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: MAN: Yeah, nice job.

We often look to technology to help us with wildlife research, but what if the better tool is man's best friend?

Attaboy!

But first... WOMAN: Oh, my God!

When the Beachie Creek Wildfire ignited east of Salem in 2020, we saw and felt the loss as communities burned up and down the Santiam Canyon.

But the fire also burned in a wilderness beloved by Oregonians from near and far.

[ man groans ] It was one of the most beautiful cabins actually out here.

What the Oregon Field Guide crew found in a place called Opal Creek a year later is a story of both loss and recovery.

For over two decades, I have had the pleasure of filming at the magical, ancient forest of Opal Creek and the old mining camp at Jawbone Flats.

The Beachie Creek fire went through the area and burned through the heart of the Opal Creek wilderness.

We're on our way to go see what's left.

[ birds chirping ] CASSANDRA PROFITA: Getting back to Opal Creek after the fire isn't easy for me and photographer Todd Sonflieth.

The forest surrounding it is closed to the public and its trails are riddled with downed trees and washouts like this one.

The only reason we're allowed in is because we're going with some folks from the Opal Creek Ancient Forest Center.

MAN: This will be the first time that we've hiked in with a special-use permit from the Forest Service, and we have a somewhat special relationship because we're property owners and in-holders of that property inside Forest Service land, and so that gives us access that others don't have.

Like us, Dwayne wants to see what's left of his group's educational center at Jawbone Flats and how the enchanting forest surrounding it has changed.

The Opal Creek Wilderness covers more than 20,000 acres of the Willamette National Forest east of Salem.

It's home to one of the largest old-growth forests Oregon has left.

So we're in a pretty old part of the forest here.

And it's lured Field Guide back again and again.

This is what the area looked like in 1998 after it was first set aside as Wilderness.

We went back again in 2007... WOMAN: Get him before he goes away!

There you go.

...as Opal Creek was building a reputation as one of the best places in the Northwest to learn firsthand about ancient forests.

What kind of newt?

BOY: Rough-skinned!

WOMAN: That's right.

This is Cedar Flats.

These big ones are close to 800 to 1,000 years old.

Field Guide photographers always looked forward to filming luminous pools like this one, crystal clear and completely protected in an unlogged watershed.

Then, in August of 2020, lightning sparked the Beachie Creek Wildfire in the heart of the wilderness, just two miles away from the Opal Creek Ancient Forest Center.

DISPATCHER: 911, what is your emergency?

WOMAN: We need help in Gates.

There's a fire coming up in the neighborhood.

It's huge.

Oh, my God.

Oh, my God.

CASSANDRA PROFITA: The fire raced through the forest as well as communities up and down the Santiam Canyon.

Altogether, it burned nearly 200,000 acres of land.

It destroyed hundreds of homes in the nearby towns of Detroit, Gates, and Mill City.

And it killed five people.

That's a lot to recover from.

[ sighs ] As hard as it is to get to Opal Creek this time around, we know it'll be even harder to see what the fire did to the place so many Oregonians know and love and can't visit right now.

Dwayne says there's still serious safety risks in the area, including some fires still burning underground almost a year later.

The forest is still closed, and for good reason, because there are still flare-ups happening in the forest, and, you know, still additional dangers.

MAN: This is interesting.

Here's a western red cedar that survived.

Here's a huckleberry that's still alive.

Fire ecologist Boone Kauffman brought some much-needed optimism.

Just envision, six months ago, it was flaming here, it was probably 1,000 degrees at this site, and you can see how much of the forest floor was consumed, yet so many of the plants survive even those harsh conditions.

In a few years, I would envision this area just will be loaded with beautiful white plumes of this bear grass.

Virtually all of the plants and animals of these forests evolved to survive and even thrive and quite often even depend upon fire for their survival and for their reproduction.

This is nice.

If you look here real closely, here's a small conifer seedling.

And look, here's another one.

You can tell it's a Douglas fir.

It has the little mouse tail.

There's the little Douglas fir seedling coming out.

So you see that as quickly as the forest is destroyed, the seedlings come right back, you know?

It's magnificent, isn't it?

As we get closer to Jawbone Flats, we start seeing evidence of the old mines and the miners who used to live here.

It looks really different now.

Oh, look at that.

Auggie Gleason manages the Ancient Forest Center facilities.

He's the first to notice that the fire burned the last remaining cabin in this abandoned mining camp.

[ groans ] It was one of the most beautiful cabins actually out here.

Really?

So it was actually a lived-in cabin.

This was more than just one building.

This had covered walkways and rails to the mine and down to that mine.

I mean, it was a whole town too, just like Jawbone was, right here.

Some of the surrounding forest is still alive and green.

But arriving at Jawbone Flats is heartbreaking.

The fire leveled all of the original 1930s mining-camp buildings.

It's hard to tell the difference between the rusty old mining equipment and things the fire only recently destroyed.

BOONE: So was that an old wrecked vehicle, or was that a--?

AUGGIE: Nope, that was my Suburban.

BOONE: Oh!

And this is our Pelton wheel.

This is basically where our hydro power came in.

Field Guide filmed this exact spot in 2007 on a tour with facilities director Adam Mims.

We have about three-quarters of a mile of pipe that brings this water downhill.

It's all gravity-fed.

Back then, it was the perfect place to scoop up a refreshing cup of water from nearby Flume Creek.

But there's no water flowing through it now, and it's unclear whether that water source will still be useable after the fire.

When we visited in 2007, the commissary building was new.

Now its shattered solar panels are among the rubble.

This was a renovated cabin we toured.

ADAM: We have a new stove, on-demand hot-water heater... Now, that's all gone.

The only remaining cabin is this one.

The good news is it was untouched by the fire, so our crew has sleeping quarters for the night.

This cabin is not one of the originals.

It's great to have a cabin left.

We may decide to expand it to build a new lodge or some other purpose.

It certainly will stick around.

Only from the air can you get the full sense of how large and destructive this fire was.

The right side of this ridge is the Opal Creek drainage.

You can see that Jawbone Flats is actually a bit of an oasis in a landscape that was scorched.

We joined Dwayne as he hikes to one of his favorite spots on Opal Creek.

DWAYNE: I think hope was the thing that we had once the sadness faded away.

The beauty of the water is the same, and it's running just as clear and blue.

The surroundings are torched, but the waterway is still there and there's still trees around it.

Along the trail, you can see the remains of the old mining-camp office.

Cabin One, which was the original office for the mining company, sat a little bit up on stilts and looked over a waterfall on Battle Ax Creek.

It had this beautiful deck, but it was my favorite because you had that just amazing setting in the forest.

There was, of course, the sadness of the loss.

The buildings were touchstones for memories for people.

You know, I remember sitting there with a friend and talking about going to Opal Pool.

We had to brace ourselves for what the famously photogenic Opal Pool would look like now.

Yeah, the bridge was over here.

It is a chilling sight.

The forest surrounding this pool was obliterated.

And the iconic bridge we'd walked across on an earlier visit is gone.

This is one of the main destinations for people that came to stay with us and also for hikers.

MAN: Three, two, one.

[ man yells ] Oh, that's cold!

[ laughs ] DWAYNE: This was the hardest thing to look at when I first came here, was just the intense devastation of the fire, and it's still hard to see.

Boy, this is a very incredible sight.

Boone says the fire killed almost all of these trees, many of which were between 100 and 200 years old.

This would be clearly a stand-replacing, high-severity -- as high a severity fire as you'll ever see because of the -- what must have been about the most extreme weather that could have ever occurred during a fire in the western Cascades, to have not only killed such a high proportion of the trees but to have blown them over.

But even here, where the fire wiped out so much beautiful scenery, Boone finds hope.

If you look -- the last few trees that are still standing are still green.

They survived the fire.

And then if you look at the understory, though, you can see the understory is starting to sprout.

It's coming back to life.

You have snowbrush, you have the salal here.

What you see is, you can just see the dozens of conifer seedlings.

These are western hemlock seedlings that have all come in the first year, so while it looks devastating to many people, you know, these species have evolved over millennia, and now we have the future forest right before our eyes.

[ Auggie sighs ] This is Cabin Nine.

For Auggie, this visit is especially personal.

This is my drum.

This was made out of a propane tank.

As a staff member, this was his home.

Yeah, it's, um, intense.

Here's my rifle.

[ chuckles ] He took these photos as the fire burned closer and closer to Jawbone Flats.

He regrets not taking more with him when he evacuated.

We were supposed to leave, and I then said, "Okay, let's get out of here.

Let's just leave."

I felt like I was coming back.

It's like optimist to a fault.

You know, I'm very hopeful.

I just saw this place being here, no matter what.

And so I left all my tools.

I left everything.

[ Auggie sighs ] But it seemed like the whole state was on fire.

It was very, very difficult, because we had nowhere to go.

We didn't know what to do, and... that's what this brings up for me... because I took care of these buildings as well, you know?

So this is George's cabin.

A painful loss for Auggie and many others was the death of George Atiyeh.

He was in Cabin Eight, right next to me, and we could always kind of see each other.

MAN: You can see they're hitting it pretty hard.

It doesn't look like there's very much left, whether we can keep this going.

George led the fight to protect this forest from logging during the timber wars of the '80s and '90s.

And he died in the Beachie Creek Fire at his home in the nearby Elkhorn community.

Oh, he loved it here.

He loved the people, he loved this spot in particular.

And he grew up here.

Because of a burned bridge, the Ancient Forest Center still doesn't have road access nearly a year after the fire, so it's going to take extra time to rebuild.

Over the past century, the Opal Creek forest has been a mining camp, an education center, and a wilderness playground for 20,000 visitors a year.

Auggie says after all that, maybe the forest needs a break.

AUGGIE: There's a lot of people that come through here every year.

Yes, this is a magical place, and it said, "I'm done.

You gotta get out of here.

I need time."

I'm happy that it's taking time.

BOONE: The rebirth out of the ashes.

AUGGIE: It needs to heal, and it's a different kind of way to look at it.

And some people might not understand it, because they feel that they have lost something, but it's temporary.

Everything is temporary.

[ ♪♪♪ ] [ dog panting ] A lot gets made about how the latest, greatest technology is helping scientists in the field, but sometimes you just can't beat nature's designs... or humans' best friends.

Here, Scott.

AARON SCOTT: One of the hardest parts about studying and protecting endangered species is simply finding them.

Did you put the samples up there?

That's where Rogue Detection Teams come in.

The teams are made up of human handlers, or what they call bounders, and trained rescue dogs.

You should see Pips right now, he's just pressing his nose up against the crate, like, "Let me out."

Today, they're taking us along as they search for one of the most elusive animals in the Northwest: wolves.

It might seem an impossible task.

A wolf pack can range over hundreds of miles.

MAN: You ready?

Let's go find it.

Fortunately, we're looking for something a little easier to find: the poop the wolves leave behind.

Coming out here, you wouldn't know where to start, and it's kind of like finding a needle in a bit of a hay field.

It might sound silly, but poop, or what researchers call scat, is a powerful tool for monitoring animals that are hard to find.

It can tell us how many there are, where they go, what they eat, and if they're healthy and reproducing.

And dogs, of course, are experts at sniffing it out.

[ Heath whistles ] This is Pips.

He's done a lot of amazing projects.

He's worked on fishers and martins and badgers, caterpillars.

He's a stocky little tank that just wants to go, go, go.

Let's go find it.

There should be quite a bit out here.

WOMAN: Famous last words.

HEATH: I know it.

Humans have long relied on dogs' incredible sense of smell.

What sets the Rogue Detection Teams apart is that they only work with the rescue dogs that other people reject for one very particular reason: they are obsessed with fetch.

[ dog barking ] HEATH: They get this kind of crazy eyes that you want to see.

That fetch obsession really is our method of communicating with them.

So since they love this more than anything else, teaching them another odor takes 15 minutes.

The way it works is they put out empty jars and then one jar of whatever they want the dog to detect.

This is wolf scat, but the process works with anything from invasive mussels to diseased plants.

WOMAN: This is a new one.

Ready?

I'll bring Filson out, the dog I'll be working, and I'll ask him to sniff the holes, and when he gets to the sample, I'll just kind of toss a ball and make it really fun.

Attaboy!

Way to go!

What'd you get there?

And then, as we go through it a few more times, I'll eventually ask him to sit, and that will tell him that my expectation for his alert is to sit.

Sit.

Nice job!

Way to go!

And then when we're out in the wild and I have no idea where the poop is, I haven't put it out at all for him, I'll know he's at a sample because we've followed these steps and stages to get to that point.

Did you find the poopers?

HEATH: Yeah, nice job.

Let's go find it.

And that takes us back to our search for wolf poop.

Oh, he's on to something.

What you got?

Show me.

Attaboy.

[ Jennifer chuckles ] Oh, that's a nice scat.

Let's go get some more.

If they were working on a research project, they'd send the poop off to a lab, but today they're just collecting it because, well, they need a library of rare animal scat to keep their dogs up to snuff.

This is like hairy gold for us.

[ laughs ] Heath got his start working with detection dogs in 2001, and he went on to help build a program at the University of Washington called Conservation Canines.

When I started 20 years ago, we were doing some stuff in the Canadian Rockies, and I got in this habit of just going out -- like, I didn't even take a tent -- and curling up under a tree with a dog.

My mom thinks I'm more of a dog than a human.

In fact, when I go home, I end up sleeping on the floor a lot of times to be closer to the dogs than sleeping in the nice, comfy bed.

Over the years, the program's teams have traveled around the globe.

They've worked with conservation groups, scientists, and wildlife agencies to survey for everything from tigers to pangolins.

Where do dogs fit in the conservation world?

You know, just about anyplace.

I am constantly surprised by their ability to smell things.

PCBs, viruses, areas where an animal's landed or laid down, it's unlimited.

If you figure out how to teach them that odor, then they'll find it.

[ birds chirping, then dog barks ] JENNIFER: When I'm out of the field and on the property, I live in a yurt, and we have anywhere between five to six dogs in the yurt with us, and first thing in the morning, we'll let the dogs out on a break, and then they get fed.

And then we'll usually go on a morning walk.

Billy, this way.

Filson is my newest recruit.

What was really fun about working in Yosemite with him on our first project was just discovering Filson.

Every day was just learning something new.

And he was just a tough little nugget.

He actually found the two fisher scat samples that are the first found north of the Merced River in over a hundred years.

He was trained on fisher, but I wasn't expecting to find fisher in this area because everyone had said there's no fisher here.

And it's just like this sense of, like, pride and joy that, "Wow, he did that," you know?

I had nothing to do with it.

[ chuckles ] This is the point where you're probably thinking their job sounds mighty romantic.

But while they can work with any breed of dog, they've learned that it takes a special breed of humans to spend months in the field alone, backpacking through rugged, remote terrain and crawling through leech-infested jungles with fetch-obsessed rescue dogs.

MAN: Ranger, stop.

Jake Lammi applied to work with the program five years ago.

He was one of ten candidates invited to a screening workshop of sorts.

It was basically The Hunger Games, is how I kind of, you know, like to tell it, because our first day, he took us on a 17-mile hike in the rain, made sure, like, our boots were full of water and stuff like that.

It was kind of like weeding out people a little bit at first, because if you can't do that on your own, there's no way you're going to be able to do it with a dog.

And people start self-selecting out, and then after a month, they ended up hiring two of us.

And that was when I went on my first project with Ranger, the primary dog that I work with.

It's the kind of job that becomes your life.

But after years of living out of their cars and shared university housing, they realized they needed a permanent home.

JENNIFER: I think what made us fall in love with this area is we're in the Columbia River Valley, and, I mean, the river kind of supports a really special ecosystem, so we have grizzly bears, there's cougars -- we had one on our property, we can see their prints.

To think that we could even live here was, like, magical.

So then when we came up here our first day on this hike, I think we were just like, "This.

This spot.

We have to."

So in 2019, Heath bought this property.

Seven humans and 16 dogs then moved in to start a new company, Rogue Detection Teams.

WOMAN: Good dog!

Way to go!

Good boy.

I have four dogs in my house.

Do you like how I paused?

Because sometimes I have five.

And so dogs and teams will leave, and whoever's here is left to take care of whomever is not on a project.

Watching the dogs play, it's easy to see why the team gravitated to the name Rogue.

We have a dog that plays with a metal food dish.

[ barking ] We have a dog that's like a Chihuahua mix rat terrier something.

They don't all kind of fit the mold for what a lot of people view a detection dog as.

They're not all high-drive Labs.

They come in all shapes and sizes, and they're all rescue dogs, they're all from shelters.

And that's something that we think is really important.

The title of Rogue doesn't just apply to the dogs, though.

Many of the humans also identify as introverts, nomads, and rogues.

SUZIE: Doesn't that look more refreshing?

It makes for a strange pack.

A bunch of dog-loving loners living together in the middle of nowhere.

Living with eight or nine people together in like, a -- it's not quite a commune, you know, but it's -- [ chuckles ] it can feel similar at times.

It's definitely never something that I really thought I would do.

Cheers!

ALL: Cheers!

SUZIE: To us actually all being together for a little while.

JAKE: All right, big guy.

All right, over here.

Going forward, the Rogues are excited about expanding the ways that dogs can contribute to conservation research as well as bringing the dogs into classrooms to teach kids about science.

Good job!

Nice work.

SUZIE: The dogs and the stories are really good to engage students with conservation, but the narrative that comes along with these dogs that were homeless that now travel to Vietnam and Nepal, and kids are like, "What?"

it just gives them this desire to dream a little bit bigger or think a little bit differently.

The dogs also push scientists to think differently, and they certainly help the Rogues to dream a little bit bigger themselves.

Here.

[ whistles ] The dogs that I work with and the communication that happens and that connection is incredible.

It's the coolest thing in the world.

Good job, buddy.

Ready?

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

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