♪ jangly mandolin ♪ mandolin and bass I'm a journalist and I am traveling across the United States of America.

On this journey I'll be visiting some iconic American experiences.

My next stop is Oregon.

It just keeps comin', all day... ♪ ♪ quiet acoustic guitar I've come to the State of Oregon.

I'm here to explore its varied landscapes, to learn more about the Native American culture here and the Maker Movement.

My journey begins in Portland.

It's the cultural capital of Oregon.

It's a thriving city that prides itself on being unique.

It's the perfect place for what's known as the Maker Movement.

The Maker culture here in Portland is a really cool part of the culture.

It is where people are using their hands and making things and sort of staying away from these bigger box stores.

I'm here with the Martinez family and they have been working with leather goods for four generations.

I'm with Levi and Martin, so tell me a little bit about your business?

Yeah.

So Orox Leather began as a family business four generations ago.

My great grandfather began doing leather goods as a part of a hobby and working for his baseball team doing leather goods for the team and then eventually that kind of transcending to generational change.

And when my father carried the bags, my grandfather did sandals.

And then now here in Portland the doors are opening up for makers like us.

Well, and you know the first thing that comes to mind is you guys are a big family and you all get along and you all do this.

How does that work?

Yeah well, it's rocky.

It's not always; well what we like is just like that we work towards the same, the same goal we want.

We want to make a business that can support, you know, like our team.

And what is the name "Orox" mean?

Orox stands for Oregon and Oaxaca.

So we wanted to find something that will you know that represent both our family heritage and also like our culture here in Portland, which is you know like, the Maker culture... so.

And where's your family from originally?

Our family's from Oaxaca, Mexico which is where the, where the traditions and all the heritage of the leather craft was born.

Awesome.

Okay.

Well I'd love to learn a little bit about what you guys do.

Yeah.

So over here in the shop we go from the beginning to the end of all the products.

We source all our leather from the U .S., all of it is tanned here in the US.

Well, I would love to learn how to make these.

Yeah.

So right now these ones I have already prepped and this is kind of like the final look of the product.

And as you can see, it doesn't look at all like that right now.

No, but there's a couple of steps that we need to get done and we have two different, three different steps in this showing.

So the first step is you can grab one of these guys and we're going to hammer in this little edge on the bottom.

Okay.

We're going to just take it out and just fold it in there like this.

So you kind of open it diagonal like this.

I'm not doing very well here.

And then you kind of press, the leather.

You know this was one of the reasons why we like to work with the leather.

The leather is so supple and I just kind of like, you can mold it and shape it the way that you want.

So you just kind like, center it in there and then what we're gonna do is you're gonna hold it tight in there and kind of like flatten it.

And then we're going grab a hammer.

And why do you think this Maker culture is such a big thing here in Oregon?

Oregon has a unique way in which it forms communities.

Like there's a lot of sense of community in different areas.

So the Maker Movement began as a part of this farmer's market, those Saturday markets, these are open spaces where any small manufacturer that makes products in their garage and that can come and sell them during the weekend.

So that's kind of like an incubator where a lot of other companies can develop and test the market and see something that can that can be successful for the future.

[Brandy] I think people also like to see things that are origina, that nobody else has, right?

[Levi] That's the other side.

And there's the appreciation for a craft, there's appreciation for makers.

And really the customers want to know where the product comes from, where the materials come from.

Why you're making it.

So they want to feel connected.

So they want to feel connected with not only the product but with you as a maker.

And every single time you know, I look at my purse, right?

If I own this I can think of you wonderful guys.

Exactly, yeah.

♪ light, plucked notes ♪ electric guitar When you come to Portland you might want to check out the craft-brewing scene.

This is a very important part of the culture here and I'm with Christian Ettinger.

He is a brewmaster.

Tell me a little bit about Portland and what its connections are to that scene?

Portland is a wonderful craft-brewing Mecca.

We've got over one hundred breweries in our city of about a million and a half people and about almost three hundred over the whole state.

Craft-brewing has grown up here because we have wonderful water, we've got malted barley, we've got five percent of the world's hops right now our backyard.

So it's an important brewing center for the US.

What I'd like to show you first Brandy is our Raspberry Bubble Trouble Brut IPA and that's the chalice here.

So as we take a look we like to look, sniff and sip.

Bring it to our nose, give it a little sniff.

What do you smell?

I smell raspberries.

Yeah, it's beautiful.

Hmm?

Well, cheers.

Cheers my friend.

To raspberry.

Here we go.

I like that.

It's very light.

It's not what I expected when you say IPA.

Yeah.

The brut end of that is really dry and the dryness helps to really express those fruity qualities from the hops but also what I get first is that, that nose of raspberry and that fruity finish.

Christian, I like this.

This is really, really nice and light.

The second one is our Grapefruit Hazy IPA known as Ferocious Citrus IPA.

First thing we're gonna take a look at it.

You're going to see it's quite a bit hazier than the last beer we tried.

So let's take a sniff.

Oh!

I smell grapefruit right away.

Very strong.

Yeah, just like breakfast beer right?

All right.

Take a sip.

Tell me again.

It's smooth and I really like it.

It's totally different than this one.

Yeah, that's kind of the fun range here than the, but with those four simple ingredients you can do so much.

I could have this for breakfast, that's a problem.

Well, cheers.

Cheers.

(laughs) From the busy city of Portland I traveled seventy miles south to Albany.

Around fifty thousand people live here.

The community has worked hard to put its city on the map with a carousel that took them fourteen years to make.

Here in Albany, there's a really fun thing that you can do.

You can go on a carousel and it's like, you know going back in time when you were a kid or if you are young at heart you can also have this experience.

It's a museum and Wendy Kirby is the founder of this unique, fun experience.

Tell me where this idea came from?

Well when I went to Missoula, Montana.

We had just started Urban Renewal, which was to redo our downtown and revitalize it.

Well, I'd come up with the idea from going to Missoula.

They carved a carousel completely from scratch.

And I said, you know what?

I think that'd be really cool in Albany.

In June of 2003, we started carvin'.

We completely restored a 1909 Denzel mechanism - that's the carriage that we run the carousel on.

This is fantastic.

I understand that each one of these animals is actually handmade and painted.

Oh yes yes.

It's made from scratch, only with chisels, palettes and knives.

And then it's painted and it takes eight coats of paint and then they take it to an automotive place and put three coats of automotive clear coat on it.

So that's how come it looks so shiny.

Well Wendy, I'd love to take a ride.

Is that OK?

Oh yeah!

Let's do it!

Let's do it.

Wow!!

This is the one that I want to try.

The bear.

Just jump on board?

Grabbed.

And which one are you gonna get on?

I'm gonna get on this one.

(laughing) This is the serval cat.

Okay.

I haven't been on one of these I think, ever.

This is the perfect time to get on one, right?

Yeah.

♪ steam calliope Now all that magic you see upstairs with those animals comes from the imagination of the Carvers.

And I'm with the Lead Carver here, Jack Giles.

Tell me a little bit about how the program works?

How do people make something like this into these beautiful animals you see upstairs?

We, we have various; four or five different carvers that work on this and some of them have different levels of experience.

So we carve the pieces individually.

And when we get to seventy percent done we'll glue it together and then one of the more experienced carvers will put the muscle definition and the detail.

Well Jack, give me a sense of what we can do here?

I'm looking at these different pieces of wood.

I'm imagining that this is a cat right, because of the tail?

Snow Leopard.

Snow Leopard, yeah.

Show me what I can do here.

I'd love to - So you just want you want to kind of grab it.

If you grab it here you see this kind of moves around so you want to kind of grab it down here.

OK.

So you can change the angle and then you just kind of start doing this and you can sort of rotate the tool as you're going down so you just kind of round it.

So you kind of do that.

Wonderful.

So basically you're rounding the body here?

Correct.

Yeah.

I don't want to do anything wrong - am I doing it right?

Now you're doing good.

Okay good.

By the time you're rounding this that will be all the way back to here and you... Really, so I have to cut all that off.

Correct.

Yeah.

Wow.

(mallet tapping) So Brandy, this is the picture of the snow leopard that you're carving on.

So in a couple hours you should have it done.

No, a couple ofyears I might have it done.

These take about five to seven years to each animal five to seven years so the dragon here took eight or nine years.

We're volunteers so just takes a long time to do so.

Absolutely.

But this has got a lot of detail so it's gonna take forever to do the feathers and the necklace yeah.

I really like how you mix the different animals.

I noticed that upstairs they have different characteristics, right?

You have the snow leopard and then the peacock feathers.

So much fun.

I'd love to come up with an idea.

Hmmm, now my head is spinning.

Thank you so much Jack.

This is so much fun.

Thank you.

♪ steam calliope From Albany, I drove 140 miles east to my next adventure.

I've traveled to central Oregon and I want to see these incredible forests that are here.

I'm in the Deschutes National Forest and I'm with Mike Willock.

He owns an adventure travel company and he's taking me out on an ATV, or an 'all terrain vehicle' to explore this beautiful forest.

Tell me a little bit about why you're taking me on one of these?

Well it's all about the experience and it's all about giving people the opportunity to see these beautiful forests out here in Oregon.

And with these side by side otherwise known as the all terrain vehicles we're able to access things that people can't normally see while hiking or going on other excursions or adventures.

I guess too if maybe you weren't able to walk as far or whatever depending on your ability.

These give you an opportunity to explore and kind of a quick way too, right?

Absolutely.

These things can go up to thirty- five, forty miles an hour.

And tell me a little bit about what we're going to see?

So today some of our main highlights that we're gonna see we're gonna be going out to an old lava flow.

So we're one of the only adventure companies that allows us to drive actually over an old lava flow so that's going to be one of our highlights.

We also have a beautiful vista that we're gonna be going to, so we can check out the Central Cascade Range.

All right, I'm putting on my belt.

I can't wait to do this.

Let's do it.

All right.

All buckled up?

Doin' it.

Let's do it!

The Deschutes National Forest covers nearly 1.6 million acres on the eastern slopes of the Cascades in Central Oregon.

The forest spans a variety of landscapes and ecosystems with trails that help you explore.

Wow.

This is amazing!

♪ This is the old lava flow that originated about seven thousand years ago and we have the opportunity to drive these awesome machines up on through this trail here.

I love it.

Like you arrived here you feel like you're on the moon or something.

Yeah, and it's incredible.

You can actually pick up these uh, these rocks and just feel how light these things are.

Weird.

Yeah.

It's like nothing!

Absolutely nothing.

Seriously.

Yeah, a lot of these will actually be able to float in water just like our pumice does.

So it's pretty neat.

Let me just ask you what volcano did this come from?

So this all originated from the Newberry Crater, which is also called the Newberry Caldera.

It is a national monument that we have out here in the Deschutes National Forest.

The sound of the crunching underneath your feet here is so satisfying.

It makes you feel like you're a little kid.

You're just exploring this incredible place.

It's interesting because some of these you can't pull out at all because you're just stuck deep inside and other ones, you can just easily pick them up and they are so light and they have all these holes and different formations.

The moss seems to like this area.

It's just all the water will seep right through and it doesn't give a lot of the bigger trees or bushes really an opportunity.

No.

It's too rugged to have trees here.

But I love the colors... like this one.

This one is actually purple.

Neat.

(motor rumbling) We decide to head out so we could drive to the vista in daylight.

Riding through the forest we see lots of different trees like Ponderosa Pine, Mountain Hemlock, Subalpine Fir, Mixed Conifer and Western Juniper.

[Brandy] The forest is much thicker here.

[Mike] Yeah, it's pretty dense and you can start to see the vegetation changing as we climb.

[Brandy] Wow.... [Mike] Wow!

So we made it to the top of the mountain vista lookout.

Just in time.

Just in time for a beautiful sunset.

So that's the central Cascade Range on a nice October sunset.

Wow.

Absolutely.

It's an incredible viewpoint.

Yeah, just a great experience.

♪ acoustic guitar The next morning I traveled northeast for around one hundred and twenty miles to a ranch in the small town of Fossil.

♪ I've come to Eastern Oregon, which is famous for its cattle ranching and I'm here with the Wilson family.

I'm with Phil Wilson and his daughter Kara and her husband Brian and they have a cattle ranch here.

Tell me a little bit Phil, what it's like to have a job like this and a lifestyle?

It is a lifestyle; it's a dang poor job.

It's a difficult way to make a living but it's very enriching.

We've been fortunate to be in operation here for five generations.

We're on the fifth generation.

What is it like for you to still be in this business?

I know that sometimes people have family farms and then the children end up, not... you know, being involved in it.

How come you decided to do that?

I think we are unbelievably blessed that our family wants to continue to raise incredible beef for consumers and it's absolutely amazing to live in the high desert of eastern Oregon.

[Brandy] And do you find that tourists want to come here and have this ranch experience?

[Kara] Wilson Ranches Retreat Bed and Breakfast is the 1910 Sears and Roebuck Kit house and so we have families from all over the world.

Just about every day that come here to experience an authentic working cattle ranch with a family that's doing it the way that they started so, all over our cattle work is still done on the back of a horse the way God intended.

Wonderful.

And you know what?

I think people also just want to get out in nature and this is a wonderful way to have that opportunity especially if you live in a city or something you won't have a chance to just jump on a horse like this.

So let's, let's do it.

Can't wait.

♪ strumming guitar This is Cochise?

This is... OK... Hand on, foot in, swing over.

OK. And how come you picked Cochise for me?

Because he is the best.

Is he the best?

Is he nice?

Okay so I'm grabbing it like an ice cream cone and then any way I want to ride it I... direction I want to go and I just push it that way.

Yep and then pull back to stop.

Let him have his head go forward.

We ride with one hand.

That way you can use your other hand for roping, texting or pickin' your nose.

Oh wonderful.

Thank you very much.

And keep your hand off the saddle horn.

Don't put it there?

It's the fastest way off the horse.

Just put it down.

You're good.

All right.

Thank you.

Hey, how you doing Buddy?

Looking good, I've got to remember to just use one hand.

What we're doing is we're going to gather the cows and calves known as the pair and sort off the calves.

And the calves are gonna get weaned today.

[Brandy] So, I'm going straight to the herd here.

I've never done this before.

I'm going to see if this works.

All right.

Hup, hup, hup, hup, hup!

What should I be saying to them?

Hup... Whatever, whatever comes out of you that you'd like to express to our cattle herd Brandy is just fine with us.

I love it.

Let's go guys.

This is a nice city girl here learning how to be a cattle rancher right here.

Let's do it guys.

Let's get out of here.

Get down that hill.

Let's go let's go let's go.

How many cows do you think are in front of us?

[Kara] So we'll probably have a little over a hundred and seventy pair that will be coming out of this pasture.

Wow.

And are they all the same type of cows?

They're all Angus Cross.

So how come some when one's brown and one's white in there?

Well that's called Eastern Oregon diversity my dear.

OK.

I like it.

No, so that's a Charolais and Red Angus.

So you say that they're Angus Cross because they're all bred back with a registered Angus bulls.

But we do have some mix in the cowherd.

Fascinating.

♪ percussion and cows mooing Our Wilson Ranches family is absolutely blessed to be able to share this with the world and we're thankful that you were able to join us today as well.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Brandy.

Bye... (laughs) From the ranch I traveled east for one hundred and thirty miles to Pendleton.

The city is famous for its large rodeo known as the Pendleton Roundup and its agricultural and ranching past.

My first stop is at the custom cowboy boots and leather shop.

Here in Pendleton, the cowboy in Western culture is very much alive and I'm with a bespoke boot and shoemaker, Richard Stapleman.

And you've been making boots and shoes for people for many years now.

Tell me a little bit about what you do?

So our shop is specific for fit, that allows our customers to come in, design their own boots and shoes and I would just measure them and ensure that that it's a perfect fit.

And how did you learn how to do this, Richard?

So back in my younger days I rodeoed and a lot of my rodeo buddies after the rodeo they would all head to the bars and that really wasn't my thing.

I was married, had children and so I would go find a boot shop.

That's what interested me, leather work.

And, and that sparked the interest of golly one day I think I'm going to go into that trade.

I want to I want to be a boot maker.

Cool.

So year after year of hanging out in people's boots shops till they'd run me off.

Then I was able to find books that would train you how to make boots and shoes and I just began.

Wow, and you're so talented.

Most of my customers literally limp in here and I'm their last resort.

You know to build their boots and shoes for them.

They come in, put 'em on, walk around for a few minutes and I get hugged by gigantic men - and see gigantic men cry.

I believe it.

That they haven't had boots or shoes that fit for twenty-five, thirty years.

Wow.

I don't want to give people hope but... you can see the wheels turning that, “Oh my God...

I get to go hunting or I can go out and start doing what I want again.

” Okay.

So tell me what we're going to do here you're going to teach me a bit of your trade.

Okay, so we'll sew our doughnuts in our poll holes on our 1908 Treadle Singer.

1908?

It's a 1908.

Yep.

It accommodates my slow, slow speed.

So let's go ahead and pounce our stitch pattern on there.

OK.

So, what we're going to do we've created a pattern out of paper.

We've pre-, we have pre- poked all the holes with the sewing machine so I literally can now know where each stitch is gonna go.

And I want to control that to maintain a nice, even artistic pattern.

OK.

So, what we'll do, we'll line this back up, we have a sock full of just simple baby powder and I'm going to hold this paper pattern fairly firmly and just lightly and quickly... Wow, it looks amazing!

Thank you so much Richard for showing me this insight into your world.

It's fascinating and I can really tell it's a passion so I'm happy that you found your passion after bull riding.

Me too!

(laugh together) ♪ My trip to Oregon would not be complete without learning about the Indigenous people who have lived on the land for ten thousand years.

Just outside of Pendleton you can come to Tamástslikt Cultural Institute and learn about the indigenous people in the area.

I'm with John Beavis.

Tell me a little bit about the different groups that are here?

OK, you are in the homeland of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla, recognized in 1855.

We confederated, but we're three tribes: we're Cayuse, Umatilla, Walla Walla.

This is primarily Cayuse country and the Umatillas were more towards the Columbia River and the Walla Walla were more toward tri-cities area, but we come together in fifty-five when the treaty was negotiated.

That's why we're all here today.

Crazy, because ironically, when the treaty was negotiated this reservation wasn't even on the drawing board.

Wow.

And what's your background?

I'm Umatilla / Walla Walla.

And what do people learn when they come to the Cultural Institute here?

Well, they get our history when you go to the exhibit you'll start with the Aboriginal pre-contact.

By the time you get to the end, your modern times and what you do is you witness all the changes our people went through as time progressed and you hear it through our voices and our elders and our stories.

So what I'd like to tell people at the tours is everything you learn in school: throw it out the window it don't mean nothing here.

And did people in this region go to Indian residential schools?

Oh yeah, yeah.

Boarding school?

Oh yeah, right over there.

That used to be a boarding school.

And did people lose some of their culture?

Oh, everybody did.

That, that's what we call the darkest period in our history when we were forbidden.

There was a lot of these things that we do today that were forbidden by the government, horse parading, powwows, language, sweat house, vision seeking, naming ceremony, all of that.

They tried to get it all away from us.

But how did you, after those schools were closed, how did you find that knowledge?

That was sort of lost.

When, when you're at boarding school they can't watch you twenty-four / seven.

You get free time.

And it was in that free time, I believe that the kids would go off campus and that's where they would let their hair down.

They would talk the language.

They would sing the song.

And that's how it stayed alive.

It just kind of went underground and it almost disappeared, especially the language.

But it, like we say it's making a comeback now.

And so, life is like a pendulum, it swings back and forth.

Well, well it's swing away from us for a while now swinging back to us.

First thing and do a grab four nice-sized poles and we're going to measure.

Is that too long?

No, perfect.

Let's stand 'er up.

Perfect.

Wonderful.

Oh, there's a horse on it!

Beautiful.

I painted this myself.

♪