Tundra Buggy Inventor Receives the Order of Manitoba

For Len Smith, his road to the Order started out in Churchill, Manitoba as a hobby to safely travel through polar bear territory and as an excuse to hang out with some friends. Len began crafting machines that would eventually help create a new global industry, ecotourism, and for Churchill, Len would pioneer the development of a new identity for the town as the "Polar Bear Capital of the World!".

Acting more like cowboys in the late seventies, his first real polar bear touring client was a Smithsonian Magazine crew. That first Smithsonian crew helped generate tremendous amounts of exposure for Len's Tundra Buggies and to Churchill's polar bears.

Now, in order to experience one of Canada's true treasures, the polar bears of Churchill, Tundra Buggies every year cater to literally dozens of film crews and journalists, as well as about 10,000 tourists.

Whether he understood it at the time, or not, with his invention of the Tundra Buggy, Len Smith has put Manitoba on the world map as the "Polar Bear Capital of the World" and is very much responsible for Churchill's current primary industry, tourism. Since 1979, the town has hosted literally hundreds of thousands of guests from all over the world there to experience polar bears.