Better Than the Spa: Why I Dive Into Iqaluit’s Icy Waters

We didn’t realize until afterwards, but the thin layer of ice on top of the water was razor sharp. After we came out of the water, slapping and rubbing our cold arms and legs back to life, we saw little droplets of blood at our ankles and knees. I bled the most because I was the first into the water and had broken the ice. We looked at each other and grinned: lesson learned. Next time, we will bring a hockey stick to smash any ice before we go in, and wear long sleeves and leggings.

Over the summer of 2025, I took time for myself to swim at high tide at Apex beach in Iqaluit. I enjoyed the quiet and brisk moments so much that I decided to continue into the fall. Then I decided that it would be wonderful to share the experience of the cold water with others and to see how long we could go into the colder weather. I put a call out to friends, and now, I’ve found myself amongst a group of women in Iqaluit who like to plunge into the cold ocean water.

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I am Greenlandic on my mother’s side and English on my father’s side; in Greenland, like in Scandinavia and Great Britain, cold-plunging is a common activity. I have always enjoyed it. When I was a child, I made a point of swimming in the river by our cabin on the May long weekend, whether there was still ice along the shore or not. One summer as a teen, I did not use hot water nor shampoo for the entire school break. My skin and hair were luxurious.

A couple of summers ago, my cousin and I hiked over one of the mountains next to Nuuk and got completely consumed by blackflies. We spent the entire hike flapping at the infestations in the air around us, our brows furrowed so much that we started getting headachy. At the bottom of the mountain, we pulled off all our clothes and lowered our itchy bodies into the water and, within seconds, found complete relief. The cold, salty water sucked all the nasty from our bites and dissipated our headaches.

Our family are lifetime sauna enthusiasts. You loll about in a ninety-degree wooden room, gossip with naked friends and family, scratch one another’s backs, and sweat. Once you feel that you have reached just the right temperature, you run outside and, depending on the season, you scream and cry and gasp as you roll around in the snow, or scream and cry and gasp as you pour buckets of dead-cold rainwater over your head. Then you sit in the open air, head spinning with exhilaration, skin steaming, and a halo of equanimity above you. While I will absolutely go to a spa in an urban, fig-leafed, and hushed environment and enjoy myself thoroughly (though I did once get thrown out of the lineup to enter a spa in Montreal for laughing too loud), nothing compares to the raw energy, the raucousness, and the ultimate calmness of hitting the cycles of thermal hot and cold in an environment of your own making. The pairing of these two temperature extremes brings relief in many ways—it helps reduce lactic acid buildup in your muscles after exertion, it helps you sleep well, it improves blood circulation, and it also helps you bring your being into the present moment.

Cold-plunging in Iqaluit this fall is a new journey in experiential learning for me, a much-needed type of healing, after many changes in my life. I’m learning a lot about my mind and body, my fellow plungers, the environment. The purposeful walk into cold water is different from a sauna or spa experience, because it takes courage to enter the water without the cushioning of coming from or returning to a warm environment. I’m learning a new sense of control and release, a new understanding of sitting in discomfort, and a new way to flood my system with self-generated warmth.

At Apex beach, where we go for dips, there are long delineations of kelp and seaweed at the various high tide marks throughout the month. Iqaluit has some of the highest tides in the world, so the variety of lines is numerous. There are many species of kelp and seaweed—qiqquaq in Inuktitut. Some are long flags, with hollow, crunchy stalks. Some are spindly, like little balls of salty, rubbery tumbleweed. Some—called equutikut (“bladder kelp”) in Kalaallisut—have variegated stems with blisters filled with clear, gooey liquid. On one of our plunges, we found a long frond full of holes. Was it from precipitation? Was it parasites? As it turns out, the kelp develops the holes itself so that it can maintain a more steadfast position in the water, letting the currents pass through it.

My fellow Iqaluit cold-plungers and I are creating both a system and a ritual around getting into the cold water, so that the practice remains safe and enjoyable. Each time we get in, we tweak what we need to do.

We started out going into the water barefoot, but now we wear thick socks or booties. We have added hats and full-length clothing and gloves. The added layers make it easier for the bottoms of our feet and protect our skin. We dip only when it isn’t windy or raining or snowing too hard. While the temperature of the water itself doesn’t vary too much, the experience of coming out of the water and getting dressed again is more bearable when the winds are calm.

We show up at the beach at high tide, which is a different time and a different height every day, according to the moon cycle. We spend a few moments taking deep breaths, absorbing the vista, and clearing our minds. One last check-in with each other and we go in. I lower myself into the water quickly, because I find that if I inch my way in, the anticipation is too painful, especially for my crotch and nipples. My lungs spasm and I gasp and sputter, but I calm myself and draw in a long, slow breath and swim a few strokes.

I dunked my head under the water earlier in the season, but as the weather cooled, I started getting brain freeze, so I no longer do that. My hands and feet quickly become numb and my heart thumps hard. I can feel the deep cold on my chest, like a bite. Only a few seconds pass and we wade out of the water. Everything tingles—it is a paradox of feeling fiery hot because of the extreme cold. After a half minute of stomping feeling back into our extremities, we wade back in for one more dip. At the end, we come back to our clothing and pull it all on with fingers that don’t quite bend and skin that doesn’t feel much.

The moments after the dip are what provide the deep sense of calm and resolve that sees me through many days. I can feel my body working hard to come back to homeostasis, blood returning to all my capillaries, dopamine and serotonin washing my brain. My eyes rest on the patterns of the water lapping on the shore and over to the line of where land meets water across the bay, and I sit with my friends and compare our experiences. A tin cup of hot tea shoots warmth to the bones of my hands. It’s joyful and serene.

For the most part, Inuit are coastal people. The ocean looms large on the vistas we gaze upon, on the resources we draw from, and in the depth of imagination we create from. We hunt and travel on the ocean, and we have stories from time immemorial and still today, of people who meet a quick death when they fall into Arctic waters and are unable to get out again.

The water is unforgiving, and so our visits into it must be succinct and done with a clear heart and mind. The ocean is alive, it breathes, grows, and retracts, and it is itself a sentient being, filled with other sentient beings, big and small. The blood that the icy ocean drew from our legs as we broke through was just a tiny indicator of its immense power.

With thanks to the Gordon Foundation for supporting the work of writers from Canada’s North.