- [Narrator] Coming up on this edition of Backroads of Montana we visit Giant Springs State Park.

Where Great Falls residents reflect.

- [Guest] It's a busy place.

- [Narrator] People around the world visit a Lolo Ranch without leaving their homes.

- [Guest] If one of us have left our gate open accidentally, it takes about five minutes and we hear about it.

- [Narrator] Observed the process as ice forms on a Montana River.

- [Guest] It's a neat part of our rivers, it's an important part of our rivers.

- [Narrator] A Group of retirees makes the Seeley Lake Campground, a great place to pitch your tent.

- [Guest] We got good friends around.

- [Narrator] It's time for something big for our 50th episode.

- [Announcer] Backroads of Montana is made possible with production support from the Greater Montana Foundation.

Encouraging communication on issues, trends, and values of importance to Montanans.

The Big Sky Film Grant and the University of Montana.

♪ Home is where Montana is, Montana is My Home.

♪ ♪ From Mountain Peaks to Prairie Ln, places I have known.

♪ ♪ and I'm bound to ramble.

Yes, I'm bound to roll.

♪ ♪ and when I'm in off the road now.

My Montana is My Home.

♪ - Hello, and welcome to the 50th episode of back roads of Montana.

I'm William Marcus.

Over the years, we've traveled from Ekalaka to Eureka and respite of wisdom.

To meet some of Montana's most interesting people and to share some special places you might like to visit.

This Antler Pile is a sign that we're at the National Bison Range outside Moiese.

A place of natural beauty that helped restore one of America's most iconic animals.

We'll explore the Bison Range and learn its complex history throughout the show.

Our first story takes us back to the very first place we photographed for Backroads in 1990, Giant Springs State Park near Great Falls.

To get underwater footage, we had to place our camera in a large aquarium.

Now, after all those years, we thought we'd return to this tranquil little park nestled beside the Missouri River.

Only this time we'll let someone else get wet.

Officially.

It's a State Park, but Great Falls would like to think of it as their own.

- Great Falls definitely loves this park.

Giant Springs has been a major part of this town.

So, the locals are here all the time.

- [Narrator] It's where they come to stretch two or four legs, or just stretch out.

To plunge into a pool or a picnic basket.

To take a leisurely stroll and daydream, as they watched the Trout slowly swim in a circle.

And when something goes wrong at their favorite getaway, they get mad because Giant Springs is their special place reserved for the special moments in their lives.

Simply put, it's where Great Falls comes to relax and enjoy the perks of being a Montanan.

As a result, Giant Springs State Park is easily the most visited State Park in Montana.

With close to half a million visitors a year, but all that love requires more than a little attention.

- For the small staff we have here.

It's a lot of work to stay on top of the maintenance and all the visitors.

- Part of that maintenance includes the springers.

Twice each year, the Electric City Dive Club shows up to clean up litter and clear out some of the unchecked vegetation.

After a quick safety talk.

- As you dive, you know all the precautions dive safely and enjoy.

- [Narrator] Dive Club President Jim Benner assigns the first duty of the afternoon.

Try to recover a lost wedding ring.

- I think it's over there and she's going to point it out were she lost it.

- [Narrator] He settles in with the task.

- Anne will be the diver looking for it.

Point out the exact spot that you dropped it.

- [Narrator] Well, Anne literally searches for a needle in a haystack.

The rest of the clubs settle into their various duties.

- Max was actually diving, Dave was actually diving, Carrie and Cheryl were working the edge throwing what they could over the edge so it would go down the river.

- [Narrator] Jim maintains a safety position above water, keeping a watchful eye on everyone else.

- Anything we do has got a certain amount of danger.

You can spot the trouble.

Even I'm fully dressed, I'll go into water and help.

- [Narrator] Within minutes Amy surfaces with something in her hand, It's a cell phone.

That's been in 12 feet of water for two days.

Remarkably.

It still works and in less than 20 minutes, the owner arrives to happily collect it.

The club returns to the day's cleanup, removing any invasive species, but also carefully thinning out some of the native vegetation.

Which can overpopulate the Springs, obscuring the bottom and choking out the Fish.

The Parks many regulars like to keep track of what's going on down there.

- There's a number of them.

My staff and I were talking about, how you could write a book about the regulars down here.

We have a guy that comes down almost every day with his ducks and he walks his four ducks down from the parking lot and they swim in the springs.

- It's an awesome park here.

Faith and Grace are my two older ducks, and then this Spring and March I got two ducks and named a Marnell and Betty after my Great-aunt and uncle, but Arnold turned out to be in our lane.

So I got four girls, a lot of folk come here and really enjoy... You probably not helping the interview either.

- [Narrator] Even Mike's ducks can't experience the Springs to the degree that Anne does.

The peace and natural beauty of the Park is doubled in the uncommonly, Clearwater.

- It's real surreal, I guess is the best word to say.

It's just so completely different than anything you'd find on land, and the fish kind of follow you around trying to figure out.

What the heck we're doing down there with them?

But that's just really fun.

- [Narrator] Eventually, Anne supply of air is exhausted, and she surfaces.

Aside from the cell phone, today's hall includes a couple of fishing lures and some change.

That money will be donated to the children, but no rain.

There are just some things that the Giant Springs refuses to surrender like a young women's wedding band and the love of this Great Falls Community.

In July of 1896, humorist and writer, Mark Twain spent an afternoon at Giant Springs and visited the surrounding area.

He described Great Falls as the prettiest little town in the West.

Well, in the history of the west, the systemic eradication of the American Bison.

As a tool to move Plains Indians onto Reservations.

Is one of America's ugliest stories.

As the animal faced extinction, the American bison society proposed a refuge to restore them.

19,000 acres of the Flathead Indian reservation were taken by the government and fenced off.

Indians weren't welcome.

The reservation had a Large Bison Herd raised by tribal member Michael Pablo, but the US government had no interest in buying them.

So Pablo's sold most of them off to Canada.

The few left behind became the start of the Bison Range Herd.

Today about 300 Bison graze here and after long negotiations the range has transitioned from the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

To full-time administration by the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes.

Next, we're off to a different kind of refuge.

A Montana Guest Ranch that draws people from around the world who are looking for a bit of respite.

But most of these visitors never pack a suitcase and actually never set foot on Montana soil.

The manure scooping is one of those Mundane Ranch Tasks typically done without an audience, but on any given day there could be dozens of people watching Suzanne Miller from above.

- This is crazy.

Isn't it?

- 24 hours a day, seven days a week, including holidays.

- That's called our Ranch Cam.

- [Narrator] Suzanne invites guests around the world to watch the ranches every day, and once in a lifetime views from four birds eye cameras.

- That's why you open the guest ranch, as you want to share what you have, you want to share that love, and it was a whole new way of doing it.

- We have to adjust it for us the right height, so that it's the same position for the camera every day.

If we don't, we hear about.

- [Narrator] With help from Tech Wrangler, James Wason, the Ranch has built an incredibly high tech infrastructure.

- It started out as the ranch office for trail rides turned into command central for all the Web Cams.

- [Narrator] There's one camera catching, all kinds of hungry, airborne creatures, snacking, all hours of the day and night, the more reflective, but equally active river cam showcases the Bitterroot river and its banks and the Ranch Cam centered on the Corral.

Let's visitors watch horses and the humans who care for them - If one of us have left a gate open accidentally, it takes about five minutes and we hear about.

- [Narrator] Finally, there's the Osprey Cam offering viewers an up close view of Harriet the Osprey and her mates Swoop and their annual brood of chicks.

This is the camera where the whole idea took off.

In 2011, scientists from the university of Montana approached the Miller family to install the camera, to study bird behavior.

By the following year, hundreds of thousands of viewers were watching and to Suzanne surprise, many of them were still watching the empty nest even after the Osprey flew south.

- I went to turn off the web camera at the end of the breeding season.

I got scars of emails and phone calls from people saying, please don't do that.

We want to watch your ranch because they could see behind the nest, all of our activities, the horses coming and going, and they were fascinated by it.

At first I didn't get it.

I thought get a life.

What do you mean?

You want to watch my ranch?

I didn't understand it at all.

- [Narrator] Then Suzanne became gravely ill. She was home-bound for six months and for the first time she tuned in to her own camera.

- Suddenly I got it.

That if you we're home-bound for any reason, and your life has confined to four walls.

Well, having a portal to a natural place where lots of fun things are happening, real things, real people that you can talk to.

That's a whole different thing than watching TV.

It's just a whole different thing.

- [Narrator] Nearly 2000 miles away, as the Raven Flies.

Diane Hoffman was drawn in from her own computer in Kenneth Square, Pennsylvania.

She had come for the Osprey, but she stayed for the horses.

- I got pulled into a whole environment.

That was Western in which I could not...

There's nothing like this on the east coast.

Grooming is a two-part process.

- As Suzanne added the other cameras.

She set up a whole online community and called it Days at Dunrovin.

And now outfitted with wireless microphones they started this two way conversation with their own online subscribers.

Inviting them to help name animals, control cameras and listen in on live programs.

- In Montana fashion.

Hey, growler, full of water.

- If you are not able to be in Montana, this is the second way to be there.

I can't think anything the Internet's done better for me than these camps.

- [Narrator] Like many of the online community members, Diane discovered the cameras during a lonely time in her life.

She had lost her husband of many years and in many ways lost herself and Dunn River Ranch opened her eyes to a new landscape of healing.

- It's a place where it's calm, nobody's fighting and where people are nice to each other.

And for me personally, it was a perfect place to rejoin the world because that's what I think I did.

In Dunn River as I came out of my dark place and I rejoined the world.

(soft music) - Last year, I got an email from a woman who said, I'd like to come and spread some of my mother's ashes at Dunn River, would you allow me to do that?

And I wrote back.

I said of course.

She said that Dunn River had been her mother's happy place for the last two years of her life.

- The technology is great, but it really doesn't have a purpose unless we're able to use it to connect and be more human with each other.

- [Narrator] Dunrovin's cameras provide that chance to truly connect with real Montana landscapes, animals and people.

in situations that range from high thrills to no thrills.

- I am sure that the people in Montana don't think they're speciaL as they are, and they don't think they're as unique as they are.

And I don't think that they think there are any different, but they really are.

- More than 200 paying members watch the cameras from places as far away as Eastern Europe, Australia and Japan.

Meanwhile, Suzanne and James plan to keep expanding Dunrovin's digital offerings with additional live programs and more camera views.

The National Bison Range is an open air laboratory for Bison Research.

The public can watch the yearly gatherings where the herd is inspected and treated.

The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes have a long history of Wildlife Management on the Reservation, restoring habitat and establishing wetlands that are home to dozens of wild animals.

Montana has a variety of markers that signal the changing of the seasons.

Once sure sign, that winter has arrived is the formation of ice on our dozens of rivers.

We followed the Clark Fork River in Western Montana to observe this beautiful process.

- One of the things, I love about winter and Missoula is watching the river and learning and seeing what kind of patterns and forums might emerge.

You first start to get formation of what's referred to as Border Ice, which can sometimes be formation at the edges of the channel So, when you start to see the chunks of ice that are in the water, the technical term that we use, when that first forms is called Frazil Ice.

After the Border Ice, you would start to get this Frazil Ice formation.

Where the river is still flowing, and you have these ice chunks flowing downstream, but they're starting to get denser and denser in terms of how much of the surface of the water is moving water.

When we have ice formation that is frozen to the bed of the river, we call that Anchor Ice.

So you have the Frazil Ice on the surface, the Anchor Ice on the bed, and Anchor Ice we don't see for the most part.

And then periodically that Anchor Ice, will break away and move up towards the surface.

And in some cases contribute to sort of the consolidation of the surface.

But in a river like the Clark fork, we would generally expect there to be some flowing water underneath the surface of the ice.

It's a neat part of our rivers.

It's an important part of our rivers in terms of thinking about connections to climate change and ecosystems important to understand, but also important to appreciate the wonder of it.

- It's extremely rare for rivers to free solid in Montana and with varying degrees of thickness experts, remind us to use great caution when approaching any ice on the rivers.

A careful drive through the National Bison Range on the Flathead Indian Reservation.

Offers spectacular views of the Mission Mountains, and close up views of the Namesake Residents.

Bison may look sleepy and slow, but they're strong resilient animals.

Tribal elder, Shirley Treben loves spending time here.

- Our families would come picnicking and gazing at the Buffalo.

And also another attraction was the White Buffalo big medicine, now that was turned back over to the tribes.

That means quite a bit to all of us, to be able to come here and realize it's home.

It's always was, makes my heart happy to be here.

Up here especially like you said, it's like the top of the world.

I really love it here.

- In our final story, we meet some community college retirees.

Who have found the secret to happiness in the simplest of things friendship, volunteering, and camping.

Spring rains are drenching Lake Alva and it's lonely campsites.

However, some very important guests are about to arrive.

- I'm always amazed at the colors.

Look at that.

- [Narrator] Retirees, Tim Kelliher and his wife Sandra Poulack have been driving for five days.

They make this trek every May escaping the heat of Tucson for the cool of Montana's forest.

- A little more this way.

- [Narrator] Tim and Sandra and their dog Lilly have volunteered as camp hosts at Lake Alva for years.

- We are home- - Feels good.

It does.

- [Narrator] 11 Miles away and two weeks earlier, retirees Mike Tweeten and his wife Lisa Holturf arrived at River Point Campground.

Mike and Lisa have hosted here as long as Tim and Sandra have hosted Lake Alva.

In fact, the four of them usually make the trip from Tucson to Seeley Lake together, because they were friends well before they ever put down stakes here.

- And the majority of us came from Pima Colleges downtown campus.

It's a big Community College.

- [Narrator] Sandra was a counselor, Tim, a construction lab assistant, and Mike a biologist and entomologist.

Out of these different backgrounds emerged a common bond, the great outdoors.

- We would plan weekends and camp and like get five, six sites together and it was just fun.

- So the four of us ended up developing a really close friendship.

As the four friend began to ponder retirement, they knew they wanted to stay active.

- We were daydreaming about, what are we going to do when we retire?.

- We've always talked about camp hosting, and so I started looking @volunteer.gov.

- We were still just talking and thinking.

It was like, should we do it?

Or should we not?

- [Narrator] Then fate nudged them into action.

- Tim had a health scare and that was really a push to say, you know what?

Life is zipping by.

It is time to do this.

If we're going to do this.

- [Narrator] Neither couple had seen their campgrounds before they arrived.

It was love at first sight.

- It takes my breath away.

It's just gorgeous.

- I'm not a religious man or anything like that, but it does help the soul.

Just to be out in nature.

- I think we both fell in love with it.

As soon as we got here at the lake and the river and just everything about it.

- Couldn't ask for a better place.

In fact I've told a lot of campers.

This is not only the best job in the world, but the best place in the world.

- [Narrator] It may look perfect, but the hosts have lots of work to do before the campers arrive.

There are leaves and needles to be raked, fire pits to clean and bathrooms to sanitize, and nobody seems to love the work more than Tim.

- He's amazing.

He should be the poster child for Camp Post.

- Tim's got the biggest heart in the world, always happy to help out everybody.

- Tim can't sit still.

- Hi guys.

How you all doing?

You don't want to grow old.

Sit in some chair.

You just want to keep moving forward.

Never stop.

No matter what.

You've grown a few inches.

You cannot stay stationary.

If you get stationary, somebody's going to run you over.

- [Narrator] So beyond their normal hosting duties, Tim volunteered before friends to paint all the speed bumps in the campgrounds.

He also repainted Alva's old wooden map.

- If you see something broken or worn out, fix it.

I got all the time in the world.

- [Narrator] Tim's background as a Combat Engineer with the army Rangers, means he can fix just about anything.

Each one is 20 Voltage.

- Our whole purpose is to try and take any weight we can off the Ranger.

- They do a lot more than what it says in the description.

- [Narrator] Ranger, Eric Bert says, campers take notice that these hosts are going the extra mile.

- It's nice to have them here.

It's nice to have a little bit of authority run around.

- We were pulling in, it was all raked and clean.

- Visitors comments even on small stuff like that, to where, seeing the lines from a rake around the Campsite.

It tells folks that they care and are keeping track of things.

- [Narrator] Tim and Sandra, aren't just leaving their mark on the campground.

They've sanded and refinished the Bear Cubs that welcome visitors to Seeley Lake and Sandra volunteers at the historical society.

- You gotta play the Organ, dust the skeleton.

Make sure the grizzly bear furs are fluffed up and ready.

So it's a blast.

Okay.

That's good.

- [Narrator] While Sandra plays the Pump Organ for visitors.

Her husband has found another job that needs doing right outside the museum.

- Do good for other people.

- That's where the real joy is.

- [Narrator] This year they brought more friends from the college to share the joy.

Eddoren and Ken and Anne Marie buys through their weight into volunteering.

Every Sunday, the whole group got together for potlucks and pizza nights.

There is one very difficult part of the job though.

Saying goodbye, when the summer's over.

- It gets harder every year.

It really does.

- It's a little bit bittersweet, but knowing we'll be back, it makes it easier.

- If I dropped dead right now, I'd be the happiest person in the world.

Don't need nothing.

Got everything.

Got a good wife, great dog, grandkids, kids.

You got friends out here in the woods.

What else do you need in life?

That's it rolled up in a box.

- Tim and Sandra and Mike and Lisa hope to recruit more of their colleagues to volunteer as camp hosts with them next Spring.

They figure if they've learned the secret to happiness, why not share with others?

We're happy to share our show with you today.

We'd like to thank the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes and the staff at the National Bison Range for their help.

The National Bison Range is open during daylight hours only.

Weather and road conditions permitting.

Closing times very seasonally and will be posted.

Report to the visitor center when you arrive.

So many of our stories have been suggested by viewers, just like you leave a story idea on our Facebook page or write us at Backroads of Montana The university of Montana, Missoula Montana 59812.

You can watch previous episodes of our show at montanapbs.org, or pick up a DVD at your local library.

And with this show, we've reached a milestone or a mile marker if you will, 50 episodes of the Backroads of Montana.

Thank you for watching all these years.

And if you keep watching the show, we'll keep covering the Backroads of Montana.

I'm William Marcus.

Thanks for coming along.

- Backroads of Montana is made possible with production support from the greater Montana foundation.

Encouraging communication on issues, trends, and values of importance to Montanans.

The Big Sky Film Grant and The University of Montana.

♪It's my home.

♪From Mountain Peak to Prairie Ln places I have known, ♪ ♪and I'm bound to ramble.

Yes, I'm bound to roll.

♪ ♪when I'm in off the road now, my Montana is my home.

♪ ♪Come in off the road now, you know I'm heading ♪ ♪ Home