Meet Tom Owens & Tina Smiley, Blackrock District, Toppings & Spread Creek Ambassadors
2026 is Tom Owens’s third summer as a camping ambassador at Toppings and Spread Creek. While his wife Tina Smiley was with him last year, 2026 is her first year as an official Friends of the Bridger-Teton volunteer directly supporting the BTNF. “Last summer I jumped in the car and joined Tom. I thought it would be for two weeks, but I spent the whole summer because I enjoyed it—the landscape and helping people—so much. This summer I wanted to make it official.”
Since retiring 11 years ago, Tom has done significant amounts of volunteer work on public lands, including at Gila Cliffs National Monument, on the Coconino National Forest (outside of Flagstaff, Arizona), at Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge in southwestern Nevada, and on the Custer-Gallatin National Forest.
Volunteering is also important to Tina. “I think volunteering is an important part of making our society work and move forward,” she says. “Also, it gets me out and around people and I love national parks and forests and being out in nature.”
The couple especially enjoys their volunteering for the Bridger-Teton National Forest supported by FBT because it is for a significant amount of time. “We’re there for three solid months, which gives me a feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction” Tina says. “A lot of volunteer gigs are two weeks or a month, but I really like the idea of putting down our camp and that is our home for several months.”
As a retired wildlife biologist—Tom worked for Washington Fish & Wildlife for 35 years—when not actively performing his duties as a camping area Ambassador, Tom enjoys wildlife watching. “My career was in Washington state, so I think bison and bears are cool,” he says. “And I think moose are wonderful. I’m easily entertained by all forms of wildlife.”
Tina really enjoys connecting with the international visitors on the BTNF. “I’ve met people from all over the world and I love that,” she says. “People from Europe, Asia, Mexico, the Middle East—they make a huge effort to get to the Tetons and to stay in a campground on the BTNF and I like to talk to them.”
Fun Facts:
Tom was a wildlife data manager for Washington Fish & Wildlife and got to work on the projects of wildlife biologists statewide. “My experience went from western pond turtles to bald eagles and everything in between. I had a glorious 35 years of doing data management and research,” he says.
When she was 20, Tina was hired to fish king crab in the Bering Sea. After that, she settled in Homer, Alaska, where she lived in an off-grid log home she built by hand with her then-husband and owned and operated an assisted living home for developmentally disabled and mentally ill children and adults.