TRAVERSE CITY — As the slushy, winter waters of East Bay swirled around my bare calves, I wondered if Daniel Sarya had been right. Polar plunges are a silly fad, right? I wasn’t on Mitchell Creek beach, at Sarya’s MI Sauna, to prove anything to anyone. Listen to your body, he’d said. But numb appendages do not complain, so I waded deeper. Following Sarya’s lead, I turned around, sat, and reclined into the bay’s icy embrace.
It was just after my second steam in Sarya’s mobile sauna, which sits on a trailer in the parking lot of the beach just west of the pedestrian bridge to Keith J. Charters Traverse City State Park campground. The sauna is about 20 feet long, with blonde wood siding and sticks mounted to the side that say MI_SAUNA. It’s been parked there since Sept. 18.
“I like winter swimming. It’s one of my favorite things to do now,” Sarya said when we first met. That was Saturday, a day before we took the plunge side-by-side. It was sunny then but the sauna was booked for the rest of the day. Sarya said there was an opening the next day at 5. By then, the sun was sinking into a haze of evening cloud cover and the wind was whipping. The temperature was around 40 degrees. When I arrived Sarya offered a fist to bump, as his fingers were messy from snacking on grilled broccoli.
“Got to get my electrolytes up. Got a bunch of people. I’ve been in the lake already but I figured if you’re coming, I’ll join you. So I had to eat a little bit,” he said. “You’ve got to have something in your body. You can’t go into a workout totally hungry.”
He hastened to explain the raison d’etre for his custom built, welded-steel-framed labor of love. From the project’s beginnings in 2018 he was purely motivated, he said, from a desire to grow sauna culture in northern Michigan. After numerous trips to his ancestral lands in Finland for research, the MI Sauna was constructed in 2020. He began telling the story of how he came to secure a five-year contract for the site at the state park beach in 2021.
“I just went and asked permission from the State of Michigan. I’m like huh, there’s the office,” said Sarya, gesturing across U.S. 31 toward the campground. “I wonder what it’s going to take. They said fill out this paperwork, buy this insurance, do all this.”
Work, for Sarya, is an orthodontics practice. He still does it full-time and is operating the sauna when he can, with volunteer assistance. That’s primarily weekends during the day for now. He insisted that MI Sauna was never conceived as a for-profit venture. It’s simply in his blood. Sarya is from Traverse City but maintains family connections in Finland.
“I was washed in the sauna as a kid. I was bathed in it. It’s part of my culture, my heritage. My great-grandmother’s maiden name is based upon ‘the family that runs a public sauna,’” said Sarya.
As for the temperature range, which he has been keeping between 200 and 250 degrees, it’s at the upper bounds of Finnish tradition. The Finnish Sauna Society, for example, recommends 176 to 212 degrees (80 to 100 C). After all, wouldn’t boiling point be a natural limit?
“Yeah but it’s different,” said Sarya. “It teaches your body how to sweat. And it’s got more ventilation than the average sauna. You’ve got more fresh air coming in, so you can breathe better. And if you put a hat over your face or something, your body can take more heat than your lungs. So you just start figuring out ways to address it. It’s pushing yourself beyond that normal comfort zone.”
Inhabiting these margins beyond comfort is like brute forcing transcendental meditation. At one extreme, thoughts scatter and dissipate in a wash of blast-furnace heat and vapors, pores opening wide. At the other, nerves fire last-minute warnings before going weirdly quiet as one’s whole being is drawn inward to a single point suspended in pure, liquid cold. A recommended session lasts roughly 80 minutes and involves subjecting oneself to heat and then cold three or four times.
“It’s pushing yourself, like exercise. You push yourself a little harder. There’s an old term, sisu, in Finnish. There’s no real, direct translation but it’s being able to conquer anything. And this kind of embodies that,” said Sarya. “You’re pushing yourself to a stressor of the heat and knowing that you’re going to get through it and you never give up. And you realize that after that, you can get through anything if you just set your mind to it.”
MI Sauna’s popularity is growing quickly. Boldly curious passers-by and a core of devoted regulars have the hot house running at full capacity at the moment. Rising demand has compelled Sarya to up the supply.
“Every weekend it’s getting busier,” he said. “It’s growing organically, to the point where we’re really busy. So we’re working on a second one.”
The mood around MI Sauna is loose and convivial. Designed to fit 8 to 9 people, individuals and small groups go in and out of the sauna intermittently, smiling and chatting. The charge is by the seat, $35, for an 80-minute session.
“The social aspect of it’s really fun. That’s the thing I never got in my own sauna,” said Steve Geary, a MI Sauna regular. “You meet interesting people. Every week it’s just somebody completely different.”
Both Geary and Sarya said it was exceedingly rare for people to accept invitations to their at-home saunas. Sarya said his mobile sauna is part of a larger project to open minds to the social potential of saunas, in addition to embracing their many personal benefits.
“In Finland, what I love about it is everywhere you go you have a sauna,” he said. “Saunas are everywhere.”
He described experiences in Finland visiting family, walking and cycling from sauna to sauna, and cooling off in the sea. He said he hopes polar plunge trends here in the U.S. and studies of the health benefits of these kinds of practices will get more people in the spirit.
“The whole world wide there is a movement,” he said. “The sauna culture is growing.”
MI Sauna will be at Mitchell Creek beach until mid-May, when it will be moved to Frankfort for summer storage. Sarya took it on tour for a few dates last summer, to such places as Barnes Park in Eastport and the Kingsley Golf Club, for a private event. He said he aims to provide an authentic, Finnish sauna experience with each session.
“It’s about getting back to nature, being one with yourself and the world,” he said. “It’s really about getting back to your roots and getting back to breathing again and enjoying life.”