Inside the mad world of Canada’s hair-freezing competition
Sub-20C temperatures usually call for a beanie to avoid a frozen barnet – but not in Canada. Damien Gabet travelled into the wilderness to wet his tresses and let the frost style an up-do worthy of the Yukon’s International Hair Freezing Contest
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Your support makes all the difference.There was once a band called Static-X. Their late lead singer, Wayne Static, had the most remarkable shock of hair. Long, hellraising spikes, straighter than a razor blade. As a rock-loving teen, I would use GHDs (or my mum’s iron) to electrify my mop, too. But I could never quite achieve the same mane as Wayne. At 19, I gave up and let it flop like Kurt Cobain.
Twenty years later I was at the Eclipse Nordic Hot Springs in the Yukon, Canada. I’d flown from the UK to compete in the International Hair Freezing Contest. Every year, competitors are invited to jump into Eclipse’s balmy waters, wet their tresses and let Jack Frost have his way. Someone in the foyer asked what I was planning to fashion. “Well, have you heard of Wa…”
The caveat of the competition is that there must be cold weather. A minimum of -20C. If the mercury doesn’t sufficiently drop, your follicles won’t freeze and the fella with the camera won’t take your photo. When I arrived last winter, it was around -10°C. Damn cold, but not cold enough. You see, I’d unwittingly chosen an El Niño year, when North America warms up.
My guide assured me that the temperature could drop: “Let’s just wait a few days and see,” she said, in a kindly tone. Fortunately, the competition isn’t a one-day affair: photos are taken across the season and judged in spring. “So, what can a solo traveller, bumbling around the Canadian subarctic, do while waiting to freeze their hair?” I asked.
Obviously you start by trying to freeze other parts of your body. Which is why I went for a dip in a lake a few miles from my lodgings in state capital Whitehorse. Trevor Braun, who in the summer months heads up Yukan Canoe, had on that February day chainsawed a hole in the ice large enough for masochism. I’m a fan of cold-water swimming in my native Kent, but no amount of North Sea can prepare you for the gelid slap of a bonafide ice dive.
Genital pangs aside, it was a joyful, jetlag-zapping experience, augmented by the view: pristine snowy hills, spiked with serried pines. I managed five minutes before Trevor and I thawed in his mobile sauna. I asked him whether Yukoners were all as brave as he was. “It’s a place that attracts misfits who do fun things for the sake of it,” he said. “Don’t ask what someone does for a living; ask what they do on a Saturday night.”
Getting dressed in Victorian garbs and watching burlesque is what they do. At least, during the annual Rendezvous Festival (7 to 23 February in 2025). A three-week celebration of all things Yukon, it’s customary to chi-chi, so I hired tails and a top hat and headed to a mildly raunchy show in town. Later, at The 98 Hotel Bar, they were hosting the Bum Bum Contest. I’ll let your imagination run with that one.
I kept my finery on the next day for Rendezvous’s chainsaw throwing competition. Ahead of me in the line was last year’s champion. Eric Studerus, a Herculean firefighter from Seattle, flies up every year to compete. “Dig your toes in, throw with one arm and roar,” he said when I asked for slinging tips. My first throw was disqualified (foot over the line) and my second looked as if the chainsaw was throwing me. Studerus retained his crown.
I took a stroll around the festival’s snow sculpture park and met former world champions Gisli Balzer and Shaila Baxendale. They were busy carving a brace of bison, wearing goggles, driving a Cadillac. I asked Shaila, a third-gen local, her thoughts on Rendezvous and the chainsaw comp: “We allow you to do more here than anywhere else in the world,” she said. “We take risks because we’re Yukoners.”
One of the wildest things you can do in the Yukon is dog sledding and wild camping with real-deal champion mushers. No photo-opp nonsense – proper freezing wilderness with moose and bears and wolves.
I drove three hours on roads longer than the horizon to find sled royalty Michelle Philipps and her husband Ed. They live offgrid, at Tagish Lake Kennels, with their 65 Alaskan huskies. Michelle had just won the Yukon Quest, a 1,000-mile unassisted race considered the toughest in the world. She’s decided to give city folk a taste of the musher’s life by launching a sled-to-tent wild camping experience (the only one of its kind in North America).
My outing today was with Ed. A proper Yukoner, full of old-school frontier spirit, he’s been mushing for 40 years. His hounds make quite the sound and stink as they set off, but the methane was fleeting and we were soon carving at a clip through snowy forests and over vast frozen lakes. Later, I was given the chance to conduct my own sled (attached to his). “If you don’t do as I say you’re going to eat snow,” said Ed. I ate snow. Twice.
Our camp that night was a pair of propane-heated Arctic Oven tents. At dusk, we dined at my place on homemade chicken pie. Ed described a recent UFO sighting and retold his son’s rather chilling sasquatch-sighting story. I asked for three tips to win in the wilderness: whistle for the Northern Lights; drink hot choc to stay warm – not coffee; and always leave your toothpaste outside the tent. “Bears love it,” he said, earnestly.
Outside, Ed lit a fragrant aspen fire in an old tumble dryer drum before bedding down for the night. I sat and scared myself by staring at the nearly full moon and contemplating how this was the only fire I’d ever huddled around that wasn’t purely ornamental. I whistled and whistled but only the slightest sliver of the aurora appeared. The next morning Ed informed me that I’d missed it by minutes. It didn’t matter, though, because the whole experience was among the best of my career. Authenticity in extreme conditions – nothing like it.
I always know when I’m impressed by nature because the Jurassic Park theme tune starts playing in my head. Further north, in Unesco-protected Kluane National Park, an orchestra thundered. This is the home of the largest non-polar icefield in the world, where 2,000 glaciers join across 13,000sq miles. The most dramatic way to take in its vertiginous vastness is from the air in an old Cessna 206. Terrifying. Well, to begin with, at least: under the steady stewardship of John, owner of Rocking Star Adventures, I soon settled enough to marvel at 6,000m-high Mount Logan and the oceans of ice around it. Our 400km whip-round passed in a flash and I felt almost annihilated by the beauty of it all. As I alighted, all ponderous, my guide smiled at me and said “It’s going to be really cold this evening.”
Now, on my final night in the Yukon, we headed to Eclipse. I checked into one of their new onsite apartments and skidded over. In a word? Triumph. I finally created the coif I’ve always wanted. Me winning the comp was about as likely as Wayne returning from rock ‘n’ roll heaven. But I could, at least, go home with my hair held high.
How to do it
Frontier Travel offers a Yukon package from £3,995pp, including return international and internal flights with Air Canada from London Heathrow to Whitehorse via Vancouver, seven-day intermediate car hire with Driving Force, two nights at the Best Western Goldrush Inn Whitehorse, one night at the Raven Inn in Whitehorse, two nights at Mount Logan Ecolodge in Haines Junction (all accommodation is room only), a snowshoeing trip in Kluane National park, Kluane Flightseeing Trip, a Nordic Eclipse Hot Springs ticket, a Yukon Wildlife Preserve ticket, a Dog Sledding tour with lunch, and a Northern Tales aurora viewing tour; wild camping is available on request. Price based on February 2025 departure and subject to availability.
Damien travelled as a guest of Travel Yukon and Destination Canada.
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