Mountain Culture

Le dimanche 1er février, 2026, sept membres du Club alpin du Canada (CAC), accompagnés de deux guides, se sont rassemblés à la coopérative Intervale, près de Saint‑Donat (QC), enthousiastes de participer au tout premier cours national de leadership hivernal offert dans l’Est du Canada par le CAC.

Behind the scenes at The Alpine Club of Canada’s General Mountaineering Camp kitchen.
There are kitchens, and then there are kitchens in the clouds.
At the Alpine Club of Canada’s General Mountaineering Camp, the kitchen sits high in the alpine, far from roads, grocery stores, and predictable weather. Everything needed to feed up to fifty people arrives by helicopter. After that, meals rely on planning, teamwork, and a willingness to adapt.
One guarantee is that no matter what happens, storms, shortages, or stove malfunctions, meals go out.
My name is Amy Pfaff, the GMC head cook, and this is a little bit of what it takes to run a kitchen in the clouds.

Behind the scenes at The Alpine Club of Canada’s General Mountaineering Camp kitchen.
There are kitchens, and then there are kitchens in the clouds.
At the Alpine Club of Canada’s General Mountaineering Camp, the kitchen sits high in the alpine, far from roads, grocery stores, and predictable weather. Everything needed to feed up to fifty people arrives by helicopter. After that, meals rely on planning, teamwork, and a willingness to adapt.
One guarantee is that no matter what happens, storms, shortages, or stove malfunctions, meals go out.
My name is Amy Pfaff, the GMC head cook, and this is a little bit of what it takes to run a kitchen in the clouds.

Before we ever touched an ice tool or filmed a documentary, we were two people approaching 50, feeling the pull to do something different, something bold. We didn’t know it yet, but the ACC—especially the Manitoba and St. Boniface sections—would be the spark, the structure, and the community that would set our next decade in motion.

If there’s one thing that Saskatchewanians understand, it’s ice. The frozen, wind-swept landscapes of southern Saskatchewan present a survival (and often a spiritual) challenge for its brave inhabitants for what can feel like months without end.

Avalanche and weather conditions aligned perfectly for the first annual ACC Saskatchewan Section Ski and Board Fest from March 28 to April 1. Our team was made up of nine section members, six of us made the long drive from Saskatoon, and met up with three who came from Calgary. The trip was based out of the Lake Louise Alpine Centre hostel, and we toured different locations in the area for four days. In total, we climbed over 3,500 metres and travelled almost 50 kilometres on our skis and split boards.

I hadn’t met any of our group of nine who would be traversing the Wapta Icefields, so we met in an Edmonton playground to practise our crevasse rescue. I had taken a crevasse course but hadn’t done any glacier travel since, so I practised every day for a week in my living room. We carpooled to Lake Louise where we spent the night at the hostel in shared dorm rooms just like a bunch of kids on a sleepover.