Ice Hotel 2016

The annual Ice Hotel that is built from actual snow and ice every year in Jukkasjärvi, Sweden has been open for a few weeks now. And every year, the design for the hotel as well as each of the rooms is different! Participating artists and designers come to sculpt and craft the suites into works of art that one can sleep in.

But even though the Ice Hotel is located 200 miles above the Arctic Circle, the sun comes to melt the structure every spring. Yet now you cn stay at the Ice Hotel year-round! The just-announced cool news, pun intended, is that the Ice Hotel is creating structure at a former ice storage site adjacent to the property. The power to keep the structure chilled will be generated by solar panels that will absorb the near-constant sun that region of the world gets in spring and summer! Genius.

Here are some photos of this year's 27th incarnation of the Ice Hotel.

And here are renderings of the soon-to-be-opened year round facility--a view in winter and a view in summer with the green, living room in full bloom!

http://www.icehotel.com/

BEAUTY: Photography--Evgenia Arbugaeva

Russian photographer Evgenia Arbugaeva studied in New York and traveled to far flung locations in Asia and Africa but returned to her native country to capture haunting images of life in the harsh Russian north and the Arctic Circle.

Her time spent with Arctic hunters as they search the permafrost for mammoth tusks, with workers in mines and oil fields, on a ship sailing the ice-filled Barents Sea, or with meteorologists taking measurements under the Northern Lights has produced some absolutely breathtakingly surreal images.

http://www.evgeniaarbugaeva.com/

See more of her photojournalism work at this National Geographic article about Arctic mines and oil fields:
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/03/new-arctic-thawing-rapidly-circle-work-oil/

Hotel Kakslauttanen

Oh, how I would love to spend a holiday season at Hotel Kakslauttanen, perched in Lapland, at the northern-most edge of Finland... within the Arctic Circle! In addition to log cabins and traditional igloos, they have a unique glass igloo village where one can relax in bed, in insulated normal room-temperature warmth and gaze up at the Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights, through the special thermal fog-free glass.

They also have the world's largest smoke sauna and reindeer safaris in the winter! What more could I possibly want?

Here are the log cabins. I can't make up my mind; I might have to stay a night in the glass igloo and then a night in a log cabin!

Visit their website for more information and great virtual tours of the Glass Igloos, Log Cabins, Snow Restaurant, and Snow Chapel.
http://kakslauttanen.fi/en/