The Schvitz-Carlton
Umvelt breathes new life into downtown Bozeman.
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Spend a few minutes immersed in the ever-growing discography of the Butte rapper 2 Dolla Will and you will likely hear a brief, recurring snippet of Jeff Steitzer, demanding, with the gravitas of a deity and no small amount of menace, that you “go back to Bozeman.”
The suggestion is not meant kindly, and its implications are far from flattering. These days, even a Missoula yuppie such as myself can relate to 2 Dolla’s populist angst; wandering past the $1,000 cowboy boots on display at the Luchesse store, stewing in the hard-edged pretension that hangs over Shan like a fart, navigating cocktail bars that radiate about as much cheer as a Soviet dentist office, it can be easy to feel like you don’t belong in Bozeman. (That all being said, Mountains Walking remains my favorite brewery in Montana, a true bastion of warmth, with impeccable calzones to boot.)
And so, when I stumbled across Umvelt, an Instagram-friendly Russian bathhouse that opened late last year behind the Lark Hotel, I booked a $60 session with at least a mild twinge of trepidation. (The business’s slogan — “Feel what’s real” — doesn’t do it any favors.)
Yet I am a bit of a fanatic when it comes to a good schvitz. Some people like to track down historical landmarks when they travel. Others go in search of the best local coffee. I like to find a sauna.
The sauna’s benefits are known, and I’ll spare you the details, as you’ve likely either experienced them yourself, or you have a friend who evangelizes the Teachings of Huberman. But I believe that a sauna holds extra worth when you’re on the road; it can serve as a refuge, a place to stabilize and refresh, a neutral, tech-free space where the mind can wander and rest.
That’s exactly what I found at Umvelt.
A bathhouse can, if not carefully minded, become a recipe for superlative grossness: Water pools on the floor. Paint peels from the walls, pulled down by its own soggy weight. Chaos abounds as sweaty, steaming bodies big and small vie for space in cramped, sizzling hot rooms, their collective, herd-like heat leaving you feeling like you’ve forked over your hard-earned cash only to get wedged inside a life-sized petri dish.
Yet Umvelt, blessedly, negates all of these unsavory situations.
From the moment you change into your (required) swimsuit in a stylish and subdued dressing room suffused with sandalwood, the otherworldly sounds of Nala Sinephro wafting in the air, the staff’s attention to sanitation is hard to miss.
The bathhouse itself — accessed down a flight of wide, wooden stairs lined with rich tapestries and through a red-paned glass door — is arranged around a warm pool and cold plunge. A bank of showers are tucked into one corner. Despite a constant parade of bodies tracking water every which way, this open space remains pretty dry, thanks to the constant presence of black-clad staffers, squeegeeing all of that water down a series of drains like benevolent Squid Games Circles. Granted, Umvelt had opened only weeks before I visited, but the saunas themselves, accessed off of the main pool room, were also pristine.
Entry to Umvelt is staggered; a limited number of guests are admitted ever thirty minutes. As a result, the saunas and pools are hardly crowded. I visited on the Sunday afternoon of a holiday weekend, yet I still spent a long stretch alone in the three-tiered dry sauna. Over in the fiercely hot “Event Sauna," dimly-lit in tones of red and gold, seven of us had space to all lie down and sink into our own thoughts; the scene reminded me of a seance in Dune, or of being placed in deep sleep on a spaceship bound for some distant planet.
Umvelt requests that you leave your phone in your locker, and that you keep most of your talking to the central pool area. Those rules were followed closely by all — much to the relief of my inner Larry David— and my fellow sweaters, some of whom had donned goofy black Umvelt banya hats, were uniformly friendly, unhurried and respectful of the quiet that infused the space.
Umvelt offers something rare in Bozeman (and, perhaps, yes, in the wider world, too): luxury without ostentation, the feeling of treating yourself without breaking the bank. You could do a lot worse with sixty bucks in that town, and I will happily pay up again anytime I find myself there.