A bead of sweat tickled behind my ear. It travels along my jaw line, through my hair. I can feel my breath—I can feel it, hot, brushing against my throat. My heart thumps in my chest and panics at first: it squirms in my ribcage, a lobster in a pot. And then, it settles into the metronome tick. I suddenly feel my body, everything, the blood traveling currents in me, that rattling heart.

On this March evening, I sit in a metal trailer parked along the Deschutes in Bend. In the corner is a small wood-burning stove, crowned with sizzling, steaming rocks. Halina Kowalski-Thompson, owner Gather Sauna House in central Oregon, host sessions here. Today, it’s 195 degrees Fahrenheit in the sauna. It’s 47 degrees outside. It’s around 42 degrees in the river. That’s where we’re headed next. As we lower our bodies into the water, my lungs seem to forget how to breathe. I have to remind them—slowly, through my nostrils. Counting to myself, waiting for my brain to loosen up. And then, after returning to the towels, we sit down. Kowalski-Thompson tells us to resist the urge to dull the noises of discomfort with neutral warmth. I let the shakes erupt and then dissipate. I feel the drops evaporate from my arms. My skin, my brain, my whole body feels like it’s vibrating.

For Kowalski-Thompson, the most magical part of a sauna isn’t actually in the sauna, or the breath-taking step into a river: it’s this moment afterwards, sitting in nature, feeling alive. “You let that feeling wash over you,” she says. “You see the birds flying over you and hear their feathers. You are that gift.”

Saunas and their many relatives have been around for millennia – by current estimates, about 10,000 years. In Finland, people dug holes in the ground, placed stones at the base and heated them with campfires – only to alter the flame with wet peat, steam and smoke filling the surrounding hut. They would follow their sauna with a swim in the Baltic Sea or another bracing body of water, a way to cool off and wash off soot and sweat. They were sacred spaces, intertwined with folklore. “The pre-Christian Finns had this harvest festival called Kekri, and it was a Day of the Dead thing,” says Andrew Nestingen, director of the University of Washington’s Department of Scandinavian Studies. “(The dead) were coming back and heating up their sauna.”

Thousands of miles away in what we now call the Pacific Northwest, the Kalapuya would build similar structures often called sweat houses or sweat lodges; they were heating rocks in a fire outside a mud hut where men were steaming together. Many tribes in the greater area, including the Klamath, Takelma, and Nez Perce, had their own distinct traditions and structures; most involved fire-heated stones sprinkled with water to create steam.

Much later, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Finnish immigrants settled in Oregon, particularly in Astoria, bringing with them the specific sauna culture. Around the same time, public baths and steam rooms began to spring up in earnest in downtown Portland and Astoria’s Uniontown neighborhood—places where Oregonians bathed, sweated, steamed, and congregated. Both here and in Finland, saunas were a vital meeting place for the community. “Without modern plumbing, it was a place to clean,” says Nestingen. “People were born in saunas; the bodies were washed in saunas. The sauna occupies quite an important place in the stages of life, and socializing is an important part of it.”

Oregon, of course, is a rain-soaked state that has long loved a figurative (or literal?) hot spot. However, most locals have been terrified to death in the past springs, places like Kah-Nee-Ta, Breitenbushand Terwilliger. Sauna culture is not as established here compared to places like Minnesota. But that’s changing in the Pacific Northwest: newly opened sauna gardens and spas have turned the cedar bench into the main event, as opposed to an afterthought alongside a hotel pool or bathtub.

Those original smoke saunas, sweat houses, and public baths are a far cry from the infrared suites and eucalyptus-scented steam rooms that have sprung up around the globe lately. Only in the Portland area, rent your own sauna studios SweatHouse and Pure sweat have emerged as locals invest in backyard barrel saunas and Everett House visits Luxury spa and contrast therapy palace Knot Springswhich opened in 2016, was completely sold out in early 2023; it now has a waiting list of 800 people. And the variety of hot spring options seems to be growing in Portland: the highly anticipated ones Cascadean underground hotel and spa on NE Alberta Street, is home to what is purported to be Portland’s largest hydrothermal spa and subscriptions sold out even before the restaurant opened. And Nordstrom alum Sadie Voeks is working on opening Portland’s first formal hammam, Harare.

Kowalski-Thompson partly attributes the growing interest in sauna experiences to the COVID-19 pandemic — both in the way it has forced people to consider their poor physical health and in the way people have been isolated. “With COVID, people have had to slow down,” she says. “They were health-minded, they were looking for new ways (to be healthy). … We’re entering a stage where people are looking for healthy places to connect that aren’t bars.”

Sauna culture varies dramatically. Some are quiet, meditative places to feel present in your body, to enjoy the deafening sound of your heartbeat. Some are chatty social clubs where Portlanders, naked or nearly so, strike up steamy conversations. Some are wellness-focused, cutting-edge clinics where staff extol the physical and mental benefits of sauna or contrast therapy while walking you through a private space. And others fall somewhere in the middle. What they all offer – including those original public baths or smoke saunas – is the opportunity to be in your body, in the moment.

Two years after that first riverside shvitz, I found myself in a bathroom 113 miles away at the brand’s posh Snow Peak Campground in Long Beach, Washington. That evening, his cypress-lined sauna was packed with young couples from Portland, contrast therapy patients with heat-resistant timers, and extroverted Californians who had never done shvitch before. Outside the isolation door, a group of children, all under the age of 10, huddled around the cold recess of the bath, counting in unison as each shuddered and winced in its depths. Their parents watched from the sauna bench and we chuckled to ourselves. It was not a serene, serious space; that’s good. We could all count together, remembering how to breathe.