Oregon Field Guide

When the salmon are running up the Columbia River, Native people are there with them. The river is a way of life for the Wy-Kan-Ush-Pum, the Salmon People. Over the last century and a half, they have watched as forces eroded their access to salmon. The stakes in their fight to preserve the salmon, and their way of life, are existential.

Two sisters take over the family business at the Stangel Bison Ranch in Enterprise, Oregon; As the once polluted Willamette River has grown cleaner, it’s attracted hordes of swimmers, motorboaters, kayakers and SUPers. And that’s brought a new problems from overcrowding and incompatible uses; A good cleansing rainstorm in the Wallowas turned out to be one photographer's delight.

Getting into painfully cold water has become a way of life for Ivana Maclay; Open Slopes PDX is making skiing and snowboarding more accessible and welcoming to Black, Indigenous and other people of color; A small group of growers are betting the farm that olive oil might be Oregon’s new pinot noir.

A storybook Christmas comes to life as this small-town, all-volunteer railroad fires up their antique locomotives; Cascades Wolverine Project aims to support wolverine recovery in the Cascade Mountains through monitoring, and community science; The Yoder Mill mill has been in Clackamas County since the 1800's when the Yoder family came out west.

Katie Stearns helps lead a new generation to take up the ancient martial art of shooting arrows from the backs of galloping horses; Revisit the 2009 Bridge Creek Project in eastern Oregon for an update on the success of the role beavers play in the landscape; Anyone who has hiked in a National Forest has seen one of the iconic trail signs crafted by Mount Adams Ranger Station volunteer, Dan Finn.

A father and daughter’s search for the Skyline Trail is as much about a trail lost to time, as it is about how nature helped forge a family’s bonds; Octopuses are incredibly smart, yet the majority of their neurons exist in their arms and suckers and not in their brain, making them as close to alien intelligence as we can find on Earth; Newt Balls Photo Essay.