Inn on Madeline Island

Madeline Island is the only one of the twenty-two Apostle Islands that is inhabited year-round, accessible by ferry from Bayfield in summer and by an ice road across frozen Lake Superior in winter — one of the few remaining ice roads in the continental United States. The Inn on Madeline Island features a wood-fired lakeside sauna with direct plunge access to Lake Superior, the world's largest freshwater lake by surface area. The Finnish and Scandinavian heritage of the Lake Superior shoreline communities runs deep: the same immigrant families that settled northern Wisconsin's copper mining towns brought their sauna culture intact, and the wood-fired lakeside sauna on Madeline Island is the most direct expression of that heritage. In winter, the sauna-to-frozen-lake sequence is practiced exactly as it is in Finland.