Here is the entire premise, and I want you to sit with how sturdy it is.
There is a hot spring in the Yukon. Outside the hot spring, it is forty below. You get in the hot spring, which is lovely. Then you put your head under, and bring it back up into the air, and the air — being forty below — begins, immediately and without any input from you, to turn your hair into a sculpture. 🧊
So you shape it. And then you win two thousand dollars.
That’s the pool. Pleasant, isn’t it. Grass, gravel, spruce trees, a nice curve on it. Everybody paddling about.
Now take that exact pool and drop the air around it to −20 °C (−4 °F) — the official minimum entry temperature — and understand that the water underneath you stays at a completely unbothered 36 to 42 °C, and you have the entire International Hair Freezing Contest. ♨️
It was invented by a man with no hair
This is my favourite fact in the whole story and I refuse to bury it.
The contest was started in 2011 by a former manager of the hot springs — a man who, in the words of the current owner Andrew Umbrich, “didn’t have much hair himself.”
“It was just a good, clever idea.” — Andrew Umbrich, on the bald man who invented a hair contest
A person who could never win it looked at the steam, and the cold, and the customers, and thought: there’s something in this. And there was. 🧑🦲
The technique, per the people who run it
The staff at Takhini have been asked about this enough times that they now give actual coaching, and the coaching is wonderful, because it is delivered in the tone of a person explaining a completely normal procedure.
Step one: get in. Dip your head. Wet the hair completely. 💦
Step two: come up and let the cold do the work. This takes patience. Umbrich’s tip for a winning entry: “If you have long hair, lay your head on the side of the pool. Once it starts to freeze, you can prop it up and put it in basically any shape you want.”
Step three: manage your ears. The official guidance is to keep dipping them back into the hot water periodically, because your ears do not care about your art. 👂
Step four: ring the bell.
There is a bell, near the pool entrance. When you are satisfied with your ice, you ring it, and a staff member comes out and takes your photograph. That is the submission process. That’s it. Somebody’s actual job, on a February afternoon in the Yukon, is to answer a bell and go photograph a stranger’s frozen head. 🔔
And what if you’re bald, like the founder? You are not excused. Eyebrows freeze. Eyelashes freeze. And per staff, if you have enough body hair and you are “tough enough to stay out of the water long enough,” that will freeze too — a sentence I think about often. 😐
Forty below is just a Thursday up there
It’s worth being clear that the entry requirement is not some extreme threshold the Yukon rarely clears. Whitehorse gets there routinely, all winter, and life simply continues.
That’s a man commuting in it. On a bicycle. Through ice fog. This is the ambient reality that makes the contest possible: a whole town for whom −20 °C is a mild inconvenience, sitting next to a spring that has been running hot for over a hundred years, and someone finally connecting the two. 🚲
The internet found it, obviously
For the first few years it was tiny — 10 to 15 entries a season, a fun little thing timed to the Yukon Sourdough Rendezvous festival in February.
Then 2015 happened. A batch of photos went out and the internet did what the internet does with a picture of a person whose hair has frozen into a pair of enormous ice antlers. It went global. 🌍
“We got very lucky in 2015,” Umbrich told CBC. “We had some great photos that went viral, and ever since, our competition has got more and more popular.”
The numbers tell it plainly. 2017: 35 entries, top prize $750. 2020: 288 entries — more than double what they’d had in 2011 — across five categories (Best Male, Best Female, Best Group, People’s Choice, and Most Creative), each paying CAD$2,000 plus free passes to the pools. 💸
The contest now runs all winter.
About the photographs (a note, and a small pointing gesture)
You’ll notice there are no frozen-hair photos on this page, and that is deliberate.
The famous shots — the antlers, the ice-Medusas, the frost-caked beards, the couple who froze their hair together into a single joint sculpture (“it looks strange but it’s a nice picture”) — belong to the entrants and to Takhini Hot Pools. They’re licensed to the venue. They are not free-to-reuse, whatever a random re-upload might claim, and we’re not going to pretend otherwise just because they’d look great here.
They would look great here. Go and look at them — CNN has a gallery of the winners, and CBC has a pile more. Every one is credited Courtesy Takhini Hot Pools, which is the correct way round. 📸
Why this lives on a good-news blog
Because of when CNN ran their piece.
They published it on 1 April 2020 — which is to say, into the teeth of the thing, when the pools themselves were shut and nobody was going anywhere at all. The headline was “Canada’s outlandish hair freezing contest offers much-needed laughs.” The lede was, essentially: we’ll take them where we can get them.
And Umbrich, the man who owns a hot spring he was not allowed to open, said this:
“We like to think that this contest will bring some joy to viewers around the world — even if just for a few moments.”
That’s the whole thing, really. A bald man in the Yukon invented a hair contest for no better reason than that it was a good, clever idea. Fourteen winters later there’s a bell by a pool, and someone whose job is to answer it, and 288 people a year who will happily stand around at forty below with a head full of ice, holding very still, laughing, waiting for the cold to finish making the shape.
Your hair does not snap off. They promise. 🧊💛
