Backcountry Table all started on a chairlift …
Meet Brent
Brent is the creative force behind GOSO Cookware (and Backcountry Table) a camping cookware company built around the idea that cooking outdoors should be as good as cooking anywhere else.
He brings the cooking chops, the creative vision, the outdoor experience, and a deep belief that food connects us to our communities, our ingredients, our surroundings, and the natural world.
He’s an entrepreneur, maker, and community builder who can make you a pretty stellar breakfast sando if you ask nice.
Meet Dawn
Dawn is an entrepreneur, event builder, lifelong community-maker, and outdoor enthusiast.
After rebuilding and running the Mustang Drive-In PEC (in Ontario) with her partner, and personally organizing hundreds of events and experiences … she knows that community doesn't happen by accident. It takes effort, participation, and someone willing to actually make the thing happen.
Dawn brings the operations, planning, event experience, and a serious love of vanlife, camping, food, and getting people together. Her go-to camp snack: fresh tortilla warmed and wrapped around a banana slathered in peanut butter. Perfection.
Cook. Camp. Community.
Backcountry Table started on a chairlift.
Dawn Laing and Brent Firkser were riding the Summit Chair at Whitewater, heading up for a day of snowboarding with buds and doing what they often do: talking about food, the outdoors, and what they were going to eat.
Brent was talking about GOSO, his camping cookware company, and the events and pop-ups he had been doing around it. Dawn suggested he should throw a parking lot party or camp meetup.
She knew a little something about bringing campers together. At her previous business, the Mustang Drive-In in Prince Edward County, Ontario, Dawn and her partner had created Vantelope, a three day van and camping meetup built around bringing people together.
Then Brent said something that changed the conversation.
He'd already been thinking about doing something like this. It’s been on his mind for a while.
But he didn't want another gear-and-gab sort of overland rig festival. He wanted something focused on camping, cooking, and community. A gathering where it mattered less what you were camping in and much more what was on the menu.
That was the idea.
Dawn, being Dawn, she followed up the next day and asked Brent if he was serious and if so, let’s get this thing organized.
And Backcountry Table started taking shape.
The Idea Behind the Table
What if the camping event was about the food?
So much of the outdoor event world revolves around the gear: the trucks, the vans, the tents, the bikes, the latest equipment and the rigs people bring to get outside.
We love all of that. Truly, we do.
But we kept coming back to something simpler:
What if the thing bringing everyone together was the meal?
Backcountry Table is an outdoor cooking and camping gathering built around that idea.
It's a place for chefs and home cooks, overlanders and hikers, vanlifers and cyclists, coffee nerds and camp cooks to come together and share what they know.
You might learn how to cook a whole fish, discover a new camp coffee ritual or ingredient, swap recipes with the person parked beside you, or sit down to a meal with people you met that morning.
Because we believe the best part of camping isn't always the camping.
Sometimes it's what happens when everyone starts cooking.
Not a gear & gab. A meal with a bunch of friends you haven't met yet.
That's probably the simplest way to explain Backcountry Table.
We're not here to tell you what you should be camping in.
We're interested in what's happening around the camp kitchen.
What are you cooking?
Where did you learn how to make it?
What did you bring?
What can you teach someone else?
And, most importantly:
What did you eat?
That question has become something of a running theme between Brent and Dawn … whether it's a chairlift pocket snack, a camp meal, or a dinner after a day outside.
Because food has a funny way of opening the door to conversation.
Why Cook. Camp. Community.?
We believe the outdoors is where we can reconnect—with nature, with ourselves, and with other people.
We believe community isn't something you simply belong to. It's something you participate in. You show up. You share. You contribute. You make room at the table.
And we believe cooking is one of the best ways to do that.
That's why Backcountry Table isn't designed as an event you simply watch.
You participate.
Bring your own food. Bring your own cooking setup. Share a recipe. Teach someone a trick you've learned. Ask questions. Sit down with strangers. Help someone with their camp kitchen.
This year, we're deliberately keeping the focus on the Backcountry Table community rather than filling the event with food vendors. We want the conversation to stay around the table—and to give everyone a reason to contribute.
And then Whitewater said yes.
There was a moment when Backcountry Table stopped being an idea and became a real thing.
Whitewater Mountain Resort was our number-one choice for the event. When they believed in the idea and agreed to become our home, we knew we were onto something.
Set in the Selkirk Mountains just outside Nelson, BC, Whitewater gives Backcountry Table exactly the kind of setting we imagined when we first talked about it on that chairlift.
Mountain air. Campsites. Big skies. Good people.
And, if we're lucky, a pretty spectacular dinner under the stars.
Brent calls Backcountry Table a "thousand-star Michelin Star dining experience."
We think that's about right.
Cook. Camp.
Community.
There may not be white tablecloths.
There may not be reservations.
There may not even be a table that looks remotely like the one you're used to eating at.
Instead, there are mountains, camp kitchens, good food, stories, new friends, and a sky full of stars.
That's the Backcountry Table.
More than a camping event, it's a chance to connect with nature and with other people who are just as happy to eat outside—rain or shine.
So bring your appetite.
Bring something to share.
Bring a recipe, a story, a skill, or simply a willingness to pull up a chair.
We'll see you around the table.