Riel Cairns describes himself as both the chief problem creator and the chief problem solver at Backcountry Pizza. In 2017, after working in restaurants from Ontario to Ireland, including several years at Whistler’s Trattoria di Umberto, Cairns purchased the Pemberton pizzeria.
He and his wife Melissa had moved to Pemberton, where they were raising their two children, when the pizza shop came up for sale. “I really didn’t know a whole lot about pizzas,” Cairns says. “But what I did know is that I wanted to make a really good product, with good quality ingredients.”
His first challenge was to renovate the shop and totally redesign the pizzas. He created traditional pies, like pepperoni, and also more inventive varieties, including the Mykonos, a Greek-style vegetarian pizza, topped with goat feta, green peppers, spinach and Castelvetrano olives. Backcountry tops the Hawaiian pizza, which Cairns calls the Mahalo (the Hawaiian word for “thank you”), with capicollo and freshly cut pineapple, rather than the canned fruit most pizzerias use.
“We’re not like the plumbers, the electricians, the doctors or the fire services,” Cairns says, “but pizza is my contribution to the lovely little world that we have up here in Pemberton.” And in 2022, Backcountry had another chance to contribute to the regional community, when a newly launched craft brewery came to them with a problem — and an opportunity.
A Partnership of Pizza and Beer
Just under two hours east of Pemberton, Lillooet Brewing Company had opened in a former feed store, a building without a full kitchen. The brewery planned to partner with a food truck for their meal service, explains Amy Eby, the general manager. But they couldn’t find a food truck willing to work with an unknown brewpub in a remote mountain town.
Lillooet Brewing began offering charcuterie boards with meats sourced from Spray Creek Ranch, a nearby family-run farm. Then, after a hike near Pemberton, Eby and her husband stopped at Backcountry Pizza, and the delicious pies sparked an idea. She reached out to Cairns to propose a collaboration: Would Backcountry provide pizzas to the brewery?
Cairns and his staff puzzled out how to prep and partially cook personal-sized pizzas and then package and freeze them for the brewery. Lillooet Brewing sourced a mini pizza oven on Facebook Marketplace and set it up on the bar. Each pie needs only five minutes in the little oven to heat up, ready to eat.
But the most complex challenge remained: delivering the pizzas over the mountains from Pemberton to Lillooet. It required a 100-kilometre trip over the Duffey Lake Road, a slog at the best of times and notoriously difficult (and closure-prone) in winter weather.
The initial process was somewhat ad hoc, with a salesperson from the brewery stopping to pick up pizzas when he travelled to see clients. But the pizzas were such a big hit that they needed a more regular delivery solution.
Enter the Meat Truck
Tristan Banwell and his wife, Aubyn, own Lillooet’s Spray Creek Ranch, which provides the meat for Lillooet Brewing’s charcuterie boards. Banwell regularly drives over the Duffey to deliver the ranch’s products to customers in Pemberton, Whistler and Squamish, returning to Lillooet with a trailer of empty coolers. One day, after completing his deliveries, he dropped into Backcountry Pizza for a bite. As he chatted with Cairns, he learned of the great pizza delivery problem. Another collaboration was born.
Now, every two weeks, after Banwell makes his deliveries in the Sea to Sky Corridor, he loads roughly 450 Backcountry pizzas into his trailer and delivers them to Lillooet Brewing. For his trouble, the brewery pays him with pizza — a stack of five pies for each trailer-full he brings.
“All these small businesses, helping each other out — it’s such a great community that we’ve built,” Eby says. “Riel sells our beer, we sell Spring Creek meats and charcuterie.” And now, she adds, “we’re known for the best pizzas in town.” Problem solved.
Lillooet Brewing Company
After studying at Kwantlen Polytechnic University’s brewing program, carpenter and homebrewer Sacha Bordas returned to his hometown, purchased an old feed store and transformed the building into Lillooet Brewing Company.
The brewpub overlooks the Fraser River and mountains and typically offers 10 beers on tap, all brewed on-site. Their classic brews, named for local wildlife, include the flagship Mule Deer Lager, Western Screech Owl Pale Ale and Mountain Bluebird Belgian Wit.
“Some craft breweries go really insane with their flavours,” general manager Amy Eby notes. “Our beer is a drink for everybody.”