ISSUE 35

In the far north, winter is the season people look forward to. This year, go find out what they know.

Nomadic Spirit is a weekly newsletter for travelers who care as much about the why as the where.

This week's Dispatch makes the case for spending part of the winter somewhere colder, with help from a psychologist who went to Norway to study winter misery and found people looking forward to the dark. A Chosen Place takes you to Helsinki, where locals get through the short days with public saunas, ski trails, a crowded library and the occasional swim through a hole in the ice. In The Journey, Trudy A. lands on a remote Falklands island with a scientist who has waited years to see its albatross colony. And Further Afield has Scandinavian advice for the dark months, a sauna inside a Ferris wheel and a man who finished walking around the world last week, 28 years after he set out.

Where travel and life intersect

The clocks were set back a week ago Sunday, and in Chicago the sun now goes down before five. I find it kind of depressing. Which is probably why this is the time of year many of us start planning our escape from winter. Skiers are the exception, and plenty of them head for the slopes as soon as the first snow falls. For the rest of us, I want to make the case for going the other way, at least once, to somewhere people fully embrace enjoying the cold.

I say that as someone who loves a Chicago winter. I worked in the city for more than 35 years, and some of my best hours came after the first snows, walking through the Loop, along the Chicago River and out to Lake Michigan. Some of the most beautiful sights came during my years at the University of Chicago, traipsing across campus in the first snow: bright lights on the Gothic buildings and excited students packing snowballs.

By March I've changed my mind. The snowbanks at the curb have gone black, the weather is about the same as it was in January, and I start looking at flights. Around this point I begin taking the gray skies personally.

Kari Leibowitz, a young American psychology student, went to Tromsø, Norway, on a Fulbright scholarship to study seasonal depression. Tromsø sits about 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle, and from November 21 to about January 21, the sun never makes it above the mountains around town.

Her Norwegian adviser told her that people in Tromsø hold up well through the winter. A study of nearly 9,000 residents had found less winter depression than you would predict that far north. People there looked forward to the polar night.

Leibowitz surveyed 238 Norwegians in Oslo, Tromsø and Svalbard about how they think of winter. Those who saw it as a season full of things to enjoy reported more life satisfaction and better mental health. That outlook grew even stronger the farther north she went. The survey shows a link between the two, and Leibowitz came away convinced that people can learn to embrace the cold. In 2024 she wrote a book, How to Winter: Harness Your Mindset to Thrive on Cold, Dark, or Difficult Days.

The Norwegians she met did specific things. They dressed for the cold and went outside anyway. They gathered with friends by candlelight and had a word for that warmth on a cold, dark night: koselig.

Traveling from the cold to the cold may sound backward. Your friends who spend the winter somewhere sunny will be happy to tell you so. For most of our working lives, the question never came up. Vacation meant a week or two, often fitting around school calendars, and winter was something to stay home through or fly away from. Many of us now have more say over when we go. That makes winter worth an experiment.

Take Jokkmokk, a town of about 3,000 just north of the Arctic Circle in Swedish Lapland. Every February for more than 400 years, the Indigenous Sámi from across the north have gathered there for a winter market, and the town swells to around 50,000 people. The temperature can drop to minus 30 Celsius, and the crowds stay outside anyway. Reindeer race across the frozen lake. Stalls sell antler handicrafts, and the evenings fill with concerts and talks.

In Sapporo, huge snow sculptures fill the city center for a week in early February. Québec City holds a ten-day carnival with night parades and teams paddling and dragging canoes across the ice floes of the St. Lawrence.

You must go in winter to see any of them. The people who run these events spend the year getting ready for the coldest weeks.

All that said, I won't be toughing out a Chicago March. When the gray wears me down, I'll get on a plane to somewhere warm.

by Paul M. Rand, founder and editor of Nomadic Spirit

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Destinations worth traveling for, and understanding once you arrive

Helsinki is How to Winter in practice. In late December, the sun is up for less than six hours, and January days hover just below freezing. It's cold, but it's not “I'm never going outside again” cold.

Most visitors come in summer, so in winter the locals have more of the city to themselves. It's the season to see Helsinki the way the people who live there do. The routines of its 700,000 or so residents are out in the open: the sauna after work, the ski trail on a weekend morning, the library on a Saturday afternoon. Visitors are welcome at nearly all of them, most cost little or nothing, and short tram rides connect them. You can spend a week or two in Helsinki doing what locals do, and much of it comes down to getting hot and then getting cold.

Finland has about 3.3 million saunas for 5.6 million people, and UNESCO added Finnish sauna culture to its intangible heritage list in 2020. Most Finns grow up with a sauna at home, or one shared with the rest of the apartment building. The public saunas that once dotted Finnish cities nearly disappeared after the 1950s. In recent years, private citizens have started building new ones, and Helsinki has many.

Kotiharjun Sauna, in the old working-class neighborhood of Kallio, has been firing its wood stove since 1928 and calls itself the city's last public wood-burning sauna. On Mustikkamaa island, Sompasauna is free and open around the clock, all year, and its regulars run it themselves. There are no attendants and no showers, and one rule, which they call sauna peace: respect the people beside you and the place itself. Allas, a floating pool and sauna complex, sits in the harbor a short walk from Senate Square. Löyly, a wooden building on the shore, has steps that go straight down into the sea.

This is where it gets a bit daunting. More than 720,000 Finns swim outdoors all winter, often in a hole cut in the ice, and then go back into the sauna to warm up. Visitors can try it at Allas, which offers winter swimming in the harbor. The sauna is a few steps away, and first-timers tend to find it in record time.

Helsinki has up to 200 kilometers of ski trails, including routes in Central Park, a long strip of forest that runs north from the city center. The ferry to Suomenlinna, the island sea fortress, runs all winter, and many of its cafés stay open. In the Töölö neighborhood, Café Regatta, a small red cottage on the water, keeps a fire going outside next to the frozen sea.

Savotta, near Senate Square, serves salmon soup. Ekberg, an old Helsinki bakery, is known for korvapuusti, the Finnish cinnamon bun, whose name means something like “slapped ears.” When the dark comes in the middle of the afternoon, people move indoors without going home. Oodi, the central library that opened in December 2018, logged close to three million visits in its first year, more than four for every person in the city. People read and work there, use its workshops and recording studios, or sit by the big windows and wait out the cold.

On Christmas Eve, families light candles at Hietaniemi Cemetery, as they do on All Saints' Day around the start of November, and by four o'clock the grounds glow with them. From November 27 to December 22, the December market at the foot of the Cathedral steps has its own wood-burning sauna, heated to about 100°C (212°F), between the porridge and mulled-wine stalls. Then Lux Helsinki, the city's free light-art festival, runs eight days, from December 30 to January 6. It is the first time the festival has spanned New Year's, and about 450,000 people came last January.

Helsinki is compact and easy to walk, and the trams run all winter. Wool layers and boots with good soles handle most days. Finnair flies nonstop from several North American cities, and the city is a short flight from most European capitals. Pack a swimsuit. Most public saunas expect one, which is not true of every sauna in Finland.

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TWO WAYS TO BE IN NOMADIC SPIRIT

This week's Journey (below) is a reader submission. The Journey is open to readers who want to write about a trip that mattered. Personal, specific, in your own voice. Length is flexible. We edit lightly and leave your voice intact.

Fork First: One dish, one place, one reason to go. 200 to 300 words. The test: Would you go back for this dish? Would you tell everyone heading to that city to find it? If yes, write it up.

If you are interested in sharing your story with our nearly 40,000 readers, please write us at [email protected], and we'll send along submission guidelines.

We read everything that comes in.

Stories from travelers changed by where they went

By Trudy A.

February arrived, and off we journeyed to Ushuaia and onto a three-week voyage taking in the Antarctic Peninsula, South Georgia and the Falkland Islands.

Eighteen days into the voyage, the ship's captain, a wonderful Danish woman, has declared that today the weather is just right to visit Steeple Jason Island in the Falklands.

The excitement of the shore visit is infectious, radiating from one of the scientists on board, who cannot believe that today, after years of previous journeys and near misses, she will get to witness this thousands-strong phenomenon of nesting black-browed albatross chicks.

What makes this island so special is that Steeple Jason is home to the largest single black-browed albatross colony on the planet.

We take a short ride from the mother ship in the tender to land on a dark pebbled shore, laid out with wooden decking so we don't slip on the shoreline glazed to shining smoothness by centuries of relentless currents.

The afternoon is a relatively warm and sunny 37°F, and as we clamber out of the tender, the young scientist, unable to contain her excitement, bursts into tears of absolute joy. Today she will finally achieve her goal of witnessing a most remarkable spectacle, the enormously busy and noisy nesting grounds of these unique pelagic birds.

She leads us onto the island, pushing through five-to-six-foot-high green, spindly tussock grass that both shelters and hides the cacophony of sounds we are walking towards. As we get closer to the sounds and consequently the nests, the chicks start making a defensive clapping sound with their beaks, which adds even more enchantment to the still hidden spectacle.

Gaining some high ground above the tall thick grasses, we come to see thousands of elevated, volcano-shaped nests, with one white downy chick atop the mound of soil, seaweed, guano and mud which has been built up over years of this nesting habit. Little black eyes, black beaks and what looks like a black smile all stand out vividly against their pure white heads. Their molded nests are spaced about six inches apart and travel all the way down to the shoreline, as far as the eye can see.

Thousands of chirping, beak-clapping chicks, lots of them intermittently extending their fuzzy wings and legs as if to be readying themselves for their upcoming flying lessons, when one of their parents returns soon with morsels of tasty food. At about three months they are already the size of a seagull and very noisily communicating to each other, their parents or us, a perceived threat!

Our scientist was in awe, we were in awe, as much for her as ourselves! The innate balance of living systems, without human interference, in a remote locale, alongside a scientist so moved by the essence of nature, was an experience I will always cherish.

Trudy A. lives in Southampton, New York, and feels privileged to explore this extraordinary planet and to be humbled by every continent and all its cultures, past and present.

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Reading worth your time

Kari Leibowitz, the psychologist behind this week's Dispatch, talks through small ways to make the cold months something to look forward to, from what you wear to what you put on the calendar. This episode aired at the start of this year and holds up well for anyone already counting the days to spring.

Brontë Aurell, the Danish cook behind London's ScandiKitchen, lays out how Scandinavians get through the season: candles and lamps in place of one harsh overhead light, a walk at lunch, good layers, time with friends and a regular sauna. She also makes the case for baking cinnamon buns, which she presents as a mood strategy. We are not going to argue. This ran in late January, when most of us need it.

Dennis Lennox makes the case for Helsinki in the off-season, when the streets stay cleared, the trams keep running and most of the tourists have gone home. His February column also covers the city's two cathedrals, the Lutheran one on Senate Square and the Orthodox one across the harbor.

A roundup of the Nordics' more unusual saunas, published last New Year's Eve. It includes Helsinki's SkySauna, where you sweat in a gondola on the harbor Ferris wheel, and a Swedish sauna 80 meters underground in a former mine.

Karl Bushby left Punta Arenas, Chile, on foot in November 1998, when he was 29. About 31,000 miles later, he walked into his mother's house in Hull, England, on November 2. Along the way he crossed the frozen Bering Strait, spent nearly a decade getting through Russia and swam the English Channel to keep from breaking his rule against transport. His first words to the crowd in Hull: “Sorry to keep you waiting.”

TOVE JANSSON, MOOMINLAND MIDWINTER (1957), TRANSLATED BY THOMAS WARBURTON

Jansson, the Helsinki-born artist and writer who created the Moomins, wrote this book about a young Moomintroll who wakes from hibernation in the middle of winter and discovers what he has been sleeping through.