Skiers find powdery bliss in remote Quebec

I hear the moose munching before I spot him through a tangle of trees, knobby knee deep in powder, his antlers dusted with snow drifting from branches he's browsing. He snorts steamy puffs into the winter air. It reminds me to start breathing again.

I've just skied down a long slope of virgin powder marred only by the occasional jackrabbit footprints, zigzagging around trees, floating free of gravity. When the moose sniffs the air and trots off I hoist my backcountry skis over my shoulder and realize it's gravity payback time. I scramble to keep up with guide Jean-Francois Dubé as we stomp uphill.

My legs are already wobbly tired and I'm grateful that I peeked at the menu for dinner that awaits back at our log lodge at the top - a spread prepared by a French chef of smoked trout dressed up with ginger granita followed by roast duck adorned with morels. My post-dinner plan is a massage, then a soak in the outdoor whirlpool beneath snowcapped peaks and tonight's full moon.

The Rockies? Kootenays? Coast Mountains? Nope. This is way-out-there Quebec. Take a peek at a snowfall map of Canada's Francophone province and you'll see the remote Chic Choc ("shick-shock") Mountains - the forgotten northernmost tip of the Appalachians - standing out like a red lollipop on the Gaspe Peninsula, that big tongue of Quebec sticking into the St. Lawrence River.

It's remote, wild, untouched and has Canada's best powder east of the Rockies, a hefty annual average dump of 25 feet. And the Chic Choc Mountain Lodge is smack in the middle to catch every inch of it.

While high-amp runs at Whistler-Blackcomb and heli-skiing Champagne powder in western Canada get most of the attention, Quebecers have a long tradition of just quietly heading outside without much fanfare to play in the snow. They tackle everything from downhill and snowboarding to vast networks of cross-country and way-out backcountry skiing as well as Voyageur-caliber snowshoe trekking. The take here is that you either get out there and have fun or else endure a subzero lockdown for half the year.

Heck, winter isn't just about exercise, either - when they thumb their noses at winter hereabouts, it includes outdoor carnivals, fireworks and food festivals, skating frozen local waterways and even constructing a hotel out of ice where cocktails are served from glasses made of ice.

European ambience