Sweetwater Ranch is eighty acres on a western-Montana mountaintop — fully off-grid, deeply private, and built by hand over years as a personal retreat. It commands roughly 270 degrees of snow-capped range, sits minutes from thousands of acres of public land, and is offered now, turnkey and furnished, to its next steward.
Created and stewarded by Terry L. Fossum — #1 Wall Street Journal & USA Today bestselling author, retired U.S. Air Force Captain, award-winning actor and producer, winner of Fox’s prime-time survival reality show Kicking & Screaming, and the speaker behind the #2 New TEDx Talk in the World. Provenance that travels with the land and raises the standard of how it is kept.
The two lodgings · sleeps fourteen
A real log cabin — warm and private, with a full kitchen, a knotty-pine loft, a glass-shower bath with a bidet, a home theater for the long evenings, and a genuine “Artistic Oak” antique parlor stove. Off-grid, yet wanting for nothing.
A frontier saloon and bunkhouse the owner built board by board — an ornately carved back-bar, its own parlor stove, the named Doc Holliday Suite, and knotty-pine bunk rooms. Its own heritage mark within Sweetwater, furnished with century-old antiques.
The particulars
- Price
- $2,600,000 · for sale by owner · buyers’ agents welcome
- Location
- Gold Creek, Montana (Powell County) · mailing Helmville, MT 59843
- Land
- 80 deeded acres — two contiguous 40-acre parcels · open meadow and forest, mostly usable, gentle ground · ~270° snow-capped views
- Buildings
- Log Main Cabin (sleeps 4) · the Whiskey Ridge Saloon & Boarding House bunkhouse (sleeps 10) — fourteen beds in all
- Furnishings
- Sold furnished & turnkey — genuine century-old antiques alongside full modern amenities
- Systems
- Fully off-grid: solar · private well · on-site septic · Starlink high-speed internet
- Water
- Private well, plus a natural spring on the land
- Privacy
- Surrounding parcels 40+ acres and almost all unoccupied; minutes to thousands of acres of public land
- Amenities
- Shooting range · two fire-pit hangouts with an outdoor wet bar · indoor and outdoor kitchens · helicopter-accessible meadow
- Recreation
- Deer on the property · public-land elk & deer hunting minutes away · Blackfoot River & Clark Fork fishing
- Heritage
- In the historic Gold Creek district, where Montana’s gold was first discovered in 1852
- Access
- ≈ 2 hours from Missoula International Airport — or by helicopter, straight to the meadow
- Taxes
- ≈ $1,745 / year total (2025, both parcels) · no Montana state sales tax
- Rights
- Mineral rights not included · sold as-is, turnkey