Major support for Oregon Field Guide is provided by... [ ♪♪♪ ] WOMAN: Come on!

There he is, there he is, there he is.

[ exclaims ] Get him out of there, buddy!

Good boy!

[ laughing ] WOMAN: Whoo, high five!

Yeah!

JAHN: Next, on Oregon Field Guide: It's an ancient Oregon road trip, and by the end, you'll never look at rocks like these the same way again.

Then, it's a coastal bounty of delicious eats, harvested from the wild.

WOMAN: These are really beautiful.

But first...

It is bright out here in the middle of the Alvord Desert.

But when the sun goes down, the stars that you can see in a place like this are phenomenal.

Now, it used to be, if you wanted to take pictures of the stars at night, you had to be kind of rich.

But thanks to changes in technology, astrophotography is more accessible to the rest of us.

[ insects chirping ] I have this app, and I can use it to see the sky.

So, like, if I move it here, there's a bright star right there.

And I can know that that's Cygnus.

So I'll probably set it up here 'cause there's no cars.

[ whirs softly ] THOMAS: This small device is an updated version of this.

It's an early refractor telescope, and back in 1850, it was used to take the first successful photograph of a star.

Over the years, telescopes got more advanced and a lot more accessible to amateurs like Nico Ferguson.

Want to photograph a galaxy?

Now all you need is a few hundred bucks and a phone.

I think it's really cool to be able to take pictures of, like, these distant objects in space, because the results afterward can be, like, astounding.

[ ♪♪♪ ] There's the constellation of Andromeda about right there.

And that's what the telescope sees.

Right now, it's taking a whole bunch of exposures of the object, and then it's going to use all of those images and stack them together to get more light on the object.

All right, so I can stop exposing.

Now I have my image.

So now you can see the galaxy, a whole bunch of stars around it, and if you zoom in, you can see one of its little satellite galaxies that it captured.

Astrophotography equipment can range from a few hundred bucks to a few thousand, depending on how good you want your images to look.

Josh Romberg has a more complex set-up, but fortunately, he doesn't have to travel far to use it.

The best site for astrophotography for me is the one that I can go to every night.

And for a lot of us, that's our backyard.

I'm sure there'll be astronomers out there who will not love my cable management, but it works.

[ laughs ] Always good to take the lens cap off.

We call the actual telescope part the OTA, which means the optical tube assembly.

Essentially just means "telescope."

We just like to make things complicated.

And we love acronyms.

Right up here is a smaller telescope... Josh goes over the details of his set-up, lots of complicated jargon that mostly went over my head.

Right here is your focuser, focus boss, dew heaters.

This is my micro computer.

It's the filter wheel inside here.

Those are going to be your narrow-band filters.

That's the thing we want to focus on, narrow-band filters.

Filters that allow Josh to photograph nebulas from his backyard in Portland.

One of the really cool things about narrow-band imaging is that, on a night like tonight, where we have the moon just ripping behind us, you can still cut through all of the light pollution that not only the moon provides but also the light pollution from just our city lights here in town.

The artificial light from urban areas has created what astronomers call sky glow, essentially a layer of haze that blankets the night sky.

With the naked eye, we really can't see much, but a telescope equipped with narrow-band filters can see plenty.

So it's starting to get dark out, which is always exciting.

And we'll start our polar alignment here.

Astrophotographers use the North Star as a reference point to align their telescopes with the Earth's axis.

Once that's done, the process can be mostly automated.

Okay, so now at this point, you kind of like tiptoe away from it.

We're looking good here, at least enough to start taking some images.

We're looking through a lot of atmosphere.

And-- But you can start to pick up on some of the nebulosity that's happening along here, along this wall.

[ ♪♪♪ ] So tonight we're going to be looking east in the sky towards the constellation Cygnus.

At the very tail of Cygnus is a star called Deneb, and just below that star is the North American Nebula, which is what we're imaging right now.

Oh, there-- So here we go.

These are the moments where I look at the screen and then I look back at my telescope, and then I look at the screen and then I look at the sky, and you just put it all together, how incredible it is that this light has been traveling towards us for however many hundreds of thousands of light years and then it lands in my telescope.

You think about the scale of it, and this is tens or hundreds or thousands of light years across.

Enjoying the night sky and viewing it visually, but then also combining photography to capture what your eyes can't see, it's like the perfect pairing.

So this here is one of my favorite spots locally to come and do astrophotography.

With the view of the lake and then Mount Bachelor in the distance and this ridge, it just creates a really nice composition.

[ ♪♪♪ ] Grant Tandy takes a different approach to capturing the night sky.

His specialty is time-lapse, which involves taking hundreds of photos in a fixed location throughout the night.

These incredible images don't require much gear-- just a camera, tripod, and some patience.

I'm going to pull my camera out and see if we can figure out exactly what we're going to do here.

So tonight, the core of the Milky Way should be, like, just to the right of Mount Bachelor.

As Earth rotates east, the sky will rotate west, and that'll give us a nice perspective of the rotation of Earth.

I think we've found our spot.

This is kind of the composition that I've found that worked best for capturing half shining light off the water and half Milky Way in the sky.

When you're doing a time-lapse, you're taking a bunch of longer exposures and then kind of stacking them together in post to have enough frames to do a short video.

If we zoom in a little bit here, you can see a lot of stars near the core of the Milky Way.

I think I'm going to just let it rip.

We're on a thousand frames here that it's going to shoot.

And so it started the first one there, and it will continue to take photos for the next four hours.

[ ♪♪♪ ] We're on this tiny little globe, and it's one little aspect of this universe that we're a part of.

It's just this really humbling feeling to be out here under the sky.

[ ♪♪♪ ] GILFILLAN: Oregon has one of the most varied landscapes anywhere.

There are mountains, deserts, gentle valleys, and miles and miles of coastline.

But it wasn't always like this.

WOMAN: So here we are at Baker County, Oregon, the Elkhorn Mountains, and importantly, the place where Oregon began.

The rest was the ocean-- Idaho was the beach.

You could've been right there with sand and plesiosaurs jumping out of the water, and there was no West Coast other than Idaho.

When it comes to Oregon's ancient beginnings, Ellen Morris Bishop is one of the best time travelers around.

So we asked her to show us where these early origins have been uncovered and what they reveal.

GILFILLAN: So tell me how the Elkhorns fit into this.

BISHOP: The Elkhorn mountains are all part of a set of volcanic islands and arcs, and they crashed into North America and become the first inkling of Oregon that we have.

A couple hundred million years ago, North America looked nothing like it does today.

But there was about to be a tectonic shift.

Arcs of volcanic islands riding the edge of the ancestral Pacific Plate traveled north, slowly sideswiping and adding land, known as terranes, onto the North American Plate.

Some of these terranes got wedged behind a peninsula on that continental plate.

This ancient mash-up, including the Wallowa Terrane, makes up much of the current landscape of northeastern Oregon.

BISHOP: And today, we can see the different chunks of island arcs in the Wallowa Mountains, in Hells Canyon, and then we'll see what happens to them when they end up smashing into a continent.

Perfect, let's go.

Yeah.

All right.

[ ♪♪♪ ] Ellen always had an interest in geology, but coming to Oregon State for grad school ignited a passion that has never gone away.

This is 1974, I think.

Plate tectonics is beginning to become really a thing, and the idea of islands and land masses that smashed into one another in, you know, the grand game of global bumper cars was something that was, you know, really pretty interesting and exciting to me.

Drawing on a life-long love of photography, Ellen also leads photogeology tours, like this one to Leslie Gulch in 2011.

What you're looking at here is final squeezings of the volcano.

[ shutter clicks ] Rocks don't usually run away from you when you're trying to take pictures of them.

But they have a superb story to tell if you sit down and listen to them.

I can just take out a camera and spend some time worrying about angles and light, and I think to combine the creative thought of art and creative thought of science is a very cool thing.

Today, she's the author of several books, including the seminal In Search of Ancient Oregon, which one the Oregon Book Award for nonfiction in 2004.

Traveling east gives us our first glimpse of the ancestral island arc that became the Wallowa Mountains.

GILFILLAN: So those are the Wallowas?

BISHOP: Right, they represent the Wallowa Terrane, and they extend all the way into Idaho.

Our next stop is Hells Canyon, where this ancient Oregon road trip takes us into Idaho.

So we're going to go up here and look at a greenstone.

Got it.

Looking at this rock, you can see it's still kind of green.

But it has little white crystals in it, and that's a mineral called plagioclase.

And it tells us that this came from an island arc, or at least from the same kind of geologic process.

So for a 280-million-year-old rock, this tells quite a story.

A little farther down the canyon... Hey-- Oh, there they are.

Those are the holes I was looking for.

...we find clues about where these rocks came from.

Oh, I see them.

Yeah.

They're not very deep.

Those aren't natural?

No, they're not natural.

They were made by a person with drill.

[ both laugh ] These were holes that are drilled to figure out where these rocks came from, and they do that by looking at the magnetic field in these rocks.

Without getting too technical, our relationship to the Earth's magnetic field varies according to where we are on the planet.

When these rocks were forming a couple hundred million years ago, magnetite grains, like tiny compasses, aligned with that magnetic field as they sank to the ocean floor, preserving their location information forever.

The orientation of the magnetite grains tell us the latitude that it came from.

So it came from probably 25 degrees north, and that's about where central Mexico is today.

Wow, so this came from the latitude...

This came from the latitude of Mexico.

This is not a true Mexican rock.

[ laughs ] Okay, okay.

Mexico wasn't there at the time.

Right, right.

Okay.

It was just moved along up the coast.

Just moved along.

It's like a very, very inept tractor-trailer driver.

[ laughs ] You know, just sort of scraping along the side of the freeway, leaving little pieces of their truck behind.

[ shutter clicks ] Our next stop takes us deeper into Hells Canyon to see some more rocks.

But these particular rocks tell us not so much where or how they formed 230 million years ago but what the climate was like and who was around then.

Okay, so this is a Triassic limestone, and these rocks were deposited during a time when the dinosaurs were just appearing-- cute little things that would've been running around about the size of chickens.

And it's important because limestones only form in warm waters.

And so you get all these little dimply textures in 'em.

They're like little pimples, and there are a few fossils, mostly little shellfish.

But what interests me about this particular outcrop, there are some really interesting textures over here, but I think what they are is kind of like miniature stalactites or stalagmites.

So this is kind of like caving without having to be in a cave.

[ Gilfillan chuckles ] The road deeper into Idaho takes us closer to the big impact zone where the Wallowa Terrane crashed into the North American Plate and the front end of that careening tractor-trailer.

Mm-hmm, yeah, that's a greenstone, all right.

We're finding the same kind of greenstones that we saw in Hells Canyon, and if you can see, they're a little more deformed.

They have some joints developed, and that comes from being under more stress.

But these rocks here weren't heated all that much, and so consequently, instead of sort of melting and bending and folding, they just fractured.

So this tells a geologist that we're getting closer to something that had a lot of force behind it.

As we get closer to that continental crash zone, the local rock starts to show the effects of rising temperatures and pressures.

These rocks are highly squashed outcrop of greenstones.

So this is kind of getting close to the front bumper of that tractor-trailer.

Yeah, it's really more like we're sitting in the cab.

Oh, okay.

Look at how shiny these rocks are.

Oh, I can see them glittering.

So these micas are a diagnostic clue that this is a high-pressure, high-temperature rock, where one thing smashed into another.

Traveling at the Salmon River Canyon takes us right into the zone where the two land masses sutured together.

Here, the heat and pressures rise to the point of creating actual gemstones.

These are garnets, the red rocks in here.

And this one is a good example.

So, see, it has a little spiral arm coming off here and another spiral arm coming up off here?

GILFILLAN: Yeah.

So those are called rotated garnet, and they show how the whole fabric of the rock has been twisted, so there's been a lot of uplift involved here.

Really hot, a lot of pressure as this was forming.

So we are basically in the heart of the suture zone right now.

While it's hard to top twisted gemstones, our last stop in this ancient mash-up of heat and pressure does not disappoint.

GILFILLAN: Wow!

This is sort of the ultimate in what we've been looking for.

Here, as all of this suturing is happening, it's also doing its sideswiping motion.

The rocks here melted, allowing them to bend and fold and stretch into remarkable shapes.

Kind of like having chocolate taffy, vanilla taffy, and strawberry taffy, kind of mush them up and down and back and forth.

There's just been a lot of compression.

GILFILLAN: So we're right at the crushed bumper here.

This is the crushed bumper, yes.

So that's what happens when a series of islands runs into a continent, we literally suture it with granite.

GILFILLAN: Wow.

Okay, well, I guess that about sews it up.

Suture zone, get it.

A little suture humor.

[ both laughing ] Oh, very good.

[ ♪♪♪ ] [ geese cawing ] [ tweeting ] WOMAN: The Oregon Coast is a rugged and very dynamic place.

No two days on the Oregon Coast are the same.

It's just constantly changing and it kind of constantly keeps you on your toes.

I grew up in the Northeast, in both New York City and Pennsylvania.

And came to the Oregon Coast about 12 years ago, but just fell in love with the ecosystem as a whole.

[ ♪♪♪ ] I grew up with two chef parents, and we would go foraging for mushrooms and things like that, but living on the Oregon Coast, there's just so much food around us.

I studied marine biology and did not know that I was going to end up back in the world of food and teaching people specifically about food, but being able to really see food in its natural ecosystem and knowing how to harvest it sustainably and ethically is very empowering.

We have these dark, really murky waters, and the reason that our coastline is so dark is it's full of micronutrients, it's full of microalgaes and plankton and all this stuff that is fueling the life on our shores.

Foraging is how we've gotten food forever.

From mussels to clams to crabs, it's kind of just like a classic pastime of being on the coast, and it really helped me learn way more about this ecosystem than I had already known.

Mussels are really abundant on the Oregon Coast.

They live in this mid-tide zone, so you don't need the lowest tides to be able to access them, but you definitely need a low tide.

They are attached to the rocks and attached to other mussels with these little threads.

If that thread is still in the mussel, the mussel is still alive, so in terms of freshness, cutting that thread so that it's not getting ripped out of the mussel is a really good idea.

And then you always have to pay attention to the water so that you don't get swept away.

[ chuckles ] If you notice when you're scanning the rocks and if you think about the way that the tide works, the ones on the top are getting food less often, so you tend to find smaller mussels at the top and you find really, really big mussels at the bottom.

Some of these mussels have an entire ecosystem living on top of them.

So this one shell, for instance, has six gooseneck barnacles, a snail, 20 other barnacles growing on it, and if you can find mussels that have almost nothing else growing on them, do that so that you're not taking from this whole ecosystem even more than we need to be.

You're allowed to harvest up to 72 mussels per day and you are able to harvest shellfish recreationally all year, it's just a matter of knowing what the tides are doing and then being safe and not putting yourself into a risky situation.

All right, we probably have enough mussels for a little meal.

The nori is this dark green, almost brown seaweed that hangs off the rock in these long strands.

We have a lot of bigger brown kelps like this laminaria.

So you see other algae, maybe microalgaes growing on the surface of it, so it's a little bit rougher and darker, and you can feel almost a texture to it.

And that might not necessarily be the best piece that I would want to eat, but these other pieces that are cleaner and smoother and don't have that growth on them are great.

[ ♪♪♪ ] I've worked in environmental education for about 10 years now and have found, doing research and working in labs, that really the education and the communication side of science is kind of where my heart and soul is.

How's it going?

WOMAN: Good, how are you?

Good.

Welcome.

[ laughs ] I love taking people out into this environment and actually getting out into the field and experiencing these places.

You guys want to go to the beach?

Okay, cool.

So we're going to spend a lot of time, like, just walking around and looking at all the little critters and seeing what we can find.

That anemone wall was incredible.

You can see the top of the tide line, and that green what looks like moss is actually an algae, a seaweed.

You see different zones in the intertidal, and we call this zonation in biology and ecology.

Below the mussel bed is the low-tide zone.

You get to see areas that are not normally exposed to air at all.

Sea stars are very, very heavily munching on this mussel bed and kind of keeping it in check.

They will hug a mussel shell and with those suction-cup-like tube feet that they have, they'll pry the mussel open about a centimeter, and then they take their whole stomach and they stick it into the mussel shell and digest it, and then they pull their stomach back into their body.

Like, take Captain Monster mussel over there...

Yes, yes, yes.

Like, the big... How old will--?

How old do mussels live?

They can live about 60 years.

Yeah.

WOMAN: A mussel can live 60 years?

A mussel can live about 60 years.

So this is the chiton, the thing with the plates, but this is a different species, and it's right next to two baby starfish.

[ women exclaim ] A lot of people just haven't fully immersed themselves in these environments or have experienced them but haven't actually dove deep into what everything is and how everything's interacting, so it's always just very fun.

They're called sculpin, tide-pool sculpin.

I think that there's so much that people don't know and people don't realize about food and food systems, and when you do forage your own food and you become more attuned to your environment, I think it does inspire you to make better decisions around food and, you know, look into really what it takes to get food onto your plate.

Yeah.

[ food sizzling ] I have just always been in the world of food and really also studying the oceans, and it's been very fun to find a way to merge the two and get people out into our coastal ecosystems but also learning about how to harvest your own food and just connecting with our coast in various different ways through foraging and surfing and meeting farmers and fishermen.

[ indistinct chattering ] Oh, yeah.

It's really hot.

Ooh!

The work that I do in my day-to-day life is so in tune with what the tides are doing, and it has just been a really fun way to live, that I can look at how high the river is and know if I have to go to work soon because the tide's coming in or the tide's going out.

It just feels very special to be working so closely with the natural ecosystem.

I just feel very lucky.

[ ♪♪♪ ] You can now find many Oregon Field Guide stories and episodes online.

And to be part of the conversation about the outdoors and environment here in the Northwest, join us on Facebook.

[ birds chirping ] Major support for Oregon Field Guide is provided by... Additional support provided by... and the following... and contributing members of OPB and viewers like you.