Director’s Statement from Adam Grunseth
Since high school, I’ve dreamed of making documentary films. I got my start in visual storytelling as a teenager in the small town of Stayton Oregon, first through a school video production class, and then as a volunteer at the community TV station in Salem. I then fell into a career in local TV news. After a decade working in television, I left the corporate broadcast world, starting my own production company, with the hope that I’d finally have time to pursue documentary filmmaking. But running my own business proved all-consuming, and the “right time” to make a film always seemed just out of reach.
Adam editing video at the community TV station in Salem Oregon in the year 2000.
Adam and on-air talent Katie Boer shooting an episode of Extreme Katie.
Eventually, I realized that waiting for the perfect moment was a trap. So I stopped waiting. With no funding, no ability to pay a crew, and just a twelve-year-old Canon C100 camera, I decided to start where I was, with what I had.
When I set out to choose a subject for my first feature documentary, I wanted to make something uplifting; Something that celebrated achievement and resilience, and would leave audiences feeling optimistic at the end. My own teenage years had been shaped by the summers I spent working at Butte Creek Scout Ranch, an Old West-themed camp where I was given real responsibility. Even back then, I felt that Butte Creek was a story worth telling. The idea stayed with me for decades, and when I finally returned, I hoped I’d find the story of grit and accomplishment I had always imagined.
The year 2000 summer staff at Butte Creek, featuring documentary director Adam Grunseth as a teenage staffer.
What I found was both familiar and very different. Staffing shortages, aging infrastructure, and near-constant crises had taken their toll on the camp. What I set out to document as a celebration of camp culture evolved into something more raw and honest: a story about resilience, about young people thrust into impossible circumstances, doing their best to hold it all together.
The process of shaping the film was anything but straightforward. In the edit room, the story went through multiple revisions. At one point, it was a straightforward accounting of the summer’s major events, told through interviews with many staff members. In another version, it leaned more like a feature-length promotional video, highlighting the experiences Cub Scouts have and the unique opportunities the camp provides. Yet another cut focused almost entirely on the hardships, becoming a survival story that documented the physical and emotional toll of the summer. Each approach revealed something true, but all of them felt incomplete. There was something else to the Butte Creek experience that they just weren’t capturing.
Coffee- A critical tool when editing a feature documentary.
Seventeen year old Josie ended up being the perfect subject for the film.
The breakthrough came when I realized the true story wasn’t just about what happened, but about what it meant. For Josie, a seventeen-year-old stepping into her first summer as staff, it meant finding a place she could fit in. Josie carried both a chronic illness and the quiet weight of feeling like she never fully belonged. And yet, despite the challenges, she found at Butte Creek what she had been searching for all along: a place where she was accepted, valued, and part of something bigger than herself.
At its core, Butte Creek is about stepping into the unknown, rising to meet impossible challenges, and discovering who you are in the process. It’s a coming-of-age story not just for Josie and her fellow staff, but in many ways for me too, as a filmmaker learning to stop waiting, and to trust in the story as it revealed itself.
I hope this film resonates with anyone who has ever felt overwhelmed but chose to try anyway. I hope it inspires audiences to take action, even when the conditions aren’t perfect. And in a time when our divisions so often overshadow our shared values, I hope it reminds people of what’s possible when we come together for a common purpose.