Major support for Oregon Field Guide is provided by... [ ♪♪♪ ] MAN: My rappel!

MAN: Oh, my gosh, it's beautiful.

MAN: Good morning, everybody.

Woo!

Let's do it again!

MAN: Nicely done!

MAN: Oh, yeah!

Fourteen and a half.

Yes, that was awesome!

[ people cheering ] There you go, up, up... ED JAHN: Tonight on Oregon Field Guide: It's so beautiful.

MAN: That's quite a contraption.

Yeah, it is, thank you.

When a near-fatal stroke left this firefighter and outdoorsman unable to walk... he got inventive.

This is a nice view.

It's wonderful.

[ gulls calling ] Then, photographer Michael Bendixen takes us to one of the wildest coastlines in America.

But first, Oregon's state animal is celebrated by many, and yet they're still considered a nuisance animal that can be killed at will.

Believers in beavers say there's an increasingly important reason these critters deserve your respect.

What if we got it all wrong with Smokey the Bear?

Maybe it should've been Smokey the Beaver.

It'll all make sense after you see this next story by Aaron Scott about how beavers are helping in the fight against wildfire.

AARON SCOTT: In 2020, the Almeda Fire swept through southern Oregon.

It devastated the towns of Phoenix and Talent, burning thousands of buildings and taking three lives.

Part of the reason the fire was so destructive is that it burnt straight through the middle of the towns along the Bear Creek Greenway.

Oh, yeah, look at the ash sludge.

WOMAN: Look, yeah.

MAN: That's gnarly.

Seven months after the fire, Jacob Shockey and Sarah Koenigsberg took us along to search the greenway for a furry critter that may have helped slow the flames.

SARAH: Oh, and over here, look.

Oh, there's a bunch of little teeth marks pulling the bark off.

ALL: Surprise!

Of course, when you think of preventing wildfires, you probably think of Smokey Bear.

But we're looking for an animal that plays a much bigger role in fighting and recovering from fire: beavers.

Sarah and Jacob help run a nonprofit called the Beaver Coalition.

JACOB: We saw this all across the greenway, where you've got these bank dens.

SARAH: Oh, yeah.

Look how far back it goes.

They're pretty roomy if you crawl up in one, you know.

They're part of a growing movement to partner with beavers to tackle big problems like fire and drought.

JACOB: Many folks have been coming to beaver as we're looking at water scarcity and as we're looking at how do we most impactfully build resiliency into our landscape?

And so the Beaver Coalition sort of grew out of that, and why we exist is to empower humans to partner with beavers.

If you're asking why would humans want to partner with beavers, well, one reason becomes clear as we look down on this beaver dam in downtown Phoenix.

SARAH: That's such an awesome dam.

Beavers created this pond between the highway and Main Street not long before the fire, and it appears to have slowed the flames.

This body of water protected this little strip.

The pond might have even saved the Phoenix Civic Center.

And now the dam is filtering ash from the water for salmon and other animals living downstream.

Just think about how much toxic sludge is now in this pond from the fire runoff.

How nasty it is there and how clean it is there, right before it goes into the creek.

It's like you couldn't ask for better.

To understand what beavers have to do with fire, first we have to understand a little more about the animals themselves.

Beavers are awkward on land, making them easy pickings for predators.

But they are graceful in the water, so they build dams to create ponds and wetlands for protection.

And at the center, some construct their iconic lodges.

Scientists have long considered beavers to be nature's engineers because they reshape the very ecosystem around them.

But recently, scientists have made a new discovery.

As wildfires grow worse with climate change, these beaver wetlands can create an emerald oasis in an otherwise charred landscape.

You can see it in image after image of burns in Oregon, Idaho, and California.

To learn more, we met up with one of the leading scientists, Emily Fairfax, at nearby Ashland Creek.

If you ask someone to imagine a healthy stream or to draw a healthy stream, what they think of, often, is this little, thin stream winding through the landscape that's cool, it's clear.

And that, unfortunately, in most cases, is not what streams should be looking like.

They only look that way now because European settlers trapped millions of beavers and converted their wetlands into farmland.

Things used to look a lot more like this.

A really healthy stream, especially in valleys, especially in sort of lowland areas, should be really messy.

It should be splitting into a bunch of different directions and then coming back together.

There should be so much brush and so much vegetation that it is challenging to walk through.

There should be mud, there should be bugs, there should be fish, there should just be chaos all around you, and that's a healthy stream.

These messy beaver wetlands slow down water and irrigate valley floors as well as any farmer, even in times of drought.

And when fire moves through, they act much differently than simplified streams like Bear Creek.

Emily made this animation to explain what happens.

So what you have is a beaver moves into the landscape, and it's a pretty simplified stream, but he builds that dam.

And as he builds that dam, a pond forms.

And then from that pond, he digs those canals, spreading that water out into the landscape.

And the earth around that beaver pond is like a great big sponge.

It's sucking up water, a wetland is developing, all this biodiversity is happening, it's great, it's beautiful.

And then somewhere a fire starts.

And as that fire moves through the landscape and it approaches that stream, this area that the beaver has built this pond and has dug these canals is so wet, it's so soggy, it's really difficult to burn that.

Emily and her students have spent years poring over satellite images of beaver ponds before and after fire.

These beaver-dammed areas experience about three times less burning than the areas that don't have beavers, so they're significantly more protected from fire.

And when fire does go through them, it's much, much lower intensity, and sometimes it can't go through them at all, it's just too wet to burn.

Those wet areas also provide a safe place for other animals to hunker down in.

And that's huge, especially if you think about some sensitive species where their whole habitat could be destroyed in a fire.

So if beavers can create fire breaks and wildlife refuges all over the landscape for free, you'd think we'd want them everywhere.

But they also flood roads and yards and cut down trees that people like.

So in most Western states, including the Beaver State, the furry engineers are classified as nuisance animals, and there are few limits on hunting and trapping them.

Such was the case for Phoenix.

The last time beavers moved in, the town trapped and removed them.

You know, then after that, they started coming back.

And I said, "No, that's not going to work."

So this time, Matias Mendez called Jacob to help Phoenix live with their furry neighbors.

Matias, how's it going?

The whole clown show's here.

Matias is concerned the dam will keep growing and could eventually plug the culvert downstream and flood the road.

So Jacob is going to install a pond leveler.

It's a device that removes the flood risk but lets the town keep the ecological and fire benefits of the pond.

This is the cage that hides the leak, and this is what we're going to sink out in the pond.

Then we run this over the beaver dam.

And then it's like your bathtub drain, right?

It's keeping it at that level.

Oh, that's great, man.

Jacob's nonprofit, the Beaver Coalition, has funding to install devices like this in the Rogue Basin to help humans and beavers coexist.

But it means Jacob is going to have to get wet.

MAN: You walking or swimming?

Swimming.

[ laughs ] I can barely touch.

A pond leveler is basically a long pipe that runs over the dam out to the middle of the pond, where a cage stops the beaver from blocking it up.

We want to hide this as far from the dam as we can, because beaver will obsess over looking for that leak, and they're not thinking that it's 40 feet out in the pond.

Jacob's hope is that if the beavers thrive here, they'll start to work their way back up the greenway and they'll reshape the landscape to make it more resilient to fire and drought in the future.

We selfishly need the beaver's help.

We don't have enough time or money or people to help bring this creek back to the place it needs to be, and beaver will do that for free.

Beaver are the ecosystem engineer for this landscape, and we can play at it, but they're the professionals.

So we need to defer to the professionals.

[ ♪♪♪ ] You know, living in Oregon, being outdoors is a necessity.

And that necessity has led to some very inventive thinking in Bend.

MAN: We are going to Pine Nursery Park.

They have a wonderfully flat walking trail.

And a paved walking path that is longer than a mile is hard to find in Bend.

My name is Isaac Shannon, and I'm a student.

I am majoring in African studies, and I hope to go on to law school.

I love the outdoors, just connecting with nature, but I have cerebral palsy and mitochondrial disease.

And mitochondrial disease is a genetic condition that affects my energy at a molecular level.

Just basically I get really tired.

I went to one of the Oregon Adaptive Sports community days, and I met Geoff.

He said, "I have this chair that can go off-road."

And I'm thinking, "Wait, what?!"

JULE GILFILLAN: Isaac's talking about Geoff Babb.

So I'm trying to compile photos from Camp Welani.

Geoff is a fire ecologist and a retired wildfire incident commander.

He's also the inventor of the AdvenChair.

So I'm gonna look through some of these and find the pictures I want to put in the newsletter.

This is a fifth-grader named Scarlett.

She is sitting in an AdvenChair and was able to participate in Outdoor School because she had the AdvenChair.

The AdvenChair is a human-powered, all-terrain wheelchair that allows folks with mobility challenges to soak up what Geoff likes to call "vitamin N" for "nature.

It was all to do with my stroke.

One, two, three, up.

I grew up in a small town in the Columbia Gorge, White Salmon, Washington.

And we were outside all the time.

Just being outside was part of who I was.

The legs are a little bit of a problem.

They're a little bit like 2x4s.

GEOFF: Most men would not like their wives to push them around.

[ chuckles ] It's essential for us.

Brake is on.

Geoff and his wife Yvonne spent their whole lives outdoors.

They climbed, hiked, skied, and raised outdoors-y kids.

So I've been watching these tiny little native bees, and they've been curling up inside these mallows.

Isn't that cool, Geoff?

Look at the hairs on that.

I know.

GEOFF: In 2005, I was 48, and one morning I woke up, I just felt horrible.

I was teaching and he called, it was about 2:00 in the afternoon, says he has a headache really bad, he's had it all day, and could I come home?

By the time Yvonne got home, I slurred my speech.

And I thought, "This is just not normal."

And it was at the hospital that the stroke really hit me.

Geoff survived a near-fatal brain-stem stroke.

And while his mind was still sharp, his ability to move was severely limited.

YVONNE: After the stroke, he was struggling to figure out who he was.

You don't just go from a macho firefighter to, you know, some guy in a wheelchair.

GEOFF: As soon as I could be outside, I was.

But I discovered that being on a sidewalk or a paved path was not going to allow me to feel like I was whole again.

And you pulled that thistle out.

Yeah.

To get him back where he needed to be, Geoff and his friends added mountain-bike parts to his wheelchair.

But when an axle broke on a trip to the Grand Canyon, Geoff knew he needed an engineer.

MAN: So there's the Version 1 AdvenChair.

I heard the story of the Grand Canyon and the failure, and then listening to Geoff, he just has such a great attitude that it just rubbed off.

Right then and there, I decided that I could help.

By August of 2017, Jack had turned Geoff's ideas into a solid design for the very first AdvenChair.

There's the AdvenChair in all-terrain mode.

Parts were set to arrive by Christmas.

That November, I had my second stroke.

YVONNE: Geoff is a really determined guy.

Sometimes his friends would call him a bulldog.

But after his second stroke, I mean, he had to learn how to swallow.

Geoff's second stroke slowed him down... but it didn't stop progress on the chair.

And then I would go main wheels.

JACK: So the model that we're looking at today is the Version 3, kind of home-grown right here in Bend, Oregon.

We're pretty proud of that fact.

We're using the strongest axles on the market for mountain-bike components.

We don't want it to break.

There's a roller.

So our suspension system is low-pressure air tires.

We have a foam insert that goes inside of the tire, and they roll over objects super easy.

We have telescoping handlebars.

So Geoff's goal was to create a chair that had enough adjustability so we can suit riders of varying sizes.

So that was a challenge, but we came up with something that's working.

The seat bucket is available in three different sizes.

The seat base is adjustable forward and aft, foot rest has numerous positions.

We never stop tweaking.

It's gonna keep evolving.

GEOFF: To see ten of them lined up at one time, it's like, wow, this is really happening.

I had no idea what it was going to look like.

It's really cool.

All that's left for this version is a trail test, a mission that Isaac Shannon is happy to help out with.

ISAAC: It's so beautiful.

Smith Rock is my favorite place to hike.

My first experience out there was in the AdvenChair, and it was amazing.

It's such a great feeling to be in the chair.

It feels nice and rugged.

I was so tired by the end of the day because I couldn't stop smiling.

GEOFF: That's a nice view.

MAN: Yep.

GEOFF: It's wonderful.

Being outside is so therapeutic.

It's so important.

And not just to the person in the chair, but they all are part of that experience.

MAN: That's quite a contraption.

GEOFF: Yeah, it is, thank you.

In the AdvenChair, I jostle about.

I'm part of this team just like everybody else.

It means so much to me.

JACK: We already have Version 4.0 just floating around in my gray matter right now.

Thank you.

Thank you all.

It's definitely worth it.

Worth the workout.

Cheers.

[ chuckles ] GEOFF: Isaac makes me beam.

It's always been my goal, to make people smile.

And he represents so many other people that I've met along the way that just really wanted to be outside and enjoy nature in a group activity.

MAN: Oh, that's definitely a warm-up.

[ ♪♪♪ ] Many years ago, I backpacked Washington's Olympic Coast.

It was one of the highlights of my life.

I didn't bring a camera, but photographer Michael Bendixen rarely goes anywhere without one.

And when he returned, he brought us this photo essay from one of the wildest coastlines in America.

[ ♪♪♪ ] [ gulls cawing ] [ birds chirping ] [ birds chirping ] [ gulls cawing ] [ ♪♪♪ ] 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.

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