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Susan Eckert’s Bio
Susan Eckert is the founder and president of AdventureWomen, Inc., the country’s oldest adventure travel company for women age 30 and older. Persevering through thick and thin, she is a passionate entrepreneur and pioneer who followed her vision to create the company now known as “the grande dame of the women-only adventure travel industry”.
While growing up in Pennsylvania, Susan always dreamed of going to Africa and traveling the world. The first part of her dream came true after she graduated from Ursinus College in 1968 with a Biology degree: she married her college sweetheart and they joined the Peace Corps. The couple served in Sierra Leone, West Africa for three years where Susan pursued village public health work. This experience changed her perspective and her life forever, propelling her toward a life dedicated to exploring the world.
After her Peace Corps experience, Susan worked as a biologist for a pharmaceutical company in Chicago and was accepted into a doctoral program in Public Health at the University of Illinois Medical Center. While pursuing her doctorate, Susan began leading weekend cross-country skiing, canoeing, and hiking trips for fellow female students at the University. Experiencing the laughter, friendship, and excitement of these weekend trips, Susan began to think about creating her own company specializing in women’s adventure travel.
In 1982, divorced and with her M.P.H. and M.S.P.H. in Public Heath, Susan made the difficult decision to drop out of her doctoral program and launch her own adventure travel company. She was 35 years old living in a 3rd-story walk-up Victorian loft in Evanston, Illinois. When she approached several bankers with her idea for a women’s adventure travel company, they laughed and told her that it was too risky a proposal to grant her any money to start her business. Refusing to be put off by this apparent setback, and holding firm to the credo “if you want something badly enough, you will find a way to do it,” Susan decided to take her life savings of $25,000 and start her new company. From the back of her new Datsun pick-up truck, she began guiding rugged adventure travel trips, a field dominated almost exclusively by men.
And she never looked back. Since the early 1980s Susan has carefully researched travel opportunities and taken her clients on active adventure trips all over the globe. She has gone from cooking, guiding, and packing for trips entirely by herself to working with a team of professional guides, outfitters, and associates all over the world. Her current trips are a far cry from the backpacking and canoe trips of the past, where everything was carried in backpacks, and canoes and gear were laboriously portaged. But she still sometimes longs for the “old” days when “wilderness” really meant “no people” and travel magazines didn’t tell you every corner of the globe to explore.
Along the way, Susan has become an accomplished photographer, specializing in outdoor and wilderness photography. As a member of the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP), her work is published in brochures and books, on websites, and in various other publications. In 1986 she put her wilderness-cooking expertise into print in a cookbook called, A La Carte: Outdoor Nouvelle Cuisine. In 2002 Susan proudly received a distinguished Alumni honor at the Alumni Academy and Reunions of Ursinus College for her work with AdventureWomen and the Peace Corps.
In 1991, after leading dozens of trips in the West, Susan fell in love with Montana and decided to buy 20 acres of land outside Bozeman. A few years later, she sold the Victorian-era apartment building in Evanston—that she had single-handedly restored during a period of 10 years—and in 1994, built a log home on her land, thus turning another of her dreams into a reality. Today Susan runs AdventureWomen out of her home office in Bozeman. Attention for her dog, cat, and two Icelandic horses is balanced with the daily demands of running a highly successful adventure travel business.
Susan is pleased with the life she created for herself. “I’ve worked long and hard to live where I want to live, and have a job I am passionate about. I’ve built my log-house dream. To look out the window and see this . . . (picture a gorgeous view of the Bridger Mountains)…there’s nothing else I’d rather be doing. There’s nowhere else I’d rather be living. As long as I can travel…”