WHITE GOLD
Embracing winter from a lodge in the heart of Quebec’s Gaspe Peninsula
CHIC-CHOC MOUNTAINS, QUE.— The big red snowcat chugs through a wild mountain world of spruce and birch blanketed thick with snow; with the driver up front in the tank-like machine and us rolling behind in a bus-like trailer on treads. Then it all comes to a halt, and someone up front exclaims, “Un orignal!” and I rub away the icy condensation on my window and see the moose blocking our path.
We wait. It takes its sweet time. Nobody minds. Eventually, the moose dips back into the forest, snow coming up to its belly.
“I’m happy to work in white gold,” veteran guide Jacques Bouffard tells me later as we sit in leather armchairs at the remote lodge, taking in the Chic-Choc Mountains in the dwindling light of day. “C’est un cadeau de la vie” — a gift of life.
Set amid 60 square kilometres of protected wilderness in the heart of Quebec’s Gaspe Peninsula, the Auberge de montagne des Chic-Chocs is an 18room, provincially operated four-star lodge. Hours from anything in the ChicChoc mountains, which form part of the northern Appalachians, the lodge draws mountain bikers, wildlife watchers and hikers in the summer. In the winter, it’s metres of snow and every way to traverse it.
When we first arrive, we’re fed a hearty lasagna lunch in a communal dining room. Sitting across from me, burly and affable guide Yann Barriault asks if I’ll go backcountry skiing this afternoon.
I demur, bashfully telling him that I’ve been downhill skiing only once, on an elementary school trip to Toronto’s Earl Bales Park, and even then on the bunny hill, I spent most of the time on my butt.
Yann looks taken aback for a moment, then leans over his plate in earnest and tells me that I must ski this afternoon; that if I don’t learn now, I’ll never ski again; and I may never ski again somewhere like this — a place that blows even seasoned skiers’ souls with its steep, powder-filled wilderness where every route could be mine alone, my signature trailing behind me in the snow.
“There’s a lot of pleasure: the feeling to fly, the feeling to glide,” the Gaspe Peninsula native says. “When you do a good line, the feeling inside is emotional, yes? It’s a kind of victory.” What can I say — I’m convinced. We’re handed boots, skis, skins and poles, and begin climbing through the forest toward the summit of Mount 780. In a clearing, Yann gives our small group an avalanche safety tutorial, showing us how to use our electronic beacons and dig someone free. When I fall and a ski pops off, the snow comes up above my waist.
About halfway up, Yann continues on with the more experienced skiers and Monia Fiset, the lodge’s youngest guide, teaches me the basics in a clearing. I’m taking spills at every turn. Soon, the other skiers are zipping past, shouting “Woo hoo!” But I start to get the hang of it: I start learning how to carve my path through the fresh snow, dodging trees to glide down the mountain.
“Seriously, you weren’t bad,” Monia, 24, tells me later. “When was the last time you did something for the first time?”
Inside the auberge, it’s all casual class: warm woods, cosy couches, a crackling central fireplace and floor-to-ceiling windows that look out over snow-covered summits and yawning valleys.
There’s even a sauna and an outdoor hot tub, where a longtime skier from Quebec City raves about the Chic-Choc’s bounty of powder. Nuts to chairlifts, he tells me: a gruelling climb on skins for even just one pristine backcountry run is better than a whole day at a ski resort.
“I’ve got a quote for you,” he says. “This place is terrific! You don’t need to go to Alberta to ski: it’s all right here.”
Meals with everything from salads topped with scallops, to bacon-and-cheese stuffed chicken, to homemade fruit pies with maple syrup sorbet, are served family-style, with one of the lodge’s staff seated at every table. And every night, Jacques, the lodge’s elder statesmen, serenades guests with a guitar.
“It is not the man who takes the mountain,” he sings in French to the tune of Renaud’s 1983 song, “Dès que le vent soufflera.”
“It is the mountain that takes the man.”
The next day, I follow Jacques for more backcountry skiing, his beard and wispy hair matching the snow, eyes like glacial ice set against a mink-trimmed blue parka worn over black neoprene overalls.
“Both of your legs should be on the same side of the tree,” he instructs with a grin.
Jacques gracefully plows a trail through the powder.
“It’s a little orgasmic, no?” he says at one point. “It’s liberation.”
Snowflakes like dazzling jewels cling to even the tiniest branch. Moose prints are the only things that punctuate the snow.
Later, the 68-year-old tells me about his enviably adventurous life: travelling across the country to make documentaries for Radio-Canada, partaking in punishing expeditions from Ellesmere Island to the southern tip of Argentina, climbing Alaska’s Denali and the highest peak in the former Soviet Union.
But he always returned here, he says, to where his life began in the Gaspésie.
I ask Jacques what his secret is: how he can be more than double my age and in better shape than I’ve ever been.
“It’s the Chic-Chocs’ oxygen,” he says with a laugh.
“So, if I move here, I’ll become like you?”
“I guarantee it.”