift shop that sold postcards nobody mailed. Local families came out on Saturdays. Tourists drifted in off the Alaska Highway, sunburned and confused after a week of midnight sun. In September 2020 the place closed. Fifty-year-old pipes were freezing inside the walls. The concrete was leaking at both ends. It had been falling apart in slow motion for most of the decade and by that summer it was past saving.

What opened on the same ground in 2022 is called Eclipse Nordic Hot Springs. Seven and a half million dollars in the rebuild. Japanese-Nordic circuit. Four soaking baths, plus saunas and steam rooms and the kind of low-wood, high-glass design that costs money to look simple. Adults only. No postcards. The architecture, politely but firmly, says we are not your grandmother's hot pool anymore.

But the contest. Let me tell you about the contest.

Every winter, when the air outside the springs drops to minus twenty Celsius or colder, people climb into water the earth has been heating for nobody in particular at around forty-six degrees. They soak their hair until it's dripping. Then they hold still and let thermodynamics do its thing. Within about fifteen minutes, if the air is cold enough, their hair is a rigid white sculpture. This has been an organized competition since 2011.

I heard about it for the first time from a woman named Barb Chickené, who was eating hash browns in a diner on Main Street and looking at me like I needed translating.

"You’ve got to understand something," she said. She pointed her fork. "You tell people down south that grown adults voluntarily sit in hot water in the freezing cold and wait for their hair to turn into ice sculptures."

"Right."

"They won’t believe you."

"I believe me."

"That’s because you’ve seen it." She thought about that for a second. "How much are the prizes these days?"

"Two thousand dollars Canadian. Per category. Five categories on the Guinness roster. Six when Air North sponsors the facial hair prize."

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Part Two: Origin Stories Are Never as Clean as You'd Like

The International Hair Freezing Contest is the official name. The name earned every syllable. It started in February 2011. No launch campaign. No branded hashtag. TikTok didn't exist yet and nobody was mourning its absence. It started the way these things usually start in this country. Somebody looked at something strange that was already happening and said, essentially, well, why don't we make a thing of it?

What was already happening: every February, the Yukon Sourdough Rendezvous took over Whitehorse. Flour-packing races. Beard-growing competitions. The kind of festival where the stories that come out of winning are bigger than the prizes. After the events, the athletes and the spectators would drive out to the hot pools to soak. The outside air was routinely thirty below. The water was forty above. Steam came off the pools in visible walls, settled on wet hair, and froze on contact. Mohawks happened by accident. Horns. One year a woman claimed she'd produced, without trying, a functional crown.

The manager of the pools at the time decided to make it a competition. His name hasn't survived in any of the published accounts. People who remember him remember mainly that he wasn't hairy. First prize was a hundred dollars Canadian. Ten to fifteen people entered.

My friend Hector Drummond heard me tell this at a Tim Hortons in Whitehorse with a double-double in front of him and a resigned expression on his face.

"Fifteen people."

"For a hundred bucks."

For three years the contest stayed small. A paragraph in the Whitehorse Star. A chuckle at the IGA. Then new operators took over the pools in the mid-2010s. They'd looked at Scandinave-style spas down south and Japanese onsens overseas, and they had ideas. They decided a Yukon hot springs could be more than a concrete rectangle with a changing room. The contest began to get weird on purpose.

Sponsors showed up slowly at first. Then faster. The prize money went up. The entries went up. Nobody running the contest seemed to know how it was going to get any bigger. Nobody was complaining.

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Part Three: The Year the Internet Found Out

2015. Obama was still president. The Blue Jays were about to play a playoff series for the first time in twenty-two years. And in Whitehorse, three friends climbed into the pool at Takhini, let the steam do its work, and ended up on Facebook. Two were Yukoners. Miléna Georgeault and Maxime Gouyou Beauchamps. The third, Fanny Caritte, was visiting from France. Their hair froze into something you could, with some generosity, call a collaboration between Medusa and a wedding cake.

The staff photographer took the shot. It was uploaded. Within a day the photograph had been shared more than four hundred times. By morning the pools' inbox had emails from Germany and the UK and a short, puzzled note from somebody claiming to work for the Smithsonian.

Lise Frobisher works in Whitehorse tourism. She's been watching the thing spread since before it spread. I found her at a coffee shop on Second Avenue. She was on the phone when I sat down. I could hear the person on the other end through the earpiece. She was explaining, for what sounded like the fourth time that morning, that Whitehorse is not in fact near Yellowknife.

She hung up. She looked at me. "One Tuesday morning," she said, "everybody woke up and there were emails from Germany. Germany. And the BBC. And Ashton Kutcher’s office."

"Ashton Kutcher."

"His office. Apparently that’s a distinction."

The numbers walked up from there. Twenty entries in 2015. Thirty-five by 2017. Fifty by 2018–19. Prize money moved in step. A hundred and fifty for first place the year the viral photo hit. Seven hundred and fifty a couple of years later. Two thousand by the 2019–20 season. That was the supernova year.

Sponsors walked in the door. Tim Hortons took on Most Creative. Nongshim, the Korean instant noodle company, backed People's Choice. Air North, the Yukon's airline, eventually put its name on a separate prize for Best Frozen Facial Hair and pushed the category count to six. The managers had stumbled into the thing marketing departments would sell a kidney to bottle. When there's real money on the table, people try harder. Hair sculpted with intention starts showing up.

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Part Four: The Mechanics of Frozen Hair

How does it work. I'm glad you asked because the answer is both simple and a little unsettling.

The water at Takhini surfaces from the ground between forty-six and forty-seven degrees Celsius. That's almost poaching temperature. By the time it fills the soaking baths it's cooled to the low forties. It's mineral-rich. Calcium, magnesium, iron. No smell. The water has a distinctive reddish-brown cast that newcomers find alarming and regulars find reassuring, like well-steeped tea in a mug you know.

Sit in water like that while the air above it is minus thirty. The steam rises off the surface in volumes you would not believe unless you'd seen it. If your hair is soaked through, that steam condenses on every strand and freezes on contact. It doesn't freeze solid the way water in a pipe freezes solid. It forms a thin shell of ice on the outside of the hair. The shell is rigid enough to hold a shape. You can sculpt it while it sets. That's the trick. That's the whole game.

Murray Chickadee is a retired schoolteacher out of Watson Lake. He drove four hours north to enter the 2019 contest. He says he'll do it again. I found him in the parking lot of the hot springs, sitting in an idling truck with the heater pushed all the way up, scrolling contest photos on a phone with a spiderweb of cracks across the screen.

"It’s like watching a time-lapse of a coral reef," he said. He didn’t look up. "Except the coral reef is on your head and you’re in your bathing suit and it’s minus thirty-seven."

"Did you win?" I asked.

"Fourth. Most Creative." He scrolled a bit further. "The drive home was the best part. My wife couldn’t stop laughing. Four hours of her laughing."

The process, for those taking notes: pay your admission. Sixty dollars Canadian on regular days, fifty-five on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Get in the pool. Soak your hair all the way through. Hold still. Keep your ears in the water. This last rule is non-negotiable. Contestants are emphatic about it, because if you let your ears come up and freeze you will discover in about ninety seconds that ears do not want to be frozen. Rearrange your hair as the frost gathers.

When you're done, ring a bell at the pool's edge. A staff member comes out with a camera. Only official photographs qualify. You sign a release at the front desk. You upload one image. You wait.

Winners are picked by Eclipse staff. People's Choice goes to public vote. Disqualifications apply for props (beer cans are specifically named in the rules, which tells you something about the contestant demographic), for digital manipulation, and for anything the staff considers unsafe.

Barb turned up at the hot springs because Barb turns up everywhere in the Yukon. That's how the place works. She watched the scene from the edge of the pool with the attention she usually reserved for butter tarts.

"What kind of safety violations could there be?" she said.

"I don’t know, Barb. Maybe somebody tried to freeze a raccoon into their updo. It’s the Yukon. I wouldn’t rule anything out."

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Part Five: 288 Frozen Heads and a World Record

The 2019–20 season produced something nobody had forecast. Not the organisers. Not the sponsors. Not the long-gone, reputedly hairless manager who started the thing in 2011.

Two hundred and eighty-eight people.

Say the number again. Two hundred and eighty-eight people climbed into a hot spring in the Yukon, soaked their hair, sat perfectly still while ice built on their skulls, rang a bell, got their photographs taken, signed waivers, and submitted entries to a competition run by the staff of a rural hot springs outside a territorial capital of twenty-eight thousand people at latitude sixty north.

Guinness noticed. The record has an official title: "Largest Frozen Hair Competition." It has a date, April 1, 2020, which is either a cosmic joke or perfect timing depending on your mood. It has an ID: 15-688973. Five category winners took two thousand dollars each and free soaks. The record ran in the Guinness World Records 2023 edition. Best Frozen Facial Hair joined the roster later, when Air North signed on.

Seventy per cent of those 288 contestants were locals. The other thirty came from Australia, Taiwan, France, Germany, the United States, and a scattering of other places that had seen the contest on CNN or the BBC or the Smithsonian. The management, asked to characterise the coverage, calls it “hundreds of news and weather channels, newspapers, hair magazines, books about competitions, and thousands of online articles.” They say it with the quiet satisfaction of people who know they built this.

Hector, who had driven up from Dawson Creek for reasons he wouldn't explain, was sitting across from me at the Klondike Rib and Salmon when I told him this.

"Hair magazines."

"Hair magazines."

"There are hair magazines."

"Of course there are hair magazines, Hector. There are magazines for everything. There’s probably a magazine for people who collect dryer lint that looks like provincial premiers."

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Part Six: The Thing About Climate Change

Here the story turns, because stories about winter things in a warming world tend to.

The contest requires cold. Not chilly. Not brisk. Not "a bit nippy" the way your aunt from Moncton will describe minus five. It needs air at minus twenty Celsius or below. Skim-milk cold. The kind that sticks your nostrils together when you inhale and turns your breath into architectural volume you can walk around in.

The Yukon, it turns out, is not as cold as it used to be.

The 2023–24 season was cancelled. The temperature never sat where it needed to sit. A spokesperson told reporters that some photos got taken but not enough to run a contest. She said she believed climate change was a factor.

Dot Carruthers has lived in Whitehorse for thirty-one years. She runs a bookshop on Main Street that moves more toques than novels between November and March. She’s entered the hair freezing contest five times. When I asked her about the cancelled year, she put down the stack of paperbacks she’d been sorting and looked at me the way you look at somebody who’s just told you your dog is sick.

"The one thing up here you could count on," she said. "The cold. The stupid endless cold. Is the one thing we might actually lose. Nobody moves to Whitehorse for the weather. But the weather is ours."

She shook her head. "Now some fellow in a lab coat is telling me it might not be cold enough to freeze my hair in February. In the Yukon. That doesn’t hit like a joke. That sits."

Yukon University ran a report noting regional temperatures could go up between 0.7 and 3.7 degrees over the next fifty years. For a contest that runs on a narrow margin of extreme cold, those decimals are not abstract.

The 2025–26 season is active. Early 2026 brought snaps down to minus forty, which is ideal, and entries have been coming in steadily. Current sponsors include Air North, Chieftain Energy, Hyatt Place Whitehorse, and Yukon Beer. The contest isn’t dead. It’s just aware of itself in a way it wasn’t before.

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Part Seven: Nobody Has Ever Been Hurt

Across more than a decade of operation, thousands of individual entries, nine completed seasons, and gaps for renovation and pandemic and weak winters, the International Hair Freezing Contest has produced zero injuries. Not one. No frostbite. No hair damage. No hypothermia. Not even, as far as anybody has told me, a mildly uncomfortable ear.

The physics are gentle. The hair doesn’t freeze solid. A frost shell forms on the outside. The contestant is in forty-degree water from the neck down, which is warmer than most bathtubs. Dip your head under for a second and the ice goes back into the water it came from.

Murray Chickadee showed up at the diner again. Same diner. Whitehorse doesn’t have many. Fresh crack on his phone screen. He’d just got off the phone with his mother in Halifax.

"She keeps saying I’m going to catch my death. I said Mum, I’m sitting in forty-degree water. The only thing I’m going to catch is a weird haircut."

"What did she say to that."

"She said my father never would have done anything so foolish. Which is true. Dad was bald as a cue ball. The man couldn’t have entered this contest with a wig and a prayer."

Safety protocols exist but they aren’t complicated. Waivers. Staff supervision. No dangerous props. Keep your ears under. The real risk isn’t to the contestants.

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Part Eight: On Being Canadian in February

I’ve been thinking about why this story goes anywhere. Why a contest where people freeze their hair at a hot springs in the Yukon ends up in CNN and the Washington Post and the BBC and the Smithsonian and Fox News and Atlas Obscura and, yes, Hector, hair magazines.

It isn’t important the way wars and elections and interest rates are important. It’s important in the small way. The way that involves people choosing to be absurd together, in the open, because it’s February and the alternative is staring at the wall.

Colleen Trapper has entered the contest every year it’s been running since she moved to Whitehorse in 2016. She’s a veterinary technician with two dogs and a sourdough starter she talks to by name. I met her at the springs on a Tuesday. Fifty-five-dollar admission. She was wetting her hair methodically, studying the steam the way a sculptor studies a block of marble before making a decision.

"You want to know why I do it," she said, before I’d asked. People in the Yukon do that. They’ll tell you the important things before you’ve figured out the question. "I do it because every February I think about dying. Not in a dramatic way. In the northern way. The way you think about it when there’s four hours of daylight and the car won’t start and the news is bad and the road is worse. And then somebody says, come sit in a hot pool and freeze your hair into the shape of a rooster’s comb, and you think… yeah. Yeah, okay."

She worked her hair upward with both hands. The frost was coming in on the tips.

"Last year I did a unicorn horn. Straight up, about eight inches. My daughter said I looked like a narwhal."

"Is that a compliment."

"In this family, yeah."

The bell by the pool rings twelve, fifteen, twenty times on a good Saturday. People come out with ice on their heads and laugh at each other in the snow.

I ran into Barb one more time. She was in the parking lot at Eclipse with her coat zipped to her chin and her car idling. The steam was coming up off the pools in slow white columns.

"One more question," she said. "If I walked in there right now. Paid my sixty bucks. How long would it take?"

"About fifteen minutes. At minus thirty."

She looked at the thermometer by the entrance. It read minus thirty-two.

"You know what."

"What."

"I think I’m going to do it. I’ve never been to the Yukon before this week. I’ve never won two thousand dollars. I’ve never had my hair compared to a narwhal. Seems like as good a time as any."

She walked toward the door. The steam folded around her. She was gone before she got to the second set of doors, and I sat in the car for a while with the engine running.

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FACT BOX: THE INTERNATIONAL HAIR FREEZING CONTEST

• Founded: February 2011 at Takhini Hot Pools, during the Yukon Sourdough Rendezvous winter festival. New operators took over in the mid-2010s and scaled the contest into an international event.

• Location: Eclipse Nordic Hot Springs (formerly Takhini Hot Pools), KM 10 Takhini Hot Springs Road, about 28 km from downtown Whitehorse, Yukon.

• Water temperature: 40–43°C in the pools (the water surfaces at 46–47°C). Mineral-rich with calcium, magnesium, and iron. Reddish-brown cast.

• Air temperature required: −20°C or colder.

• Guinness World Record: “Largest Frozen Hair Competition.” 288 participants. Effective date April 1, 2020. Record ID 15-688973. Five category winners recognised at the time. Published in the Guinness World Records 2023 edition.

• Current prizes: C$2,000 per category. Five original categories (Best Male, Best Female, Best Group, Most Creative, People’s Choice). Best Frozen Facial Hair added later as a sixth, sponsored by Air North. Historical prizes ran from roughly C$100 (2011) to C$750 for first place (2017).

• Admission: C$60. C$55 on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. No separate contest entry fee.

• How to enter: Visit Eclipse Nordic Hot Springs on a qualifying cold day (December–March, when the air is −20°C or below). Soak and freeze your hair. Ring the poolside bell for an official staff photograph. Sign a waiver and submit through the web form at hairfreezingcontest.com.

• Safety record: Zero injuries reported across more than a decade of operation. The hair acquires a superficial frost shell. Submerging in the warm water thaws it on contact.

• Current status: The 2025–26 season is active. The contest was suspended 2020–22 (renovation and COVID-19) and cancelled in 2023–24 because of insufficient cold, which a spokesperson attributed in part to climate change.

• Viral breakthrough: 2015, when a winning group photo spread internationally. Coverage has since run in CNN, BBC, Smithsonian Magazine, the Washington Post, Atlas Obscura, Fox News, and hundreds of other outlets.

• Key sponsors (2025–26): Air North, Chieftain Energy, Hyatt Place Whitehorse, and Yukon Beer.

• Official websites: hairfreezingcontest.com / eclipsenordichotsprings.ca