BIG TIMBER, Mont. -- One of Adrienne Clune's first clues that frontier life would be filled with sacrifice -- and hardly as pretty as she had envisioned -- came the day she had to pose for a family portrait without her beloved makeup. It was enough to make her cry.

"I had all these romantic notions about the frontier and the West," said Clune, a stay-at-home mom from California who gave up salon pampering, a big house and modern luxuries to experience the pioneer life on PBS' "Frontier House."

"The reality," she said as filming wound down last fall, "is it's a lot of hard work."

"Frontier House," which premieres at 8 p.m. today, challenges three 21st-century families to immerse themselves into 1883 pioneer America, spending five months in an isolated Montana mountain valley seemingly untouched by modern man.

Here, they built their homes by hand, carved out a life of subsistence and entertained themselves with simple things.

They left behind running water, indoor toilets and electricity. The kids -- six in all, the youngest just 8 years old -- gave up television, their friends, Nintendo and all music they couldn't make themselves.

There was no reward for survival, no million-dollar prize for being the last one standing. (Each family received a budget to work with.)

The participants said they emerged better people -- more patient, more thankful, more confident.

"The experience itself is the payoff," said Karen Glenn, a Tennessee nurse who, with her husband, wanted her son and daughter to learn self-sufficiency and have a chance to experience what they thought would be a more carefree lifestyle.

"My children," she added, "they know that anything that happens now, they can handle."

Through it all, the families documented their battles and victories, their thoughts and fears, on video cameras provided by producers.

Its producers call "Frontier House" an "experiential history." Homesteading is part of "a great American myth," said executive producer Beth Hoppe. "And what better way to explore the reality of it than with these modern families?"