The first thing most kids interact with at the Outdoor Adventure Center isn't the tree, the snowmobile simulators, or the fishing experience built to make you feel a tug on the line.
It's the bear.
Just inside the entrance, there's a small den with a motion sensor. Get close, and the bear wakes up. Kids run in and out for the better part of an hour, shrieking with delight and going back and back for more.
"I hear the screaming in my cube," says Missy Sharp, the center's director, "and I know that they're in the bear den."
Almost nothing in this building is the real version of itself. The snowmobile doesn't go anywhere. The fishing rod's tethered to a tank. The bear's not alive.
But the building isn't trying to replace the outdoors; it's trying to get people to go find it. "You ride the snowmobile here for the first time," Missy says, "and then go on the trails up north and try it."
Missy came to the Outdoor Adventure Center after twelve years in parks and recreation, where she says the work tended to repeat itself: the same programs, year after year, with only the date changed. Here, she says, "every year is something new, something nobody ever thought of." This fall, for example, the center will add a "ship's bridge" exhibit, where kids navigate Michigan's waterways — in a building that once built the ships themselves.
Decades before Missy arrived, the venerable Globe Building had already practiced that kind of reinvention. Built originally for steam engines (Henry Ford worked there before founding his car company), the building sat empty for years before becoming the OAC in 2015.
Missy and the OAC reinvented the space further. A windowless conference room, "the one room in the building that nobody but staff ever saw," she says, is now the wildlife lodge. Its stone fireplace and wood beams frame a wall of aquariums where the center's animals live in public view. A bathroom exhibit in the sustainable house, the room she used to consider "my least favorite spot," is now a recycling-and-solar-power exhibit with touchscreen games.
The center's sturgeon, snake, and turtles aren't domesticated animals, and the staff is careful to say so. "These are not pets," is how Missy says educators frame it. "This is an educational tool... that's their habitat." It's a careful line to walk. As Missy puts it, the hardest part is "keeping nature natural" — even for an animal living inside a building built to simulate the outdoors.
That line matters outside the building too. Missy tells me families release non-native animals at Milliken State Park or Belle Isle when they decide they no longer want them. That can have consequences for the ecosystem that outlast the decision. Teaching children the difference between wild and domestic, she says, is "a message that we're always really careful about relaying."
Missy says a family with ninety minutes inside the building can do pretty much everything: try the fishing experience, ride the ATV, check out all the exhibits. The fishing boat is her favorite to watch: kids cast real poles, and their ‘catch’ plays out on a monitor. For a kid who's never held a rod, that first simulated tug lights something up in them. "Their excitement is pretty amazing to see," she says.
The fake bear in the den wakes up for every kid who gets close enough, today and every day after. The real sturgeon in the tank is on its way to becoming one of the hundred-year-old fish swimming in the Detroit River just outside.
Real or imagined, every exhibit inside the OAC is a rehearsal for something waiting outside. The center’s job is simply to make sure a kid leaves wanting to find it.
The DNR Outdoor Adventure Center is located at 1801 Atwater St., Detroit. For hours, programs, and summer camp info, visit Michigan.gov/OA
…every year is something new. This fall, for example, the center will add a "ship's bridge" exhibit, where kids navigate Michigan's waterways — in a building that once built the ships themselves.