For Amanda and Arthur (Art) Trudeau, every day is an adventure. Both come to their roles running ATV tours in Ontario at Mukwa Adventures with unique backgrounds: she’s a certified outdoor wilderness guide and motivational speaker with a background in organizing women’s retreats, workshops, and events; he’s a born hunter-gatherer who studied natural resource management and conservation. Both have long been interested in nature-based adventure tourism, both have always been outdoorspeople. Together, they have five young children (yes, five) and—as if that all wasn’t enough—they just opened a business together, Mukwa Adventures.
For the Trudeaus, the business is a long-time dream come true. For Art, who worked on the project for a couple of years before its recent launch, it was a natural (pun intended) progression. With Mukwa, he’s able to combine his professional background working in the environmental sector, and his personal history coming from a First Nations background. Bringing these things together in a way that promotes a love of the outdoors and genuine fun is all he could have hoped for.
Amanda says that in the lead-up, all they could really do was work hard and plan for the best. Very recently, all the pieces finally came together when they received funding through Waubetek Business Development Corp. and Sagamok—that financial support was what they needed to move ahead, and Mukwa was officially able to open on April 30, 2017.
When I spoke to Amanda in mid-May, interest was coming in steadily, with daily bookings already. On the day we spoke, she and Art were gearing up for the company’s first tour the very next day. Mukwa is unique in that it’s a mobile business—they trailer quads to different locations from their home base of Spanish, Ontario, on the border of Algoma and Sudbury.
They already have bookings confirmed in Elliot Lake and Massey, Ontario and are working with lodges even further away on some joint bookings—one retreat currently planned for the fall is at Magpie Relay, in Dubreuiville, for example. They provide helmets and training and are thorough in their approach—it’s not just about the ATVs themselves. When groups book with Mukwa, they can be certain it’s not the same trail over and over again, meaning it’s never dull—for the groups or the guides. By being mobile and customizable, Mukwa is able to cater to more and less experienced adventurers.
“When was the last time you did something for the first time?” their website asks. When I asked Amanda about the interest in appealing to first-timers, she tells me that lots of people aren’t experiencing being in nature as much as they could be. For her, time spent in the natural world has been very healing and life-changing, and she wants to bring this experience to others. “When you’re out there with no one around, standing by a lake, hearing loons, seeing wildlife, you realize it’s so much bigger than a regular day-to-day experience, and yet it’s right there,” she says, noting that many people don’t realize how close they are. “The sense of awe returns,” she tells me, “when introducing it to someone else.” She and her husband are used to it already, but don’t ever want to take it for granted—introducing it to others is a way of experiencing it as new all over again.
Given her background working to empower women and coordinating events for them, Amanda knows it’s important to use the tools she has to continue that work. And getting women out ATVing is unique because no one else is doing it. One of Mukwa’s offerings is a women’s retreat, where women are invited to come up and do tours as part of organizations or with family and friends.
This season, their first, they’re also working with local wedding designers and planners, running unique local bachelor parties for groomsmen, encouraging people to do something different up north for their pre-wedding celebrations. These are of course open to locals who want to do something near home, or people in cities and suburbs who want to travel north and try something a bit out of the box.
They’re also working with local First Nations men’s groups, organizing employee wellness days, corporate retreats, team-building opportunities, and geocaching adventures. The first tour they organized as Mukwa Adventures, officially, is for a men’s group from a reserve on Manitoulin Island. The group is coming to spend five hours in Spanish, with Mukwa providing screen tents and a hot BBQ lunch. “You just sit by the water and it’s all provided and cooked for you,” Amanda explains. Sounds like the best of all worlds: the peaceful outdoors, rugged adventure, bonding, and relaxation, all together. And it sounds like long, exhausting, and entirely-worth-it days for Amanda and Art, who would have it no other way.
