This rustic lodge two hours from Montreal is the place for true Quebec winter fun | Canada Voices

Having attended university in Quebec, skied its hills and had a stepmother from the Beauce who filled our kitchen with tourtière and the music of Félix Leclerc, I felt I knew the province. But last March, as my son and I drove east into Lanaudière-Mauricie – the region that runs north of the St. Lawrence River, between Montreal and Quebec City, which tourist literature calls the “heart of the province” – I realized there was much I didn’t know.

We traded a beach resort for an ice slide on our family escape to Quebec City

Our destination was the Pourvoirie du Lac Blanc. Pourvoirie, I learned, is the Québécois term for outfitter: someone or something that provides (from the verb pourvoir). Driving past interminable fields, forests and the odd chicken farm, it struck me that humans were remarkably sparse in the province’s heart, but that all changed when we arrived at the Pourvoirie.

Its parking lot was packed with pickups, trailers and snowmobiles. Inside the lodge – a long three-storey building overlooking the vast and frozen Lac Blanc – a fire roared in the hearth and staff in plaid shirts bustled around. Not a word of English was to be heard.

The lodge’s aesthetic was cozy and rustic, something between a Roots store and a hunting camp. We settled into our room, which could have comfortably housed an entire family, and headed for the dining room, where we joined a mix of dressed-for-dinner couples and ruddy-faced men in bib pants and heavy-duty rubber boots.

As we came to realize, the Pourvoirie is many things to many people: a popular pit stop on Quebec’s snowmobile highway, a magnet for recreational anglers and a coveted destination among francophone Europeans looking to experience le Quebec authentique.

At 9 a.m. on our first morning, after a breakfast fit for a lumberjack – baked beans, toast, eggs, bacon and pancakes drenched in maple syrup – we were introduced to Olivier, a wiry man in constant motion, and his pack of sled dogs.

Over incessant barking, Olivier demonstrated how the musher balances one foot on the sled’s runner and the other on the iron claw that digs into the snow as a brake. My notion that dogsledding would be a leisurely, hand-muffed experience gave way to the reality that we would be driving the things ourselves.

My teenage son and I assumed our positions, the dogs straining at their tuglines, and we were off: across the lake, into the woods, up and down hills. The entire landscape was drenched in intense vernal sunlight. It was thrilling, and my son and I took turns mushing. Being featherweights, we flew.

After rewarding the dogs with hacked-up frozen fish (minus the heads), we piled into a school bus with a convivial cross-section of la Francophonie (some Parisians, a couple from Lyon and a family from Guadeloupe) and were driven to one of the many lakes on the Pourvoirie’s 6,800-acre property.

Given the lake is regularly restocked with speckled trout, ice-fishing in it was not a skill-testing exercise. We each chose a predrilled hole and a handmade fishing pole, hooked a worm and waited a matter of minutes, if not seconds, for the fateful tug. Prizes in hand, we gathered at the lake’s edge where Tony, our guide, ignited a massive campfire, filleted the fish with dazzling facility and deep-fried it in skillets of spattering oil.

It is true: fish tastes best when it’s fresh. It also tastes good smoked, and the Pourvoirie’s kitchen presents trout in all imaginable variations. In fact, I don’t think I’ve eaten so much rainbow and speckled trout in all my life. Everything on the menu was hearty and delicious, especially the silken vegetable potages, a new one each day.

There’s no guarantee that a holiday alone with your teenaged son is going to be a success, but the Pourvoirie offered the right mix of activities, personalities and the unexpected. One morning, four ski planes landed side-by-side in front of the lodge and disgorged small parties who came in for a coffee before taking off again. All in all, one had the feeling of being away from everything and at the centre of something else.

My son’s one and only disappointment came when he was told that, at 16, he was too young to drive the snowmobiles. Worse, he was directed to ride as a passenger behind his mother. To his credit, he kept his mouth shut as I tutored my hands on the gas and the brake, while engaging the throttle oh-so-tentatively. It turned out to be dead-easy. Again, we flew through forests, down roads and across frozen swamps, all glistening in early-spring melt.

The Pourvoirie’s owner, Gaston Pellerin, is something of a local celebrity. During the paper industry slump of the 1990s, he decided to take the family’s forestry business in a new direction, converting one of its properties into a fishing camp.

It was a radical move in Quebec’s pulp and paper heartland, but it worked. Framed photos on the lodge’s wall show Pellerin brandishing trophy fish with the likes of hockey legends Guy Lafleur and Carey Price. Now a year-round operation with more than 60 employees, the Pellerin family business has become the Pourvoirie.

The place won us over for good when Gaston’s son Georges invited us into his gleaming black helicopter. My son sat shotgun, speechless as we lifted off in tilted forward motion, the Pourvoirie shrinking beneath us. As we flew over a rolling blanket of forest and lakes, with Georges pointing out various points of interest – fish hatchery here, moose habitat there – I felt a surge of patriotism.

Later that day, I spent the better part of an hour pickling in the Pourvoirie’s Jacuzzi, which overlooks Lac Blanc. The young couple from Lyon pickled next to me in vegetative silence. “I feel like I can breathe here,” the young man told me later, rather breathlessly, when we met in the lobby. His wife nodded next to him, her hair wrapped up in a towel. They rhapsodized about Canada’s huge, open spaces and friendly, relaxed people. As a Canadian, it’s good to be reminded of that – and of how much of our own country we have yet to discover.

If you go

Accommodation is available in the main lodge (starts at $225 a night for a double) and in chalets of various sizes. Guests can opt in or out of meals; the full meal plan costs $102 a person a day and does not include alcoholic beverages or gratuities. The chalets come with fully equipped kitchens.

Included in all overnight stays is access to the aquatic centre (indoor pool and spa), plus all outdoor equipment (snowshoes, cross-country skis, skates and snow tubes in the winter) and the network of trails. Additional fees apply for guided or motorized activities such as snowmobiling, ice-fishing, clay-pigeon shooting and helicopter rides.

The Pourvoirie du Lac Blanc operates year-round and has different seasonal offerings. See pourvoirielacblanc.com.

The writer was a guest of Lanaudière-Mauricie, Authentic Quebec. It did not review or approve the story before publication.