Today we’d like to introduce you to Sunny Stroeer.
Hi Sunny, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
I was a couch potato. That’s not false modesty – I grew up in Germany with minimal exposure to sports, very occasional visits to the mountains, and no real interest in either. There is no through-line from that kid to me toughing out a thousand miles of Alaska on skis (trust me, I’ve looked).
What I was good at was school, so I did as much of it as anyone would let me: Harvard, then finance, then Harvard Business School, then a decade at Bain doing strategy work for Fortune 500 executive teams. It went well. That’s the part people get wrong — they assume there was a blowup, or a bad boss, or a missed promotion. There wasn’t. I was good at the work, I was paid accordingly, and I was quietly and inexplicably miserable in a way I couldn’t justify to anyone.. least of all myself.
In 2014 I climbed Aconcagua alone. What I remember is not the summit; it’s how many times I got asked where my boyfriend was. Nobody was asking the men that. I went home, put in a few more months of consulting, and ran the numbers on my student loans. Two weeks after I made the last loan payment, I quit – 30 years old and nothing but an old $3,000 Chevy Astro van to my name. I built out the van, moved into it and hit the road.
Everything after that is a consequence of the van, though not in an order anyone would have drawn up. AWExpeditions came first — an all-women mountaineering & expedition company, because “where’s your boyfriend” deserved a better answer than a shrug. The Summit Scholarship followed in 2019, funding women and girls to support their path into the mountains; it’s put more than $225,000 behind them since. In 2020 my husband Paul and I bought Dreamland Safari Tours, a guiding company that’s been running out of Kanab since 2001. And in 2024 I skied the Iditarod Trail Invitational, 1,000 miles from Knik to Nome, becoming the first woman in the history of the race to finish the full route on skis.
In 2026 I began handing AWExpeditions to its next owner. It needed a founder whose whole attention it had, and I had stopped being that person some time ago.
Which allows me to go all in on the nonprofit work, Dreamland Safari Tours, and a speaking practice — which is the odd one, because it’s the only room where the strategy consultant and the person who spends night after night sleeping out in -50° Fahrenheit are both present. At Bain I spent a decade telling executives how to decide under uncertainty; I spent the next ten actually doing it, alone, where being wrong costs something more than a missed quarterly goal. Now, as a speaker, I put the two together.
The consultant version of me would look at this portfolio and call it overly broad. She’d be wrong. She was wrong about a few things.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
No, though the hard parts weren’t the ones people typically ask about.
Quitting wasn’t hard. Living in a van at 30 wasn’t hard — it was the most fun I’d had in a decade, and everyone kept telling me I was brave, which made doing the thing easier rather than harder.
What was hard was learning that a mission is not a business model. AWExpeditions ran for years on volunteer labor, most of it mine, and I called that mission-driven when what it actually was, was a company that couldn’t pay for itself. Fixing it took years of unglamorous work: spinning the Summit Scholarship out as its own 501(c)(3) in 2021 so the charitable side and the commercial side stopped competing for the same dollar, then rebuilding the guiding business so it could stand up without me quietly subsidizing it with unpaid hours.
Then in 2020 Paul and I bought a tour company whose core product was – and still is – putting strangers in a shared vehicle and driving them into the desert. We signed the papers on March 6, 2020, and COVID made us suspend operations ten days later.
But the hardest one is ongoing: I’m interested in too many things, and every individual yes is defensible. You say yes to five good things and the bill arrives six months later in the form of five things that are fine and working… but still operating below what their full potential could and should be – which is why AWExpeditions is going to someone else.
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Dreamland Safari Tours?
Dreamland Safari Tours is the one you can book tomorrow (or today!). Paul and I have owned it since 2020; it’s been running out of Kanab since 2001, which – in a town of 5,000 people – makes it less a business than a fixture.
We run small-group hiking and photography tours into country you can’t easily reach in a rental car: Peekaboo Canyon, White Pocket, the Wave for the handful of people who win that permit lottery, Grand Staircase-Escalante, the Vermilion Cliffs, the Arizona Strip, the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. Three-hour half days, nine- and ten-hour full days, overnight camping trips, and backpacking trips as well.
Two things set us apart: access and people. We hold operating permits across much of Southern Utah and Northern Arizona which is why we can take you places that look empty on the map but are anything but once you’re there. And we take great pride in our naturalist guides and professional crew: they’re people who can tell you what the cryptobiotic soil crust under your boot is doing and why we walk around it instead of over it, not just where to stand for the photo. Fourteen consecutive years of TripAdvisor’s Travelers’ Choice award is a verdict on them, not on me.
I also founded AWExpeditions, which runs all-women mountaineering and expedition trips on five continents — everything from introductory backpacking through Kilimanjaro and Aconcagua. It’s moving into new ownership in 2026 and it’s in very good hands. If you’re a woman who’s been waiting for a reason to go big, go look at it.
If you take one thing from this: if you love the outdoors, come to Kanab in the spring or fall; book a full day, and let someone who’s been here longer than we have show you the parts of the map with no paved roads on them.
What makes you happy?
What makes me happy is watching someone do the thing they didn’t think they could.
Every December the Summit Scholarship opens applications, and a striking number of them start with some version of “I never thought this was for me” and “I could never climb at altitude, I could never lead a trip, I’m not that kind of person.” Written, in every case, by a woman in the act of applying anyway. Then we fund her, she gets roped up with people who simply assume otherwise, and she does it.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.dreamlandtours.net
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/sstroeer
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sunny-stroeer/
- Other: https://www.sunnystroeer.com
