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: For thousands of years, this plant has helped feed the people of the Klamath Basin.

Can wocus be restored for future generations?

Then, why are robots wandering around these lava caves?

But first...

I remember the first time being out on the backroads and I saw a car like this, and I'm like, "What the heck is that thing?

I never thought then that there could be an environmental story somehow connected with these beaters, but there is, and Noah Thomas found it out in eastern Oregon as part of a series of events called the Gambler 500.

MAN: My rig's name is the Corolla Virus.

I paid 300 bucks for it.

The whole goal of the car was to make it as terrible but, like, fun as possible to drive.

[ laughs ] THOMAS: Every spring, the Blue Mountains of northeast Oregon become a gathering place for people united by a shared passion.

It's a passion that's strange and a bit puzzling.

There's lots of old, beat-up cars with names like Whiskey Tango and Mud Light... [ barks ] and White Claw or...

Bat Claw.

It originally was White Claw, and I kind of redesigned it to be Batman-themed.

[ engine revving ] This is the Gambler 500.

And while their vehicles might seem unconventional, these junker jockeys are actually here for an important cause.

MAN: Gambler 500 is this rally-style event that encourages people to come out into the forest and help protect our environment.

People think this is a race of some sort, but it's not.

People drive inexpensive or impractical vehicles that probably should've never been off-road in the first place and go out and clean up the forests.

Cleaning up trash has become sort of ingrained in the Gambler culture.

It's a fair trade-off for the cavalcade of absurd vehicles.

MAN: The cars might be ridiculous, but the amount of garbage that we get out of the woods is a lot more ridiculous.

This particular Gambler is known as OSO, or "Other Side of Oregon," one of many spinoffs of the original Gambler 500, which started in Redmond, Oregon, and quickly snowballed into a nationwide phenomenon.

There's five Gamblers that I know of just in the state of Oregon.

There's three in California, multiple in every single state in the United States.

OSO started with a few friends who shared a love for automobiles and outdoor excursions.

Got it started with 31 cars the first year and, you know, we're several hundred people up here now.

[ horn honks ] MAN: This place is gonna clear out and we're gonna go out and we're gonna do some good.

Or at least oversee other people doing some good.

Someone has to be upper management.

For many Gamblers, the quest for trash starts at daybreak.

Most head out in small groups of three to six cars, like Ricky and his crew.

We're rolling out of camp right now.

[ car thumping ] Oh, this ought to be a fun day.

Just gonna go out and see some beautiful country and some really epic views and see if we can find some trash.

[loud thunk ] Uh-oh.

My light bar just broke off.

We might want to stop and take a look, see if I can zip-tie it up or something so I don't lose it completely.

Yep, zip ties are a Gambler's friend.

There are zip ties a little bit bigger than this that's holding my transmission mount together.

[ horn honking "Dixie" ] [ horn beeps ] [ loud whistle plays over speaker ] You don't realize how much these roads beat these vehicles up until brackets and mounts and stuff start breaking just out in the middle of nowhere.

[ loud rattling ] Unreal.

I just lost a windshield wiper.

Poor truck's just falling apart.

[ chuckles ] While Ricky's group tries to keep their cars from falling apart, Aaron Ackermann is just arriving at the Gambler base camp.

He's searching for another group to tag along with.

Last year, I picked up, like, a whole truck bed full of abandoned barbed wire.

So it's fun with a cause.

Mind if I throw my tent up around you guys?

MAN 1: Yeah, we don't mind.

MAN 2: Go ahead.

AARON: Cool.

As a first-timer at OSO, a proper initiation is necessary.

The Washington Gambler scepter is going to christen this vehicle and welcome it to the Gambler.

MAN: I mean, it does have Washington plates.

There's a hole.

WOMAN: Looks like a bullet hole.

MAN: Look at that.

In true Gambler fashion, there is duct tape holding a few pieces together, like that passenger mirror.

[ chuckles ] Gamblers plan their routes around pre-set waypoints.

This group is doing the same, but they keep hitting roadblocks.

All the gates are locked this year.

We don't know why.

We're gonna head back the way we came, head up probably the medium route or up the easy route.

Ricky and his crew are having better luck with their route.

And of course, they stop to pick up every piece of trash in sight.

Two points.

[ grunts ] MAN [ over radio ]: --see if there's tracks just on the right-hand side.

DENNING: I see it.

I've talked with people up here that, when they started, you know, they were the person that was throwing beer cans out going down the road.

And then they get involved in this and realized, "Wow, you know, this is really a good thing and it makes sense."

It's public land for us to use, and if we don't take care of our public land, we're not gonna have it.

Okay, let's roll.

Lifestyles of the Gambler.

MAN [ over radio ]: That's a pretty cool view off to the left.

THOMAS: While Ricky's crew explores the John Day River canyons, Aaron's group takes a lunch break before heading south for higher ground.

We're, like, right here.

This is 52 and that says 73 on that one.

I spent my whole life wandering around, picking up trash, and then I find a group of people that wander around and pick up trash.

It's amazing.

Every time we come back from these events, they're cleaner and cleaner each time too.

We really are making a difference.

As the group travels higher into the mountains, the roads become slippery.

And in true Gambler fashion, most of the cars are only equipped with front-wheel drive.

Of course, getting stuck... MAN [ over radio ]: Bottomed out.

...well, it's all part of the gamble.

You're lucky I'm a bad shot!

Everybody here is an awesome person.

You're not really gonna meet any bad apples.

And if you're new, you really just show up and pick a group and they'll welcome you in and they won't leave you behind.

'Cause that's just the Gambler way.

That's not happening.

I know.

That's why I'm just chilling.

[ laughs ] We're probably gonna have to turn back and go back down to the base and find another way around.

[ laughs ] Good fun.

Fortunately, the Gamblers stumble on some garbage on their way back.

RICE: Gas saver.

Being a true Gambler is caring about the environment, going out with a bunch of friends, trying to have a good time, see new places, and keep these places open for generations to come.

There's a lot of people that just don't care and will trash beautiful places like this.

That's where we come in with our garbage vehicles to come get all the garbage.

All right, good to go!

Onward.

The search for trash continues.

Unfortunately, this group's search took them many miles from base camp.

They'll miss the awards ceremony, which happens after every Gambler event.

Mark, get set, go!

[ all exclaim, chattering ] The next one is our Trash Award, and this goes to the person who collected the most trash.

And this year's Trash Award goes to the little Datsun pickup and... [ crowd cheers, applauds ] MAN: That's a happy little trophy.

That truck is sitting back there with more trash in it than I think the truck weighs.

Thank you!

[ crowd cheering ] The Gamblers have one final task on their checklist: dumping their trash.

This is just dumping off what trash we found today.

It's not as much as we normally find, but... trash is trash.

It's about camaraderie, friends, making new friends, meeting new people, all walks of life.

And getting out and seeing the beautiful country that other people have in their area that they want to share with you... and cleaning it up and making it better for everybody else.

That's really what the Gambler is to me.

[ ♪♪♪ ] In southern Oregon, many wetlands were drained so we could grow crops for food.

But the draining of those wetlands also nearly eliminated an important First Food for the Klamath tribes, a plant called wocus.

But now farmers and tribes are trying to bring the wetlands and maybe the wocus back.

MAN: We need to pray before we do anything.

[ speaking in Klamath language ] [ all singing in Klamath language ] PROFITA: In late summer, Klamath tribal member Garin Riddle brings his family to this marsh for a time-honored grocery run.

GARIN: I see a good one right here.

This is one of the only places they can still find the food their ancestors ate for thousands of years.

We call this "wocsum" right here.

This is that wocus that we were talking about.

These wocus plants produce a bulb with highly nutritious seeds inside.

That's a good size.

There's something beautiful about those First Foods.

It almost, like-- it sparks this reawakening of your genetic memory, like you remember who you are.

[ singing softly in Klamath language ] Me and my family, we go and we gather, we always say a prayer, we always sing songs when we're gathering.

I truly believe that when people consume the foods that we gather, that they consume that good spirit that it was gathered with.

[ Riddle continues singing ] Our people have been gathering in these spots right here that we're at right now since the beginning of time.

Wocus thrive in fairly shallow water in healthy wetlands like this with beautiful yellow flowers in early summer.

Cold, clear water bubbles up from underground springs nearby at the headwaters of the Klamath River.

But as that water makes its way downstream, it gets hot and overloaded with pollution from nearby farms.

Many of the wetlands in the Upper Klamath Basin have been replaced by agriculture.

I'd say 90-95% of what we used to have as far as wocus is nonexistent anymore.

It's all farmlands.

Including the Tule Lake.

It's gone.

The lakes that used to be here were drained by a government irrigation project in the early 1900s.

Now you can see farms growing crops where the lakes used to be.

Upper Klamath Lake remains... and the surrounding farms use its water for irrigation.

This is no longer a lake as it once was.

It's more treated today like a bathtub.

We're constantly filling it and lowering it, filling it and lowering it.

Now, only a few places have the right amount of water for wocus.

There was wocus all along this lake, in the fringes and the edges of this lake.

All of these aquatic plants were like little factories that cleaned the water.

I look out here from where I'm sitting now, and what I see are fields that have been tilled for agriculture.

They've drained that type of habitat where wocus once thrived.

Many farms take water from the lake and send it back filled with extra nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorous that fuel toxic algae blooms.

And that could make the food from wocus plants unsafe to eat.

But could those same farms help restore the healthy wetlands and the wocus that used to be here?

Farmer Karl Wenner is testing that out.

All of these plants, we did not plant 'em.

They're-- the seed bank was here.

To reduce phosphorous in the water on his farm, he turned one of his barley fields into a permanent wetland.

Put a little water, get the right conditions, they germinate, and you've got a wetland.

[ birds calling ] It's happening, it's happening.

It's pretty exciting.

[ laughs ] But as much as he's enjoying his new wetlands, he's not doing this for fun.

His farm depends on sending water into Upper Klamath Lake before planting.

And the water on his farm was polluted with phosphorous, a nutrient in the soil.

We were told we couldn't pump in the lake anymore, and that really messed up our operation.

And we didn't want to stop doing that, so we tried to come up with a way, and one of the ways was a wetland.

He got federal funding to create these wetlands.

Now these plants are cleaning the water so it can safely go back into Upper Klamath Lake.

Well, in 18 months of being a wetland, it was sucking the phosphorous out, so we had legal water in 18 months.

Phosphorous levels in the water on his farm dropped from four times higher than the allowable limit to a level that was safe to pump back into the lake.

It wanted to fix itself.

It wanted to be a marsh, and it became one.

He's also creating temporary wetlands that move around.

This one will be flooded in the fall.

All the way, as far as you can see, this will be duck food.

And in two years, it'll be replanted with crops.

We're trying to use the wetlands not only to provide food and habitat for waterfowl, but it's going to enhance our farm.

This will be very productive ground when we transfer it out of wetlands.

We'll get a better yield and it'll be organic.

This fluffy stuff is called panicgrass.

That is all seeds-- pintail and teal cocaine.

This is wild millet.

[ chuckles ] And that's ready to go.

This is just about to hit the ground and be sitting there for birds of all kinds to come and eat.

God, I just love it!

Wetlands are what drove the system here for millennia.

We want a healthy, productive, profitable farm.

At the same time, we're gonna have acres of wetlands, tons of waterfowl, tons of wildlife using the farm.

This is the answer for the Klamath Basin.

So these seeds are the inside of wocus pods, which we have here.

After gathering wocus bulbs, Garin and Aurora spread their wocus seeds out on a screen to dry.

So this is day two of them drying.

You can still see they're kind of glossy and they're still a little bit damp when you pick them up and touch them.

There's still moisture in them and they still have kind of a swampy smell or a marshy smell.

There are many more steps to go before they can eat these seeds, but they will be highly prized because they're so rare.

GIRL: Mama!

AURORA: Yeah, baby?

Can you get that one for me?

Garin says he hopes putting wetlands on more farms in the Klamath Basin will help restore First Foods and the Klamath people who depend on them.

GARIN: There are some very good people out there that are using those federal funds to be able to bring back wetlands.

If we just give it a little chance, give it a little water, give it a little hope, a lot of times the Creator will take care of everything else.

Thank you, Daddy.

I have a responsibility.

It's not a choice of mine to be able to do these things.

It's not a choice of mine to sing songs and to gather wocus and to take my children out there.

It's not really a choice.

It's a responsibility of mine.

[ Garin singing in Klamath language ] [ ♪♪♪ ] One of Oregon's claims to fame is that America's first astronauts were sent to the rocky lava beds of central Oregon so that astronauts could learn how to walk around the uneven surfaces in their big, clunky spacesuits.

Well, there must be something about the Northwest, because NASA is back, this time to look for caves and rocky formations that might be similar to what they'll find on other planets.

But this time, they've brought robots.

GILFILLAN: The wild borderlands of northern California might seem like a strange place to find an international group of scientists.

Okay, BRAILLE team, head out!

But it turns out this lava-encrusted landscape is helping answer one of humanity's oldest questions: Are we alone?

WOMAN: This place has a lot of caves, and we think they're a good analog for Mars.

So, to get ready for a future mission to Mars, we're practicing here.

Jen Blank is lead researcher on a project that would be looking for life on Mars.

It's known as BRAILLE, which stands for... WOMAN [ on recording ]: We're 20 meters off the surface of Mars.

GILFILLAN: NASA has already been looking for signs of life just below the planet's surface, but they think they're more likely to find those signs a bit deeper.

You guys got your kneepads?

And in this case, that means caves.

We think lava tube caves are on every rocky planet in our solar system.

Caves offer protection from the crazy, harsh temperatures and from the solar radiation that is hitting the surface of Mars.

MAN: Up, two, three.

So, if there is or was life on Mars, it will likely be found underground.

But to find that life, the scientists will need the help of some "dogs."

[ robot whirring ] Affectionately known as Spots, four-legged robots like these might someday be Mars' first spelunkers.

These are our two robots.

We call them, very originally, Spot 1 and Spot 4, surprisingly.

[ soft beeping ] These are legged robot platforms.

Standing up Spot 4.

So you can see, they're very agile.

This allows them to go into really rough terrain, such as you see around me, in lava tubes.

Before the Spots are ready for Mars, they'll have to go through a long period of training.

One of the first things they'll have to learn is how to detect features that might be life.

What we see are these features that are growing up from the floor, and we call them polyps.

We also see that there's really white sort of bleachy colors on the cave wall.

So, what we're really interested in is getting Spot enough training so that when it goes autonomously exploring a cave, it can identify these features without having a human present.

You may be wondering, what might life on Mars look like?

Life, if it lived on Mars, and there's a good chance it did, I think, given what we're learning about the history of Mars, probably would either be extinct or frozen as ice.

So it's more likely we're going to find evidence of life at the microbial level.

But key question: will that be preserved and for how long?

When it gets entombed in rock, in the dark, in a stable temperature and humidity regime, you can detect remnants of life millions of years later.

Shall we coralloid sample?

Diana Northup is an expert on the kinds of life that inhabit caves.

Look at this.

MAN: Oh, wow.

NORTHUP: It's almost like it's broken and then formed that interesting rim structure.

But unlike Earth, most life forms on Mars probably won't be carbon-based.

We know that there is some organic carbon, but not tons of it, and so we think that they will be rock eaters.

Rock eaters, or chemolithotrophs, are organisms that get energy from the minerals around them rather than, say, sunlight.

Some of the organisms that you see on the wall around you are basically rock eaters.

So these are organisms that are more likely to have a role on a place like Mars.

Recognizing life forms is just one part of the Spots' training.

Another major one is getting the robots to work autonomously.

MORRELL: So you can see, on top of them they're carrying what we call our autonomy backpack.

So that's computers and sensors for the robot to see what's around it and do what we can mostly do all right, which is work out where we are and how to walk without falling over and how to go and explore this wonderful cave system.

That autonomy is essential because it can take several minutes for a signal from Earth to travel the approximately 140 million miles to Mars.

WOMAN: It takes some time.

Like, I don't want to send a command here and wait eight minutes to send the next one, so we are just trying to make the robots explore and decide, "What should I do?"

Autonomy researcher Maira Saboia will be assessing whether the Spots can make the complex decisions necessary to be truly autonomous.

In this case, the robots must find a fire extinguisher and a backpack hidden in the cave without help from a human.

Okay.

SABOIA: So we place them in locations that are hard to find and we hope the robot's going to be able to find them.

And after they find the object, it's going to change the mode to go closer to get a higher-resolution image for longer time.

One minute.

Each test run is timed to measure how quickly and accurately the robots perform.

BLANK: We look at how fast they can see the artifacts and whether they see them all correctly, whether they have high confidence in their detection and test how well the robots make their own decisions.

The first Spot must detect the target, then communicate that to the second Spot, who will then go in for a close-up.

MAN: Spot 1 is currently moving.

Spot 4 is parked, trying to get a better image of the backpack.

Even as the Spots move autonomously through the cave, they're still pups and they need to be on a leash.

BLANK: Each robot dog has a human shepherd who's walking along with a little controller, and they can take over manually or press that stop button mainly for the safety of the robot, because they're kind of expensive.

And also we don't want to crash into the cave too much.

And to accomplish everything the scientists are looking for, the robots will need to do more than just communicate with each other.

As the Spots move through the cave, they're sending mapping data back to the team at the cave's entrance.

In a real-world scenario, data collected at locations like this can then be transmitted back to scientists on Earth.

Thirty seconds.

Naturally, things don't always go as planned.

There's something wrong.

Spot is now not responding.

Five seconds.

Three, two, one, stop.

[ alarm chimes ] But that's okay, because at this point, it's all about the training.

MAN: Spot 4 is moving again.

BLANK: Ultimately this is a feasibility study.

You know, we're far from a real mission to another planet, but we've been getting better and better.

So these pups aren't quite ready for space yet, but when they get there, it'll be because of the lessons they learned in these local caves.

MAN: Good dog.

[ ♪♪♪ ] JAHN: 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.

[ vehicles rumbling in distance ] [ 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.