Big Creek a second home for new manager

For Beau Servo, coming to Big Creek is a bit like coming home again. Servo camped here when he was a kid. In fifth grade in a three-day Glacier Institute program.

Now he's the guy running the show and teaching the kids.

Servo, a University of Montana aquatics biology graduate, is the program manager at Big Creek this summer.

On this day he has his hands full with a group of first graders from Columbia Falls. He's trying to teach them about bugs and fish, and hybrids and non-natives. Big complex theories, that, surprisingly, the kids unravel fairly quickly and easily — especially if you make it into a game of tag, where some kids are the mayflies and others the fish.

They get hands-on with the fish and the bugs, too. It is a field camp after all and Beau is happy to wade out into a raging Big Creek to net up some of Montana's finest bugs — bugs that make up Class A water.

Class A bugs or not, they still make a little girl squeal when Servo puts one in her hand.

"It's an adventure every day," Servo notes with a smile. "You never know what to expect."

By the end of the summer several thousand children and adults will have gone through the Institute's programs at Big Creek. Servo taught at the Institute last summer and now has taken the helm and the headaches of running the place. From plugged toilets to broken-down generators.

He started in March and will be here until October. Two other staffers, Jake Grilley and Dani Minette, went to youth camps here as well.

Servo, 23, is a third-generation Montanan. He graduated from Flathead in '04 and spent the better part of his youth fishing western Montana's rivers and streams. His father lays concrete for a living and there were plenty of days growing up that Servo remembers working hard in the cement.

There were also plenty of days when it was too hot to work so they went fishing instead.

It was a good childhood and Servo admits that he was looking for a career that would let him fish — at least some of the time. So he picked biology and aquatics which kept him close to the rivers, and the gig at Big Creek got him closer even still. Sure, there's work and teaching and kids, but there's down time, too, when you can just sit there and teach and fish.

It's called the good life.

Servo isn't sure what his future holds. But he says he might give a teaching career a go of it.

Many of the kids here haven't had a S'more. Not once. A good quarter of them haven't even been to Glacier Park, even though they live close. Servo's hope is to open their eyes to the outdoor world, even if it's just for a few days.

"I love teaching," he said.