She was right. Within 20 minutes of setting out from a cafe used by cross-country skiers, some of us remarked that we felt mysteriously comfortable despite the extreme chill. We followed Ms. Haberli in a single file, our snowshoes leaving only shallow tracks as the lightweight metal frames prevented us from sinking into the three-foot-deep snow.

“The only thing you could hear is your breathing and the crunch of snow among your shoes,” said Leonie Rohde, who was visiting Lapland, as the Finnish region is known, from Bern, Switzerland, with her husband, Sascha. “It’s so peaceful.”

My desire to see the snow-sculpture trees began a few months earlier, when my sister in England sent me a photograph. Had I seen them before? How did they form? Despite having lived in Finland for nearly eight years, I had never seen a snow-covered spruce that looked more like a head of cauliflower than a tree.

Pauli Jokinen, a meteorologist with the Finnish Meteorological Institute, said in an email that variations in wind direction and speed effectively sculpt the encrustations over time, usually creating rounded, pronounced formations, he said.

“The shapes depend on wind direction and how long the trees have been exposed to the conditions,” he said. “If the wind blows strongly from one direction only, it could be that only one face of the tree gets a rime coating.”

As we approached the top of the fell, we stopped for warm berry juice in so-called kuksa cups, which Ms. Haberli explained are made by the Sami people of Lapland from large growths, or burls, on birch trees. By tradition, the cups are always gifts, never purchased outright by their intended owners. (It is also customary to christen them with strong liquor, although they are most often used for coffee.)

We ate sandwiches of reindeer meat on a potato-flour flatbread called rieska. The smokiness of the reindeer paired well with the bread’s slight sweetness. For dessert, we had tarts that Ms. Haberli had baked herself, small pastry rounds filled with cloudberry, an orange berry that grows in swampy Arctic areas and is prized for its nutty but tart flavor.