Howl at the Moon Is Taking Ten People to Iceland for a Week of Bathing

Alisa Cardenas runs Howl at the Moon Sauna Co. out of a converted 1989 horse trailer in West Michigan. This November, she’s taking ten people to a lakefront lodge in southern Iceland for a six-day sauna and bathing trip. The itinerary includes Sky Lagoon, wild bathing in Reykjadalur and Þórsmörk, the Icelandic sauna ritual called gúsa, and a mobile-saunagus session at the lodge. Meals, lodging, transport from Keflavík, and every bathing experience are included. It is the kind of trip more sauna businesses with a community at home ought to be thinking about.

About Alisa and the Wildflower

Alisa started Howl at the Moon in 2024, after the kind of 2021 corporate burnout that sends a lot of people looking for something more tactile to do with their lives. On her about page she describes the pull toward sauna as a series of small moments rather than a single epiphany: a Finnish neighbor’s casual “come sauna for a bit,” and the memory of a German bathhouse encounter twenty years earlier.

The flagship piece of gear is the Wildflower, a 1989 horse trailer converted into a mobile sauna, clad in Western Red Cedar and running a Finnish-made Iki wood-burning stove with more than 350 pounds of sauna stones. The interior runs 170 to 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Footprint is 13 by 8 by 10 feet. The Original IKI is the most plausible stove model for that stone capacity; IKI Kiuas hand-builds them in Finland and sells through regional distributors.

Beyond the rentals, Howl at the Moon hosts overnight bookings, special-event drop-ins, sauna tent rentals, public sauna and bathing nights, and recurring “Soup, Sound and Sauna” community gatherings, plus residencies at partner hotels and resorts. Recent residency stops include The Neighborhood Hotel in Grand Beach and The Monarch in Hart, Michigan. They showed up at Michigan Sauna Fest in Traverse City in April. The company serves greater Grand Rapids and the Lake Michigan lakeshore, and has been profiled by West Michigan Woman, Canvas Rebel, and Voyage Michigan since the launch.

That puts Howl at the Moon in good company with other US mobile saunas: Spa Fleet in the Hudson Valley (running since 2018), Cedar and Stone Nordic Sauna in Minneapolis (a Four Seasons partner), and the twenty-plus mobile rigs that turned up at the Willamette Sauna Festivaali in Portland in February 2026. The North American Sauna Society first wrote about US mobile sauna in 2020 with only a handful of operators on the map. There are now dozens of them.

What the Trip Actually Looks Like

Most travel itineraries hop you from hotel to hotel. This one parks you at one lodge for a week and uses it as a hub. Guests stay at a 10-bedroom, 9-bath waterfront property on Lake Gíslholtsvatn on a secluded peninsula in southern Iceland, described in trip materials as Scandinavian construction with modern Nordic architecture and a lakeside geothermal soaking pool a few steps from the door. A private chef named Abbey handles all the meals.

The published itinerary covers a different bathing experience each day:

• Day 1, arrival: Group pickup at Keflavík, then a visit to Sky Lagoon for a decompression soak before checking in at the lodge
• Day 2: A hike paired with wild bathing in a natural geothermal source
• Day 3: Reykjavík day trip and a SaunaRave session
• Day 4: Relax day at the lodge with a mobile-saunagus session
• Day 5: Þórsmörk valley exploration (volcanic terrain, glacial rivers, geothermal pockets)
• Day 6: Swim and soak at Laugarás Lagoon
• Day 7: Group transport back to Keflavík for departure

Optional at-base activities include a sound bath, Yoga Nidra, and an Icelandic cooking class. Alisa hosts the trip personally and describes the program on her expedition page as “a sensory adventure through ancient waters and the healing power of heat” built around “the raw, elemental medicine of the land.”

Iceland’s Bathing Scene Right Now

Iceland is not running out of places to bathe. The country drew 2.253 million overnight visitors in 2025 per the Icelandic Tourist Board, slightly down from 2024. The modern Blue Lagoon opened in 1992 and basically defined geothermal tourism for a generation. In the past five years the scene has gotten a lot deeper.

Sky Lagoon opened in 2021 on a cliff in Kópavogur, with a seven-step ritual circuit including a cold plunge and a Finnish-style sauna with a sea view. Forest Lagoon (Skógarböðin) opened near Akureyri in 2022 on a geothermal source that turned up by accident during a tunnel project. Vök Baths in the east opened in 2019 and pulls drinkable geothermal water (a regional rarity) into floating thermal lakes. GeoSea in Húsavík uses heated seawater pumped from the harbor.

The Howl at the Moon itinerary pulls from this mix. Sky Lagoon is the arrival-day anchor. Þórsmörk and Reykjadalur are the wild-bathing pieces. Reykjadalur, a hot-river hike outside Hveragerði, draws more than 100,000 visitors per year according to local tourism estimates. Iceland’s wider public-pool culture (laug, sundlaug) is on the country’s 2023 UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage nomination list, alongside Finnish sauna culture (inscribed in 2020) and Japanese onsen (under review).

One Icelandic site the trip will not include this November: Laugarvatn Fontana, a third-generation public bath in the southern lake district that uses an Icelandic-style steam room built directly over a hot spring. Fontana closed for renovation in October 2025 and is scheduled to reopen June 1, 2026. If Alisa runs the trip again in 2027, Fontana is an easy add.

A Quick Word on Gúsa

Gúsa is not a generic Icelandic word for a sauna ritual. It is the specific name for a structured three-round sauna and cold-water program developed in 2024 by Vala Baldursdóttir, founder of Sækot, a small sauna and seaside-dipping operation in Reykjavík’s Vesturbær district that opened in a converted lumpfish-fisherman’s shack on the Ægisíða shoreline. The program runs three rounds at 175 to 195 degrees Fahrenheit (80 to 90 Celsius) interspersed with cold sea plunges, led by a trained sauna master, with music and aromatic infusions tied to each round. Iceland Monitor reported in January 2026 that Baldursdóttir had trained more than 140 sauna masters through the program. It is a small but quickly forming professional cohort, distinct from the older Finnish löyly tradition and from the German Aufguss school.

The “saunagus” name on the Howl at the Moon itinerary is the Danish-influenced Nordic version of the word (sauna plus gus, the term Danish operators use for what Germans call Aufguss). The closest US analog is the competitive ritual that runs at Bathhouse in New York under the Aufguss USA banner. The Icelandic gúsa training has been a public program for only two years. Pulling it onto an itinerary instead of defaulting to a Finnish löyly is the kind of choice that tells you the operator has actually been paying attention to where Nordic sauna culture is going right now.

Cedar Grove in Maine Is Doing a Version of This in Reverse

Howl at the Moon is not the only US sauna business looking outward. Cedar Grove Sauna in Montville, Maine has been doing a related version of the same idea, just from the opposite direction. Jackie Stratton, who runs Cedar Grove out of a fixed wood-fired compound on a 200-year-old farm homestead in inland Maine and two mobile horse-trailer rigs (Reef and Eddy) that park seasonally at Spinney’s at Popham Beach, took her own six-week sauna pilgrimage to Lithuania, Latvia, Finland, and Sweden in summer 2023. The Baltic pirts tradition (the smoke sauna and the ritual built around it) stuck with her in particular.

Rather than packaging a trip back to the Baltics for her customers, Jackie brought the Baltic tradition to Maine. In October 2023, Cedar Grove hosted Lithuanian Bath Masters Rimas Kavaliauskas and Birutė Masiliauskienė for their first-ever North American training: a three-day Level One Bath Master intensive at Popham Beach plus evening workshops on plant whisks, sauna construction, and Baltic bathing practice. “Winters in Maine are long and cold and dark,” Jackie told the Portland Press Herald. “We can look to our neighbors in northern Europe to see how they cope. People feel good when they sauna.”

Alisa is taking her community to a bathing culture. Jackie went to a bathing culture and brought a piece of it home. They are two different shapes of the same move, and both are the kind of move that turns a small sauna business into a cultural connector rather than a transactional rental service.

Why More Sauna Operators Should Be Looking at This

The Global Wellness Institute projects that wellness tourism crossed the $1 trillion mark in 2024, growing at roughly 16.6 percent annually through 2027 (second only to wellness real estate among wellness sectors). International wellness tourists spend an average of $1,764 per trip, according to GWI’s 2024 Global Wellness Economy Monitor. The category has plenty of room.

Bathing-anchored Nordic retreats already sit at a few different tiers. Northern Star (Copenhagen and Helsinki) runs four-to-five-day Finnish sauna tours led by Danish gusmaster Nichlas Rasmussen. Responsible Travel books an eight-day guesthouse-to-guesthouse Finnish sauna vacation in Nurmes. Black Tomato sells an eight-night Sweden and Finland luxury sauna sojourn. Green Edventures runs a seven-day women’s Iceland hot-springs and mindfulness retreat. None of them are led by a US mobile sauna outfit.

That last bit is the actual point. If you run a sauna business in the US and you have built a community at home (regulars at your residency hotel, an email list that responds when you post a session, the same fifteen faces at the Friday pop-up), you probably have ten people who would pay to go to Iceland with you. Or Finland. Or Estonia. Or Japan. Bathhouse in New York and Othership in Toronto have publicly talked about international group trips as a long-term aspiration but have not announced one yet. Manufacturers have stayed on the supply side. The window for small operators to be the ones doing this first is wide open.

If going abroad with paying guests sounds like more than you want to take on, Cedar Grove’s model is the other half of the same move. Go yourself. Study a tradition for a few weeks. Bring a teacher or a practice or a piece of vocabulary home. Both routes turn a small sauna business into the kind of place where people show up not just for the heat but because they want to learn what their operator just learned.