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Why Montana Grit Outdoors Exists
" When Montana Grit began I was unaware that I longed for the very things that happen within the organization, after getting to know the women we have served so far, I finally feel like I am a part of something."
A Letter from Our Founder, Breane Lindvall
Montana Grit Outdoors exists because silence is not a character trait. It is a disease. And I know exactly what it costs, because I watched it collect its debt from the people I loved most.
“I built it from a vow I made after watching my grandmother — a fierce, formidable woman leave this world without ever fully knowing how much she mattered.”
My name is Breane Lindvall. I am a Montana native, a fourth-generation product of military and first responder service, and the founder of Montana Grit Outdoors. What follows is the story of what that lineage cost the women in my family — and why I chose to serve the women who serve.
BORN INTO SERVICE
I grew up in a Montana town of nine hundred people where service was not a career path — it was the family vocabulary. My great-grandfather John served across three wars: World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. My grandmother enlisted in the Army at eighteen and spent years as a 911 dispatcher. My grandfather Lenny served as a military policeman before becoming the town sheriff. My grandfather Gordon was an Air Force survival instructor. My uncle Garth served as a sniper in 1974 near the end of Vietnam and deployed again to Iraq in 2005. My uncle John enlisted in the Marines, serving in combat during Desert Storm. Two of my brothers deployed as combat veterans to Iraq. Others from my family served in the Army National Guard, one of them spending a year overseas.
Between the generations of my family, nearly every branch of service and theater of American conflict is represented. Service was not a chapter in our story. It was the whole spine of it.
I grew up like any other Montana kid would - feral and free. Drinking from the garden hose and coming home when the street lights came on. Hiking miles into mountain lakes at only five years old, never being carried. Riding in the bed of an old pickup truck down rutted roads to a cabin buried deep in the timber. Fishing, climbing trees, and living year-round on wild game, elk being the priority because of the abundance of meat it provides. My father hunted everything the land offered.
He taught me, without ever stating it directly, that the wilderness is the one place that will not lie to you. It requires you to be fully present, providing peace and contentment while treading on the building blocks of literal survival.
INHERITED WEIGHT
Life was full until 1996, when my mother died unexpectedly at twenty-nine years old. I was nine. I was the last person to see her breathing and I was the last one to see her go.
My siblings and I moved in with my grandmother. She kept food on the table and a roof over our heads. But there was one very important thing that she did not know how to do, show love. There was never a discussion about my mothers death, grief, emotions, interests, or anything at all.
My mother's death was extremely traumatic. At only nine years old I forged the chains of guilt and shame. I suppressed my pain and stored my memories in a place where I didn't have to access them, never talking about it because that is what I was taught to do.
My grandmother did not grow up in a household filled with love. Her father wore many scars from his time in the military and my grandmother was the one who had to take the brunt of his pain.
The silence was ever present as a result of the men in our family who came home from wars carrying damage no one had language for.
"At nine years old, I had already learned to carry the family legacy of silence: wrapping guilt and shame into my little heart and locking away the key."
As I grew older and started a family of my own, what I had stored began to surface. Anxiety. Persistent, sourceless fear. Professional help gave me the understanding for what I was experiencing — and then revealed something that made me see things even more clearly: I was not only carrying my own wounds. I was carrying my grandmother’s. And hers had come from her father’s.
Her father came home from war wearing his damage on the inside, where no one could treat it. He transferred the weight of it to the people around him. My grandmother absorbed it and spent the rest of her life in its shadow — fierce, formidable, deeply loved by the community around her, and never fully certain of any of it.
After my eyes were opened and started looking back at the moments when I stood by her bedside during her final days, I understood something for the first time: she had lived her entire life as though she were alone in it. The silence passed from her father to her, from her to the people she raised, and from them to me was not a personality trait. It was the repercussion of generations of unaddressed service trauma.
So.....I made a vow. This chain ends with me.
MONTANA GRIT OUTDOORS WAS BORN
MGO became official in January 2021 to honor my grandmother by providing a safe place for female veterans and first responders to belong. A place where they realize how much THEY MATTER. And a place where they get to grow, thrive, and be vulnerable through working together while experiencing the challenges and the healing power that the hunt will bring.
The particular sensation of standing inside something vast and indifferent to your problems interrupts the nervous system patterns that trauma installs. Physical challenge in the outdoors restores the relationship between a woman and her own body, a relationship that years of operating in high-stress environments can quietly destroy. The research is not preliminary. It is robust and growing.
We do not offer clinical programming or structured coaching curricula. What we do is take female veterans and female first responders who are still in the field or women who have walked out of it, and we put them in the one environment that has been proven, across centuries and cultures, to restore the human spirit: the wild, the hunt, and the freedom of the outdoors.
TO EVERY WOMAN WHO HAS SERVED
You have a place in this world and you were created on purpose. You signed the dotted line to start a journey doing a job that most people are not willing to do. That in itself is proof that you are strong, brave, and set apart from the rest because you chose to do hard things.
Sometimes it's easy to lose our way in those hard things. Forgetting how valuable we are and it can also be lonely.
I am here to tell you that you are not alone in this journey, wherever you may be in life. Whether you are a single woman making your way, a wife, a mother, or a career woman. You are doing your best and YOU are seen, heard, and loved. We will always hold a special place for you in our hearts even if we never get to meet.
Thank you for existing and making an impact on those around you. The world is a better place with you in it.
WORTHY
Worthy are you, the one He has made
The one whose hair He hand picked, the perfect shade
He built you a stout heart and a heart that is on fire
A heart with a flame that only grows when she suffers
Worthy are you to carry this flame,
like the son who carried our shame
Worthy are you whose heart He built with His hands
She who walks tall un-burnt through the flames
— Bre
