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Tundra Buggy

DCHP-2 (Nov 2016)

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tundra buggy

n. — proprietary, Manitoba

an off-road bus used to take tourists into the Canadian tundra to view wildlife (see Image 1).

Type: 1. Origin — Tundra Buggy is the name for the vehicles used by Frontiers North Adventures, a tourism company based in Churchill, Manitoba. According to the company's website, the first Tundra Buggy was built in 1979, and since then sixteen buggies have been built. The current model seats forty passengers (see Tundra Buggy reference). The term is most prevalent in Canada (see Chart 1). Within Canada, hits are concentrated in the Yukon, Manitoba and Saskatchewan (see Chart 2). It must be noted that 99.4% of Yukon hits refer to Churchill, Manitoba, as do 100% of the Saskatchewan hits, which is why we label the term as "Manitoba".
See also COD-2, s.v. "Tundra Buggy", which is marked "Cdn proprietary".

See: tundra

Quotations

1983

Tourists also spend a day exploring the environs of Churchill in a "tundra buggy" - a bus body on 63-inch tires with the floor six feet above the ground - that circles the tundra looking for birds and flora and maybe, if one is lucky, caribou.

1989

On the last day, we boarded a custom-built high-wheeled vehicle known as a tundra buggy on a birdwatching hunt for arctic loons, snow geese, sandpipers and ptarmigan.

1990

Patrons huddled inside a 34-passenger Tundra Buggy and photographed from a short distance as a lone polar bear centered his attention on the cold tundra beneath him.

2007

"It is really inspiring still for me to lock eyes . . . with a polar bear," said John Gunter, whose family takes visitors to see the massive animals in the safety of oversized off-road buses called tundra buggies.

2008

Frontiers North owns and operates Tundra Buggies in Churchill and bring groups from all over the world to the northern port to see polar bears in the fall and beluga whales in spring.

2016

Wapusk: This fascinating park is located just south of Churchill, Manitoba, and it protects one of the world's major polar bear denning areas; after all, "Wapusk" is the Cree word for "White Bear". One of my fondest memories is photographing these magnificent animals from a tundra buggy as I travelled about in this rather wild and remote landscape.