# On the coast of Alaska, there was a sweat bath so hot that nobody could breathe in it without one small invention.

- Series: [Saunantakaa](https://miu.fm/saunantakaa.md)
- Published: 2026-10-21
- Page: https://miu.fm/saunantakaa/on-the-coast-of-alaska-there-was-a-sweat-bath-so-hot-that

## Story

On the coast of Alaska, there was a sweat bath so hot that nobody could breathe in it without one small invention.

Edward W. Nelson, an American naturalist, lived at St Michael on the Bering Sea coast from 1877 to 1881 and wrote down what he saw among the Yup'ik. The fire bath was held in the men's house: the floor planks were lifted over a pit, a fire of drift logs was burnt down to coals, and the smoke hole was covered. The heat, he wrote, was so intense that the bathers were "obliged to use respirators to protect their lungs".

A respirator was a pad of fine shavings of willow or spruce, shaped to cover the mouth, the chin and part of the cheeks, with a small wooden rod across its hollow side "so that the wearer can grasp it in his teeth". On their heads the bathers wore caps made of a whole loon skin. Afterwards they sat outside in the snow, or poured ice water over themselves at holes in the river ice.

One of the respirators Nelson collected is in the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, catalogue number E38850. Its card reads: "RESPIRATOR USED IN BATH."

How hot is too hot for you?

Sources: Edward William Nelson, The Eskimo about Bering Strait, Bureau of American Ethnology, 18th Annual Report (Washington, 1899); Smithsonian NMNH Anthropology, catalogue E38850 (Smithsonian Open Access). The book's title is Nelson's; the film says Yup'ik. The museum's record calls the object a grass respirator; the film follows Nelson's description of shavings. The drawings are ours, made from his descriptions.
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