- ANNOUNCER: The Texas Parks and Wildlife Television Series is supported in part by Texas Parks and Wildlife Foundation -- conserving the wild things and wild places of Texas, thanks to members across the state.

Additional funding provided by the Toyota Tundra.

Your local Toyota dealers are proud to support outdoor recreation and conservation in Texas.

Adventure: it's what we share.

- NARRATOR: Coming up on Texas Parks and Wildlife... - Got a nice one on!

- Patriot Anglers is an organization that helps veterans.

- Very nice.

A nice bass.

- We stack them in a sort of a pyramid formation and it gives a solid surface for that new oyster reef.

- The geology of Cibolo Creek Ranch is especially unique.

[theme music] ♪ ♪ - NARRATOR: Texas Parks and Wildlife, a television series for all outdoors.

[gentle music] [fishing line whirs] - ANGLER 1: I think the Patriot Anglers is a great program.

It gives people the opportunity to get away from their daily lives, get away from issues that they may have.

- ANGLER 2: They have a way of bringing veterans together and they've been very nice to us.

We're getting them.

- ANGLER 3: People like myself, you know, we deal with PTSD, TBI, stuff like that, you always got something on the brain.

It's a bunch of stress all the time and this is actually helping me just clear my mind and it is actually a really good feeling.

- It's a good place for you to unload some burden.

[gentle music] I mean, this is great out here.

This is a great service.

Finally, this weekend, I made it, my very first time.

I'm a non fisherman, definitely a non fly fisherman.

At first I wasn't sure what to expect.

They taught me the skills to cast.

- Right back in that corner there.

When we get up there, throw it back in there.

Nice, that's a good cast, you can get a bite right there.

And then just strip it in erratically.

- You just keep bringing it in?

- Mmm-hm.

- SASSAMAN: I'm not popping it hard enough.

[chuckles] Well, I've learned how to fly-cast, I haven't learned how to catch a fish, but [chuckles] I can fly-cast.

Had some good teachers, though.

It's not always perfect, but... we're all a work in progress.

- I was in Iraq in 2002 and was wounded severely.

Came back and had many troubles for a few years.

I'd grown up fly fishing and 'cause of the nature of some of my injuries, I didn't think I'd be able to do it again, but I started slowly and I got into it and I loved it and it became part of my healing process.

[gentle music] The healing property is being out in Mother Nature.

Nature just has a healing effect on people.

It just morphed into a program.

At the end of this year, we'll have taken over 4,000 individuals fly fishing.

[gentle music] - JOHNNY: Patriot Anglers is an organization that helps veterans.

Does that have a dual hook or just one?

- Oh, it's just got one.

- One.

- JOHNNY: A lot of them are suffering from PTSD and other issues.

- It's like an angel fish.

- JOHNNY: People that are suffering severely from PTSD, they've just lost hope.

Fly fishing improves that ability to regain some hope and it does so because it's not an easy thing to do.

It takes a lots of work and a lot of practice.

- I joined the Marine Corps in '05, I got out in '09.

I did a tour in Iraq and 2 in Afghanistan.

Lately, been stressing a lot, so it's something that I needed.

Never fly fished in my life.

Learned how to do it yesterday.

Feeling pretty good about it.

I'm enjoying every bit of it right now.

[birds chirping] [fishing line whirs] - I was in the United States Air Force.

I retired with 40% disability.

Gordy is a little service dog.

[Gordy whines] He's been a helper and a good companion dog.

[upbeat music] Ah, Gordy, get 'em!

[upbeat music] Gordy loves fish.

Gordy will help eat those crappie.

- So I've been able to volunteer for about five years and I haven't served in the military, but just love fly fishing.

And Patriot Anglers has really figured out how to use fly fishing to help veterans heal.

You got one?

[fishing reel whirs] - Got a nice one on.

[water splashes] - COZART: Alright.

Well done, Dave.

- DAVE: I probably did the best of anyone.

I got a four-pound bass.

I got six crappie.

These'll be good eating.

- SASSAMAN: Did you catch anything?

- DAVE: Yeah, we'll get another one!

- SASSAMAN: I'm glad somebody caught something.

[water splashes] - COZART: Oh, there he is.

Raise your rod, raise your rod!

- SASSAMAN: Oh, there went something right there.

- COZART: The big one got away.

- SASSAMAN: Anybody can cast.

I'm proof of that.

It's learning what to do with what you got on the end of the line, that's the secret, right?

- COZART: Yup.

Should we try subsurface?

You can fish either on top of the water or you can fish subsurface.

This is a fly that actually sinks down and fishes subsurface.

Imagine if you're like a bug and you're trying to escape the water before you get eaten, right?

So, like, try to make that bug act like it's fixing to get eaten.

- JOHNNY: It helps them to learn how to focus.

Relearn how to focus.

If you don't concentrate on what you're doing, your fly line is up in a tree or in your buddy's hair or in the grass somewhere.

- [groans] You gotta get back to basics.

Sort of lost it here.

I'm catching everything but what I'm supposed to be catching.

- COZART: The catching will come.

- At this point, I'd be willing to catch a snake.

[chuckles] - COZART: Froggy daddy.

[gentle music] - JOHNNY: Once they start to get the hang of it, what seems monumental at first, seems easy to do.

- ANGLER: Now that's a big one.

Nice blue gill.

- You wanna weigh down to the bottom, stop it at 11.

There you go, perfect.

Once this settles, just some erratic twitches and then stop, and see if they take it.

- Oh, there he is.

[chuckles] Got him!

[chuckles] - COZART: Way to knock the rust off.

Booyah!

[chuckles] - ANGLER: How's it feel?

- Oh, it feels good.

[laughs] - Congratulations.

- Oh, thank.

[chuckles] - ANGLER: That's was good.

- Yeah.

You guys made me feel like I just solved the world's problems!

It's a lesson in patience.

I should give that fish a medal.

- JOHNNY: They catch a fish, all of a sudden, "I've caught a fish; I hope I can catch another.

I've caught three fish; I open and catch five more."

Something that helps them get that hope back.

- Come on God, just one more.

Yeah, I'd like to have one bass.

I feel amazing.

It's great.

It's been a wonderful experience.

For me, it wasn't about the fish, it was more of the camaraderie.

I've gotten to know a handful of amazing individuals and that was the catch in itself.

Alright!

- COZART: It's a little yellow belly.

He hammered the crappie, man.

- ANGLER: Did he?

- Yeah!

Good stuff.

[hose sprays] - And that is a bag of good eating right there.

[aluminum crinkles] - Woo, it's hot.

[gentle music] [grill door creaks] ♪ ♪ - As thankful as we are to the veterans and the participants that we have here, we're just as thankful for those of you that volunteer.

I can't express how important that is and how much a difference that makes.

I can't say enough about what Patriot Anglers has done and what Lew Duckwall has made available to the world.

[camera snaps] It just proves to me that I'm where I ought to be.

Doing what I ought to be doing.

You don't see a miracle every time.

When you do, you'll never forget.

[chokes up] - I'll tell you next time I'm having a bad day, I want you guys around me.

It's been a while since I've had a bad day, so.

Caught a fish.

I didn't catch that eight-pounder.

[chuckles] But he'll be here next time.

[upbeat music] - NARRATOR: To celebrate 40 years of our television series, we are taking a trip back in time to look at some of our earliest episodes.

♪ ♪ - And we have one that's still in research and development, but it looks great.

And we think it's gonna be effective, probably, be on the market in about a year or two.

I wanna show you something.

It has the ability for the eyes to light up.

To give a flash, to give that fear signal.

And then if you wave your hand over it, it changes the frequency.

If it gets deeper, the frequency's gonna change.

- What will they think of next?

- With all the computers and probes on and ready to go, Bucky and I got down to the serious business of fishing.

[funky music] ♪ ♪ [upbeat music] - NARRATOR: They can be flame grilled... or fresh from the bay.

Folks love their oysters.

But what to do with these oyster shells after dinner.

Well, there's another place besides the trash.

- What we're doing is helping to return oyster shells back to the bay.

Oyster shells are a very easy resource to recapture from the restaurants.

So why not grab those shells and put them out in the bay.

- NARRATOR: In Galveston, a hands-on Oyster Shell recycling program is underway.

Tons and tons of old oyster shell... are on their way to a new home.

[back-up beeper] But to tell this tale, we need to back up a little bit.

It's recycling day, and Tookie's Seafood is stop number one.

- If the restaurants buy in on it, and the restaurants then influence their staff to really be a part of it, it makes our job so much easier.

Their servers, their bus boys, their back of the house is taking all those shells, recycling them, putting them in the bins for us.

So that way we can come by every week to collect the shells.

- HAILLE: We began oyster shell recycling in response to the damage to the oyster reefs in Galveston Bay after Hurricane Ike destroyed nearly 60% of the bay's reefs.

So, the Galveston Bay Foundation's mission is to return as many shells to the bay as possible, to provide new oyster habitat.

[shells clatter] - MICHAEL: We then leave the shells out and they cure in the sun for six months.

[shells clatter] This pile here has been collected for about a year, so in a year's time, this is some of the shell we've collected.

It's going to sit here for a little bit longer to be fully cured.

Then we can actually put it back out in the bay, and that's ultimately the goal.

- You're taking it out of its natural environment to eat it, you might as well return what you can to the sea.

I mean, if you want to keep eating oysters in the future, it's a good idea.

- We get to come out here and rebuild reefs.

Do good work to help the environment.

I don't know, it's really rewarding.

- MICHAEL: All right, now we have these 30-pound bags that can then be floated out to our reef site.

And then used to build, we stack em in sort of a pyramid formation.

And it gives a solid surface for that new oyster reef to begin to grow.

[uplifting music] - HAILLE: We've already seen an abundance of oyster growth on these recycled shells, so it's definitely working.

This guy here's pretty unique, you see on the tip here, there is a brand new baby oyster that's growing.

You can really see the old shell here and the new oyster growth.

- NARRATOR: While the increase in oysters is great, a years' worth of mud and muck means new marsh grasses can be planted.

- MICHAEL: So this site in particular was seeing a lot of erosion.

Our goal is to get that marsh back.

- HAILLE: The reefs have been in place for a couple of years, we've got some of that sediment accumulated, and we're going to be planting smooth cord grass behind that reef, in between the reef and the shoreline, to help establish that new marsh habitat.

[splashing] - NARRATOR: And while the reef restoration project will bring much needed habitat to this small stretch of Galveston Bay, the hope is to keep this recycling idea going to improve bays all along the Texas coast.

- And ultimately, these reefs provide that shoreline protection.

We need that support, that buildup of oyster reefs on the bay bottom, and along our shorelines, to better the bay as a whole.

[gentle upbeat music] [wind blowing] [gentle guitar music] - DICK: The scenery on this ranch is absolutely spectacular.

- MARGARET: It's just breathtaking.

- JOHN: It's all broken and mountainous, very rough country.

This is the real thing.

The same buildings restored to their 19th-century configuration.

And terrain that is being restored to the way it looked before the first American settlers came to the area.

- DICK: It's an enormous transformation, it's night and day.

- TOM: He lives and breathes Cibolo Creek Ranch because of the history.

- LOUIS: It's John's legacy.

[dramatic music] - Here we go.

I'm John Poindexter, I am the owner of Cibolo Creek Ranch.

A little brief tour of El Fortin de la Cienega.

The ranch today is a 30,000-acre tract in the center of Presidio County in the Chinati Mountains, and it contains, importantly, three old forts built before the Civil War by Milton Faver.

[upbeat music] The fort here was constructed in about 1858-9, after Fort Cibolo across the ranch in 1857.

Let's look in here.

The history is that Milton Faver, who may have come from Missouri, migrated to this area during the Mexican-American War, then set up shop on the Rio Grande at Presidio, first and foremost a merchant and a cattleman second.

He came to the Cibolo Creek Valley, the first serious water between here and the river, and some of the last serious water between here and Fort Davis, established a bountiful plantation.

The gates were closed, the towers were manned, and the Indians came on, until the American cavalry returned to Fort Davis in 1867.

- The restoration that he has done on these three 1850s adobe forts is just amazing.

It is an exact replica of what was here.

- I know from the pictures, and because I knew the architects that helped restore this place, that these forts were piles of rubble.

[horse neighing] - DICK: He has tried to be as authentic as he could in terms of the materials used and the way that they're used.

- It's entirely made of adobe.

This has now a strengthening agent in it, but it's still adobe.

- They're just beautiful restorations.

You can look at what John's done with the fort, how he's preserved the history of the structure.

It's the same with the land.

[dramatic gentle music] - One of the first things he did is he realized the importance of water and desert, which doesn't seem like a difficult thing to do, but he invested in that.

[water trickling] - JOHN: We have carefully excavated springs where they were clogged up and channeled the water into acequias, irrigation channels that were here originally.

[water trickling] - LOUIS: The cotton woods, the willows, the grasslands, everything that we have out here from a habitat standpoint starts with water.

And he's done a lot of work to make sure that the rains that actual do occur, when they occur, that that water stays within the aquifer that the ranch is on, and it's a matter of slowing it down and trying to give vegetation an opportunity to pull that water in.

- DICK: John has done an enormous amount of range restoration.

- Restoration is a very different matter from buying property and watching it.

- You can't rely on rainfall.

We can chemically treat and rotationally graze our livestock.

You turn it back to grassland, it's almost like you're turning back the clock a hundred years, 200 years.

- DICK: You can go to our fence line and you can see the difference.

- JOHN: That would be what we found when we came to Cibolo Creek Ranch.

- Pretty stark contrast here between the fences with the grass, and obviously, the brush community.

- And what there is on this side is diverse grasses, I mean, you have multiple species on this side that have populated.

[gentle music] - JOHN: I have the conviction that owning a property such as Cibolo Creek Ranch is an obligation to share it with others.

Today, it is a commercial resort, which is visited by quite a number of clientele.

- JOHN H.: John is a very welcoming person.

- Delighted you're here.

It isn't the easiest place to get to, so we thank you.

- GUEST: Here, here.

- JOHN H.: He loves to share his ranch with his friends.

- JOHN: Pull.

[clay thrower clicking] [gunshot cracking] - I got it.

- We have a number of outdoor sporting events.

[gunshot cracking] Clay target ranges.

- Oh!

- JOHN: Good shot.

We offer a mountain tour, which is quite involved.

[gravel road crackles] Truly dramatic vistas.

- DICK: The geology of Cibolo Creek Ranch is especially unique.

We are in the middle of an enormous volcanic caldera.

- LOUIS: There are literally tens of thousands of people that have come here and they learn a lot.

- How to graze the grass down.

We've had to reduce and to control the populations.

- John takes it really personally to make sure that everyone here learns about conservation and culture and history.

- JOHN: This is the most interesting room.

- LOUIS: And it's just a wonderful thing that he does.

[dramatic music] - This was I can assure you 100% brush right here.

Now you see grass all along the slope.

- Anybody who does restoration is doing a tremendous service to this country and John has upped it a notch.

- John has been successful at so many things.

One, decorated Vietnam veteran.

After Vietnam, went and got a PhD in economics.

And then he goes on to form JB Poindexter, so business success, and then this place.

- He has, passion's a good word, but absolute love for what we see here.

He has that same love for the friends that he's built around himself.

[speaking Spanish] - Wherever John decides to invest, he invests in the community and he invests in the people that call that particular community home.

John is a good neighbor.

- JOHN: Please come in.

- Labor Day is important to us because it is not only a time that everybody can make it out there - Morning, girls.

- it's also our anniversary.

- JOHN: This is the 33rd anniversary of our purchase of the ranch.

We'll have 250 to 300 people.

How are you?

We're delighted you're here.

It's a big barbecue jamboree.

Good to see you.

- You, too.

- He stands at the front door and he greets everybody that comes into the party.

- JOHN: [laughs] Yeah.

- TOM: If you have an open bar at Cibolo Creek Ranch you're gonna get all the locals to come out.

If it says 5 o'clock on the invitation, they'll show up at about 3:30, just to make sure that we have a good time.

- Ready!

[cannon booming] [upbeat trumpet music] - Frijoles, how's that?

- Perfect.

- TOM: John serves the beans at the buffet.

- JOHN: Thank you, come on, Joe.

There you are, sir.

- TOM: He makes sure that everybody's having a good time.

He makes sure that everybody's well taken care of.

[upbeat music] - MARY: I think Milton Faver would be so delighted to see what John has done.

He's just brought back what began over a hundred and fifty years ago.

- LOUIS: John Poindexter, he is one of the most gracious hosts you will find.

- JOHN: Thank you very, very much for your kind attendance.

- It speaks to him and his heart.

- He's a great American.

- John's legacy will be where we're standing right now.

What more of a legacy could any person hope for?

[upbeat music] [crowd clapping and cheering] [wind blowing] [frogs croaking] [wind blowing] [wind blowing] [wind blowing] [birds calling] [wind blowing] [wind blowing] [water lapping] [water lapping] [wind blowing] [wind blowing] [wind blowing] This series is supported in part by Texas Parks and Wildlife Foundation -- conserving the wild things and wild places of Texas, thanks to members across the state.

Additional funding provided by the Toyota Tundra.

Your local Toyota dealers are proud to support outdoor recreation and conservation in Texas.

Adventure: it's what we share.