They locked my phone away at 8am - the hours that followed completely changed my mind
Six hours after having my phone taken, I didn't want it back.
I’ve never really been a huge spa fan. The thought of continuously slipping in and out of saunas, hot tubs and cold plunge pools was less appealing to me than what accompanied it - usually, a morning or afternoon chatting to friends while performing the aforementioned rituals.
Still, an invitation to the single biggest outdoor spa in North America, nestled in the hills of Gatineau Park just outside Ottawa, wasn’t one to miss.
Upon arriving at Nordik Spa Village, barely awake at 7am on a May morning, we were met with our first surprise. Our phones were taken from us and physically locked away with our outside clothes, even before we entered the activity areas.
The complex, we learned, is divided into three zones - silence, whisper and social - which rather swiftly crushed my subconscious hopes of hanging out with friends for hours while performing the relaxation rituals.
Silence, as a concept, and I have never been particularly well acquainted. I am sadly infamous among my friends for putting on music while reading a book and listening to podcasts while getting ready.
Despite the horrifying prospect of a spell of quiet, I decided to dive headfirst into the experience, thinking I might as well immerse myself in a little peace.
In place of our phones, guests are handed a wristband loaded with a pre-paid balance, used to pay for anything across the complex - from food at one of the four restaurants to add-on experiences - meaning there was genuinely no reason to think about a screen for the remainder of the day.
The place itself earns the title it advertises. It's spread across forested hillside terrain, a vast, beautifully designed complex of nine outdoor baths including an infinity pool, eight distinct saunas, cold plunge pools, icy waterfalls cascading over exposed rock faces, outdoor firepits ringed with Adirondack chairs, massage pavilions tucked between the trees, and winding stone paths connecting all of it together.
Spruce and birch tower overhead, the Gatineau hills roll out beyond the treeline, making me feel like I'm genuinely in the middle of nowhere. Guests pay a single entry fee - CAD99, or just under £50 - for unlimited access from 9am until the complex closes at 11pm.
The entire experience is built around the thermal cycle, an ancestral ritual of hot, cold and rest practiced for over 2,000 years.
It's pretty simple: heat for ten to fifteen minutes in one of the eight saunas - some candlelit and cathedral-quiet, others shaped by music or the spa’s own scented steam rituals.
Then cold, via plunge pool, icy waterfall or bucket shower, for around ten to fifteen seconds.
After that, at least twenty minutes of rest, during which the body’s adrenaline gives way to what the spa calls “happy hormones.”
What I didn’t anticipate was how quickly the absence of noise and stimuli would stop feeling like ennui and start feeling like a relief.
My personal highlights were the saunas and the hot stone beds, for one simple shared reason: on more than one occasion, I was convinced I had closed my eyes for around ten minutes, only to open them and find that nearly half an hour had passed.
Slowly but surely, I felt my mind noticeably clearer, my ever-racing thoughts slowed to something approaching stillness. Doing nothing has always, for me, come packaged with procrastination guilt, a nagging awareness of everything I’m not doing.
As warned by the spa staff who introduced us to the concept earlier that morning, somewhere between the second sauna and the third rest, that standby feeling simply disappeared. For the first time in a long while, I was just there, existing. It was a lovely thing, to sit properly with myself for an extended stretch of time - something most of us rarely get the chance to do in a century of distractions.
By 11am, when our group of six reassembled at the restaurant for lunch, we humorously noted the vibes had shifted, and a couple of us were walking more slowly and speaking more calmly.
I - who, as a Gen Z individual, have an admittedly dependent relationship with technology - had long forgotten my phone existed.
For the final stretch, my friend Julie and I completed one last full cycle together, slowly easing back from the closest to nirvana we’ve come - (whisper-)chatting through sauna, cold plunge and rest.
The cherry on top was Kalla: an underground, candlelit saltwater flotation pool that the spa describes, with complete accuracy, as a refuge where absolute calm brings instant relief.
You lie back in water dense with Epsom salt, let your arms and legs rise on their own, and the moment your ears go under, soft music fills the water around you. It is, in the most literal sense, weightless, so fifteen minutes felt simultaneously like two and like forever.
We had to actively remind ourselves that a van driver and a Montreal airport departure were waiting, and that “we forgot the outside world existed” was unlikely to be accepted as a valid explanation for delays.
We left after six hours that felt like some of the most genuinely restful of my life - surrounded by alpine forest, exposed rock and still water, in a place that gives you full and uninterrupted permission to be unapologetically unreachable.
A few weeks on, my friends and I are already plotting our eventual return.
Book it
Nordik Spa Village also has locations in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and Whitby, Ontario, in addition to the one in Chelsea, Quebec.
Air Transat offers year-round direct flights from London Gatwick, Manchester and Glasgow to Toronto, with seasonal direct services from London Gatwick to Montreal and Ottawa. Ottawa return fares from £367 pp.
