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!

THOMAS: Next, on Oregon Field Guide: How volunteers saved the Breitenbush Hot Springs from the 2020 Labor Day fires.

MAN: Every year is a fire year.

We didn't used to relate to it that way, but we do now.

Then, a unique rock that's part of a tribal creation story for Willamette Falls has gone missing.

There's a perspective at the tribe: Everything comes home when it's time.

[ all singing in Native American language ] But first... Most people carve pumpkins into jack-o-lanterns.

But one man carved his pumpkin into a boat and set out to break a world record.

My name is Gary Kristensen, and I hold the Guinness World Record for the longest journey in a pumpkin boat, paddling.

[ laughs ] NEWSCASTER: There is a new world record attempt for most miles paddled in a pumpkin, and the paddler who did it landed right in Vancouver, Washington.

Come on back.

GARY: Last year, I set off on a voyage down the Columbia in October, and I learned on that trip that you need current.

And the best current in the Columbia River is going to be late May, early June usually, when you've got a lot of snow melt.

So how do I get a pumpkin in June?

Usually pumpkins are ready in October.

So I decided I'm going to start a pumpkin in January, something I've never seen anybody else-- at least not in this climate, in this area-- do it before.

Usually if you plant a plant too early, they just don't grow.

[ chuckles ] Fingers are crossed.

I'm attempting to set the world record again because I feel like I could've gone farther the first time.

[ ♪♪♪ ] As of today, this pumpkin is 46 days old from the time it was a flower, and it's now 530 pounds.

[ indistinct conversation ] MAN: To grow giant pumpkins, you've got to be wired a little bit differently anyway, because it takes a lot of work to get one this big.

And Gary is just wired a little bit different than the rest of us.

It's fully hanging?

Whoa!

[ laughs ] This year I had to come up with a name for the boat, and because the pumpkin was a flower in March, I decided to call it a "Marchflower."

[ people speaking indistinctly ] So I'm going to put all this-- all of this stuff in your boat.

Did you bring your golf clubs?

All right, says it's recording.

Guinness requires a certain amount of video every hour, so by mounting the time-lapse camera, I'm able to get video of the entire journey.

Let's get this under way.

Thank you, guys, for coming.

Keep coming.

All right, stop right there.

All right, I'm starting to float.

MAN: Dude, that current is looking... [ ♪♪♪ ] GARY: I'm starting at Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River, and I'm hoping to paddle to Astoria, and that's about three times as far as my first journey... if I make it all the way.

[ laughs ] Paddling a pumpkin is... much more challenging than paddling a kayak.

I could easily just... tip my weight, the whole thing rolls right over.

If you're in a kayak, the paddle plants in the water, you pull it back, and the kayak just slides forward.

And when you do that with a pumpkin, the paddle moves and the pumpkin does not, and it just feels like you get nowhere.

It is really difficult to paddle a pumpkin.

MAN: Basically just whatever he needs, that's what I'm here for.

When he's hungry, throw him some food.

Make sure he's staying hydrated.

Ultimately, just making sure he's safe.

GARY: Thank you.

It's already opened.

All right, thank you.

Dave is the best of friends.

He's the guy that's willing to go on a crazy adventure with me.

It would not be a safe journey without his support.

So if you want to stay to the left of the rock and go straight, you're-- You can do that.

You'll be fine.

His meal prep, it's dialed in!

Chef Boy-Ar-Dave.

I prepared all my meals in advance just to make it super easy for Dave to open the cooler and just grab a meal and hand it to me.

You think you're steady enough?

I don't know.

You got it?

That's you.

Now you gotta hold it with one hand.

Ohh!

Making me nervous!

[ laughs ] [ ♪♪♪ ] GARY: Okay, so in the tub that says "my clothes," um, there's some long-sleeve shirts.

So I've been in the pumpkin for ten hours at this point, and I'm tired, I'm cold, I'm wet, and there's pumpkin guts stuck to my pants.

DAVE: Oh, yeah, go to the left of that marker.

My plan is to try to secure it for the night.

I'm starting to get freezing now.

So I wrap a cargo net around the pumpkin.

That's to secure it to a log.

Well, we successfully launched and paddled 26.2 miles.

Two o'clock in the morning, almost.

Got our boat, pumpkin staged.

We're good to go for tomorrow.

[ Gary sighs ] Take a nap, hit it hard.

GARY: Yep.

[ birds chirping ] [ yawns, then whoops ] It's cold!

And I'm tired.

But at least I don't have to paddle a pumpkin.

It's 6:18 in the morning.

Uh... we got a few hours of sleep last night.

I'd say at least two, maybe three for me.

And it'll be interesting to see how much-- how much distance we make it today, 'cause that will tell if we actually can make it to Astoria.

When he puts his mind to something, it's-- It's gonna happen.

It's-- It's not a question of "if," it's "when."

Good to have people like that in your life.

Keeps you humble.

Where that boat is going right there is where, last year, we ended our world record.

So now, everything from now on on this trip is going to be world-record territory, so let's see where the world record lands.

[ chuckles ] I thought you were in a damn kayak!

MAN: Is that plastic or a real pumpkin?

GARY: It's a real pumpkin.

MAN: No [ bleep ]?

You get a lot of funny reactions in regard to, "Is it real?"

Or, "How did you grow that thing?"

Or, "Why are you doing this?"

[ laughs ] You guys know where I can get a pumpkin-spice latte in May?

[ Dave laughs ] People aren't used to seeing pumpkins in May.

They're used to seeing pumpkins in October.

Can I take pictures, do you mind?

DAVE: Oh, absolutely.

I just-- Oh!

Stay away from him.

Stay away from him.

Oh, I just think this is so cool!

I know, right?

You are amazing!

We've brought our friends, sorry.

Oh, my God!

That's a pumpkin.

GARY: I can show you top speed if you want.

Okay.

I think-- I think we're topped out now.

[ people laughing ] Well, have fun!

GARY: Yeah.

Good to see you.

See you guys.

See you.

Turns people into little kids, yeah?

[ ♪♪♪ ] GARY: I kind of felt like I hit a wall.

We just relaxed and floated for a little bit.

After paddling for so long and being crammed inside this pumpkin, I'm just desperate to stand up and stretch out.

It is such a relief.

[ laughs ] Oh, do I have to sit back down?

I think I get some sleep tonight, I'll have a productive day of paddling tomorrow.

But I don't know if we're on pace to make it to Astoria.

Oh, my gosh.

I've been going hard for like an hour and a half now.

DAVE: I know.

I don't know how you're doing it.

GARY: At this point, it's gotten windy.

It's a headwind.

I'm down close to the water, and these waves look huge coming at me, and I'm just paddling as hard as I can, trying to keep moving, 'cause I'm told that the spot we're going to stop is-- is just ahead.

And I keep looking over at the shore next to me, and it does not look like we're moving even though I'm paddling as hard as I possibly can.

And if I let up and paddle a little bit less, I'm going backwards.

You know, I gotta keep paddling.

I need to get to the shore.

And I'm tired.

So it's just that marina to the left there.

Oh, he's going on like 14 hours of paddling solid now.

GARY: This is going to kill me.

[ people cheering ] Luckily, a couple of my friends showed up and are cheering me on... Go, Gary!

...and that gave me the needed shot of energy to keep going, and I keep paddling as hard as I can and I get to the dock.

Is there possibly a way we can moor?

In the planning for this trip, I had planned for ways to tie off the pumpkin to a beach.

I did not think we were going to be trying to tie a pumpkin to a dock.

There's nowhere that I can see that's safe to put a pumpkin.

Well, we're all proud of you.

We're all rooting for you, man.

Oh, man.

It's a real pumpkin?

DAVE: Real pumpkin.

He grew it himself this year.

That is awesome!

We gotta figure out where to put the pumpkin.

We're going to try to loop a net around it.

My brain is spent.

I can't think straight.

I just want to get out of the pumpkin and go take a break.

I am kind of leaning towards deep-sixing this thing and going to dinner.

We're just astounded that he was in there since 5 this morning.

Oh, my word.

He was having some leg cramps.

You think?

[ laughs ] Goodness.

What about those little stakes?

The only tool I've got is this-- these spikes I had brought along for carving into a beach, and I dug them into the side of the pumpkin, thinking they would just cut a little hole, but they cut a gash.

[ laughs ] Watch us destroy this.

I'm feeling a little bit disappointed that I've possibly structurally damaged the pumpkin and that it might not be safe to continue on.

My goal was to get to Astoria, but we did break the world record.

I guess this is an end to the journey, and I think we're just going to leave the pumpkin here at the dock and go get some sleep.

Got some rest, slept in my own bed, and we need to do something with the pumpkin.

We're going to paddle the pumpkin out and we're going to deep-six this thing, carve it into pieces while standing in it in the river and let it go down.

Went from just being a flower to a pumpkin, and I'm tending to it every day and hoping that this pumpkin will live and survive, and it did.

It was actually a pretty darn good boat, and cutting it up at the end is a little bit bittersweet.

It's been a good boat.

Yeah, and hard to do, because I wanted to keep going.

And I think the pumpkin wanted to keep going too.

[ laughs ] If the pumpkin could talk, it would say, "You need to keep going.

We're not done."

[ laughs ] DAVE: There she goes.

[ Gary and onlookers whoop ] [ onlookers laughing ] [ ♪♪♪ ] This next one comes to us from our friends at Oregon Experience.

They're doing some excellent videos about how history influences our lives today.

This one is about the fight to save the Breitenbush Hot Springs from the 2020 Labor Day fires.

MAN: That thing came in at a hundred miles an hour and took out seven communities ultimately and 400,000 acres of forest.

That's a large fire.

And, uh, at that point, you know, Mother Nature wins.

Breitenbush is a special place to many people in Oregon and far beyond.

It has a hundred-plus-year-old historic lodge.

And it's also a spiritual center.

Our concern, our complete focus is about the buildings.

We're not going to be able to put out the fire that's in the forest around there.

That's just not happening, unfortunately.

I wish we could have.

MAN: The fire came through and destroyed century-old and more buildings and nearly half of the structures and so much of our infrastructure.

Decades of labor wiped out in the space of a day or two.

Three of us left after things were stabilized and then came out at the bottom, at Detroit, to find the entire town gone.

And at the moment I felt like, "Wow, we just drove into the mouth of a dragon and came out its [ bleep ]."

They all thought we were dead.

MAN: This is Breitenbush Hot Springs Retreat and Conference Center.

It has an enormous history and prehistory.

It's one of the most prodigious hot springs areas in Oregon or in the West Coast.

This place was visited by many tribes from the east side of the Cascades all the way out to Eastern Oregon, Southern Washington, Southern Idaho.

I mean, that's a lot of territory.

And people would walk literally hundreds of miles to get here in the ancestral times.

There's a lot of history, but just to grab some of the high points, there was a guy named Fred Bruckman who invented something that became all the rage a century and more ago.

He just wanted to have a dish that you could eat, and then he would put ice cream in it.

So he invented the waffle-cone machine, and it made him a wealthy person.

And his son, Merle, took some of his dad's money and, in the 1920s, had this great idea.

He punched in a road.

He built about a hundred buildings, a lodge and a dance hall, and an Olympic-sized swimming pool filled with 150,000 gallons of hot springs water.

The heyday of this place went all through the 1930s and through the '40s and through the '50s into the early '60s.

Then it just failed because Merle didn't keep up with the maintenance.

When we purchased the property back in 1977, it was essentially a ghost town.

We had a big job to do because there was no electricity, there was no heat, there was no domestic water, there was certainly no septic.

Once we opened to the public and the public began to discover the hot springs again and what it was that we were about, the cooperative that we have created here exists for the benefit of the workers, the people who live here, and the people of the community who come here.

It's a scene here, and... [ laughs ] You know?

And it still has that magic.

[ ♪♪♪ ] MAN [ over radio ]: We have an approximately 100 x 100-foot wildland fire moving into the timber from the grasses... MAN: I was brought in in early 2000s through a training consulting business I have for the region to help their maintenance staff at the Hot Springs Retreat Center develop some firefighting skills and a plan, because we're 10-plus miles from other resources.

San Juan Fire Boat 31 on the air.

JORDAN: We started building up the program with a combination of on-land people and off-land folks.

And I've remained as fire chief for the last 20 years there.

I work up here in the San Juan Islands now for the last year or so as a division chief for a fairly large department here.

And actually building brigades that are similar to Breitenbush in six or seven remote islands.

[ ♪♪♪ ] PETER: We had this massive set of fires here in the Oregon Cascades.

Whole towns were affected by the burn-- Detroit, Idanha, Mill City, Gates-- a lot of destruction of these towns.

Down into the southern part of the state, massive fires that took out Talent and parts of Ashland.

It was the most destructive burn time in the history of the state.

JORDAN: We had two fires in the area, Lionshead and Beachie Creek, one to our east, one to our west.

So we're right in the middle, which is not a great place to be.

PETER: When the winds kicked up, the east winds, on September the 7th, as we got into the late afternoon/evening, we thought, "We have to evacuate."

JORDAN: I was working things from up north.

Peter was down south at the Hot Springs, and I had a plan to come down with what we call our A team, some of our other professional firefighters coming in.

We tried to get up the guest road to get there initially.

Couldn't get there because there were so many trees down.

So we went around the other way.

There's two roads to get into Breitenbush and we found the north side on the other side of the river that we were able to get through.

We geared up and hiked up to the footbridge to go to the south side of the hot springs, and the footbridge was involved in fire.

And I'm like, "Oh, that's not a good sign."

PETER: They had to struggle their way in here to make it onto the property and see things burning like, "Oh, my God, there's active fire."

And it had already taken probably 40 or 50 structures by the time they got here.

And that's where your heart kind of falls out, even as a firefighter, because I know this place and I'm in charge of it too.

I'm responsible.

I'm like, "Oh, this is not going to be pretty."

[ ♪♪♪ ] We still had 30-mile-an-hour winds, propane tanks blowing up every five minutes, trees coming down every five or ten.

It was a little bit of Armageddon.

PETER: When the wind would hit, fire would be coming in horizontally, just all the firebrands, and then it would land... and then it would start to burn.

And what they did is set up sprinklers and hoses and just hose down or sprinkle the vertical walls of the buildings that hadn't started to burn.

JORDAN: We had way more fire than I thought.

At that point, we ran into the other two guys.

They're out there with a garden hose with-- One of them, Daniel, with a thumb over it, spraying down the building, doing the best he can.

And they'd been at it for 24 hours or more, and so-- And they both have homes there, so they were... They were psychologically beat up.

PETER: We lost 73 buildings, 73 structures in the fire.

We saved 75.

I mean, if you look around us, you see if that fire came out of those mountains with 90-mile-an-hour gusts, it would've taken everything if it hadn't been for the actions of the BFD responders.

Every year is a fire year.

We didn't used to relate to it that way, but we do now.

We lay out fire hoses and we have trash pumps into the river, and we are prepared for fire the way we were not prepared for fire because-- You know, in September of 2020.

[ indistinct chatter over radio ] JORDAN: What we are doing at Breitenbush is something we're doing up here in the San Juan Islands right now, and that's developing brigades, basically.

And there's definitely a movement right now in this country in the west, of people doing more of that.

The bottom line is, if people are going to stay and defend in place, they have to be able to do it safely.

Because we're not here to get anyone hurt or killed to protect a structure or vegetation.

So I teach that.

I teach people.

We've got about 100 people involved or more now in the islands and the ones under this fire district here where I work.

If we have a real fire like this, hand tools will do some good, but if you have flames this high, you're probably not doing much with hand tools.

Jonathan gets it.

I see the look.

We just do what we do.

I don't call us heroes.

I don't think we are.

We're just doing our job.

Just our job is to do stuff beyond self, and lots of people do stuff like that.

[ ♪♪♪ ] Willamette Falls has been a popular place to visit for as long as people have existed here.

The Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde even have a story explaining how these falls were created.

That story was commemorated on distinctive rock that used to sit right next to the falls.

But that rock has gone missing.

So now the tribes are trying to find it and bring it back.

There's a mural just off Main Street in Oregon City that's often blocked by truck traffic.

It tells a story that the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde have been sharing for thousands of years.

MAN: Welcome to Tumwata.

Today, known as Oregon City.

You'll see here a mural depicting how Meadowlark and Coyote created what we know today as the Willamette Falls.

You'll see that Coyote is on one side of the river.

Meadowlark is on the other, and they're pulling the rope between them.

The story is about Meadowlark and Coyote.

[ continues speaking in Chinook Wawa language ] Grand Ronde tribal member Bobby Mercier tells the story, known as an ikanum, first in a language called Chinook Wawa, then in English.

A long time ago, they were trying to think of a place where they could create a falls to stop the fish so everybody could eat.

And the people there decided that they were going to make this long cedar rope, and it was full of power.

They gave one side of it to Coyote on that side and they gave one side to Meadowlark, the little bird on this side.

And they said that they were gonna walk, and when both sides decided where they were going to make those falls, they would drop the rope and it would indent the earth and create the falls.

This mural commemorating the story may be hard to see during rush hour, but it's easy to find.

That's not the case with a much older commemoration of this creation story that's been missing since the 1950s.

It's a large rock with unusual markings carved into it by Indigenous people to honor the story.

BRIECE: There's a flattened end that has scribe marks.

Those are Meadowlark's talons trying to get a grip.

The tribes believe the rock used to sit next to the river and may have been removed and cast aside during the construction of the locks near the falls in the 1870s.

A businessman in Oregon City named Frank Busch found the carved rock and put it on display where 12th Street meets the river.

But then it went missing.

Details vary, but we do know that it's found, it is put on display, that it then is moved to a different location, and that's where we lose it.

The Grand Ronde recently purchased land next to Willamette Falls in Oregon City, reclaiming an area their ancestors were forced to leave in the 1800s.

Now, the tribes are redeveloping this industrial land.

And they're hoping to find the missing rock with Meadowlark's footprints on it.

MAN: Willamette Falls is such an important place for our people and our culture.

The places that are sacred to us that have been damaged or decimated or destroyed, it's like any little thing that can be done to make that right is healing for our community.

The Meadowlark and Coyote story has been a part of who I am and something I think about.

So then when I come in contact with something like that rock, where you see Meadowlark's footprint, you know, imprinted into it, it takes you back.

It's like these aren't just stories.

The tribes are working with community members to find new leads on where the rock might be now.

Though it's been missing for nearly a century, they're still hoping for its return.

There's a perspective at the tribe: Everything comes home when it's time.

It will be found.

Will it be my generation?

Maybe.

But there's a certain solace in knowing and accepting that it will find its way.

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

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

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