"I become seven years old the instant my body hits the water. I flap my arms and kick to a swim ladder, pulling myself out of the Willamette and onto the dock at Sellwood Riverfront Park. It's New Year's Day, and I've just biked across town with a bunch of strangers I'm now enthusiastically bossing about. "Again! Again!" I shout. We plunge again. Shivering, we scurry back to shore-and to the bracing heat of a sauna waiting in the parking lot."
"This is Guss, a mobile sauna that allows Portlanders to hop between heat and a natural body of water. It's a common contrast therapy tradition-Finns and Swedes break up sauna sessions with frigid dips in lakes and seas, and Russian banyas often sit next to water. Closer to home, a pair of mobile saunas in Bend spend winter by the Deschutes River, and Seattle has seen a proliferation of floating saunas."
A wood-fired mobile sauna called Guss offers Portlanders alternating sessions of intense heat and cold plunges in natural waters. Participants cycle between the sauna and bodies of water at locations such as Sellwood Riverfront Park and Cathedral Park, with appearances at breweries and special outdoor events. The practice follows Nordic and Russian contrast-therapy traditions of breaking heat with frigid dips. Regional examples include mobile saunas in Bend and floating saunas in Seattle. Portland has recently added two mobile saunas and plans a sauna festival at Milwaukie Bay Park. The owner prefers plunges in rivers or lakes to tubs or tanks.
Read at Portland Monthly
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