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: Look at this.

There's so much under there.

Many of Oregon's beaches are covered in little bits of plastic.

Cleaning the sand by hand might seem crazy, and yet it's making a difference.

MAN: We're removing several tons of microplastic right here every year.

Then... MAN: It's known to a lot of local people as the Dynamite Hole.

These pools full of steelhead used to be the targets of poachers armed with dynamite, until one man decided he'd watch over the fish himself, something he's been doing every day now for over 20 years.

And it's a delight.

But first... The vast majority of Oregonians live in places like this, where the built environment, the urban environment, has completely consumed and overrun nature.

So it's amazing to learn that there are still places secret and wild enough in Oregon where new species are still being discovered.

Even cooler, producer Aaron Scott found that many of these discoveries are not being made by scientists but by everyday folks.

MAN: These mountains are definitely a mess of roads.

They are a little confusing in places.

AARON SCOTT: By day, Neil Marchington is a deputy sheriff.

But get him off the clock, and chances are he's headed up some random dirt road, daughter in tow.

Kind of a hairy spot, huh?

Are you doing good, Aspen?

[ Neil chuckles ] He explores the rough roads most of us pass by because we assume they dead-end in the middle of nowhere.

But the spots Neil seeks rarely show up on maps, if they even have names at all.

Ah, here we are, No Name Cave.

You only find them by knowing where to look.

You can tell caves by there's always a Keystone Light trail to known caves.

It's one of the sadder parts of North American existence.

[ chuckling ] Neil is one of Oregon's most accomplished cavers.

Chances are if there's a passage big enough for someone to enter, he's crawled through it or even helped discover it.

It started out as a hobby.

But in the past decade, he's carved out an unusual niche as a highly respected subterranean citizen scientist.

You guys can hop in and we can all brief in there.

Today, he's on a mission to find specimens of an undocumented white millipede species as well as any other critters that he doesn't recognize.

Any other spider species, harvestmen, pseudoscorpions, we're going to want to collect all of those and we'll get them sent to the right people.

In addition to his daughter Aspen, he's bringing along his friend Lonnie Seiders and BLM biologist Jason Reilly.

I think we're all ready to go downhill.

No Name Cave begins with a tight belly crawl.

Just watch your head as you come through.

[ grunting and scraping ] It's not a place for the claustrophobic... nor for the arachnophobic.

ASPEN: Oh, hello.

NEIL: Oh, yeah, harvestmen everywhere.

Although, as Neil is quick to point out, the creatures commonly known as daddy longlegs aren't actually spiders, or even dangerous.

Spiders will always have fangs for envenomation.

These harvestmen, daddy longlegs, they don't have that.

They don't envenomate their prey.

Despite the old wives' tale about daddy longlegs being poisonous, they are completely benign.

Not that there aren't plenty of spiders to find in the cave's smaller entry chamber.

ASPEN: I found an arachnid.

NEIL: Oh, did you?

ASPEN: Yeah.

He's cute.

- Cute?

- ASPEN: He is.

- NEIL: Can I see?

- ASPEN: Yes, he's on his web.

And I'm just going to assume his gender.

NEIL: That is a female spider, but what species she is I don't know.

We'll try to scoop her up.

The most terrifying thing about collecting arachnids in caves might not be the darkness or crawling through cobwebs.

It might be this.

[ air hissing ] You have to suck them up through a hose.

There you go.

I have a screen in here, but things sometimes come through.

After they finish searching the antechamber, the team heads into No Name Cave's grand room.

NEIL: I love this room.

Can you hear the resonance off the crystals?

Just the echo?

It's a big chamber just full of crystals.

ASPEN: That looks amazing.

It's a pretty cool bell formation.

Yeah, the big Liberty Bell, and you can just see it glistening.

It's just gorgeous.

ASPEN: Here's a bat.

The bat's hanging out on the wall being adorable.

NEIL: Oh, nice.

So you can see on the ceiling crystals forming in the waterdrops here.

Just to get an inch longer takes probably at least 100 years.

It's pretty remarkable how slow-growing it is.

While the adults marvel at the cave formations, Aspen begins to search them.

ASPEN: I do not want to drop down that.

NEIL: One of my early childhood memories of Aspen is a cave in Nevada.

We were dragging her through the cave at 6 months old in a baby bunting through crawl passages over mud.

So that's sort of the way Aspen's grown up.

She's never really known a life that didn't include caving and research in the field with invertebrates.

MAN: And how many years has it been since you've seen Aspen's eyes?

NEIL: She's sort of hiding in her hoodie.

It's been a thing that's new for seventh grade.

I'm just too used to being in caves.

I can't stand the sunlight.

I'm a vampire.

That's my dad's fault.

[ Neil laughs ] No Name Cave and its neighbors in the Siskiyou Mountains stand out in Oregon because they are marble instead of the state's more typical lava caves.

But what really makes these caves unique is one of the critters that calls them home.

So we have a juvenile trogloraptor.

This is not an adult.

It's a very small one.

In 2010, Neil was part of a conservation group that was exploring a nearby cave when they came across a single mysterious spider.

Neil volunteered to collect more specimens and he found them here.

We didn't know what it was in the field.

We had no idea.

There was some talk about it maybe being a new genus, which would have been exciting.

We finally hear back that it's an entirely new family.

It's something that hadn't happened in North America for over a hundred years.

The spiders seem to be an evolutionary throwback frozen in time in these Oregon caves.

Their closest relatives are spiders in the fossil record that crawled the Earth in the age of dinosaurs.

Under the microscope, you get these beautiful hooked legs.

That was one of the things that inspired the trogloraptor name, a dinosaur-esque giant hooked claw at the end that they use to grab the walls.

But this lonely family of one species has more to its name than just trogloraptor.

Trogloraptor marchingtoni.

Of course, my last name is Marchington, and they were kind enough to name it after me.

Newspapers worldwide were contacting me, The Telegraph in the UK did a really nice story.

I noticed it made it into the Pakistan Times.

So it was pretty remarkable.

Caves play an exciting role in science because they are refuges.

Primitive creatures like the trogloraptor can persist here long after their surface relatives die off, providing a bridge to understanding the past.

Good job.

At the same time, caves are natural laboratories for evolution, so each new discovery can lead not only to greater understandings of the past but possibilities for the future.

Some of the cave creatures are really, really unique.

I'll be careful that I don't hurt him.

NEIL: Oh, that's beautiful.

- ASPEN: It's adorable.

- MAN: Isn't that nice?

NEIL: We've had a lot of research going on with cave bacteria.

There may be new classes of antibiotics that could literally save us from pandemics.

Vampire bat saliva has come up with a really unique compound that's probably going to be just a remarkable treatment for stroke patients.

If caves are at the forefront of science, then Neil is on the vanguard of that research.

Another one in.

He can't even find enough scientists to document all the species he collects.

Not all bear his name, though.

Do you remember what your species is called?

You have a species of harvestmen named after you.

ASPEN: I think it was, like, Taracus aspenae.

NEIL: Yeah, Taracus aspenae.

They're from Catherine Creek ice cave in the Wallowas.

We've probably found at least 30 species new to science, and only a handful of them have gone all the way through the peer-review process and are official.

That's a remarkable feat for anyone, but particularly for someone without a science degree.

Discovering new species, it's the Holy Grail of the science.

And, well, Neil is kind of a legend, at least in the biology world.

They say every cave he goes in, he comes out with a new species.

In the case of this trip, it's a small white millipede that one of Neil's scientific collaborators is finalizing with the help of one last specimen.

ASPEN: Look, one's on my hand!

And there's some others down here too, I believe.

You found a little pocket of them?

ASPEN: Look at that.

He's such a happy little guy.

For Neil, finding new species is all part of the allure that keeps him driving down those abandoned roads and flying to far-off places where a small hole in the ground can lead to a whole new world.

NEIL: Particularly today, we can look at satellite images and we can look at topo maps and we can use GPSes.

None of that works down here.

You can't see anything beyond your headlamp.

I think that helps drive some of that fascination, just the unknown and never knowing what's really around the next corner or what you're going to see today.

[ waves crashing ] These beaches are gorgeous.

But if you took a really close look, you actually might be shocked.

What one Oregon man saw prompted him to get inventive.

JULE GILFILLAN: Cannon Beach is one of Oregon's most iconic and popular beaches.

But Marc Ward and his crew aren't here on vacation.

WARD: Look at this.

There's so much under there.

They're here to clean up.

WOMAN: You want to go and run it again?

WARD: You want to run it with me, Keri?

This is what we love.

Just the most pure, pure sand.

This is pristine.

This is what you want to sit in.

Unfortunately, sand doesn't look this way all by itself... at least not anymore.

All beaches have microplastics now.

There was your coffee cup, what's left of it.

Now it's food for some marine organism.

Microplastics are the tiny particles that make up larger plastic items.

They're also what's left when those larger plastics break down.

To marine life, these small suspended particles look a lot like food.

In 2002, Marc founded Sea Turtles Forever to protect the endangered animals.

One of the most important aspects of marine turtle conservation is habitat.

So I started studying degradation of habitat.

And as we were working on that, they were starting to lose a lot of sea turtles in Australia.

And we were seeing microplastics in every single necropsy.

Shortly after that, we had a hundred sea turtles stranded in Brazil.

And what they found in the necropsy was thousands of microplastics that they had ingested.

One 13-pound turtle had swallowed more than 3,500 pieces of plastic.

Microplastic might be the most significant threat to the long-term sustainability of marine turtles.

Researchers knew that microplastics were killing turtles but suspected there was more to the story.

Plastics have the ability to absorb persistent organic pollutants in the ocean.

And the worst chemicals we ever made -- PCBs, PBDE, DDT -- were all contained in these microplastics now.

These persistent organic pollutants, known as POPs, have been linked to neurological defects in children and cancer.

At that point, I realized it's basically feeding toxic substance to our entire marine food web every day.

That also includes humans who eat that seafood.

I realized that we had to develop some kind of system to remove the microplastics.

Marc came up with a lightweight, low-cost screen to systematically filter microplastics from the beach sand.

We've set up a one-square-meter grid so that we can gauge the density of microplastics in the beach.

The teams have found everything from hypodermic needles to the remains of shotgun shells to thousands of tiny pellets called nurdles.

Pellets for manufacturing of plastics.

As discouraging as the results were, Marc's screen was effective.

It actually worked way better than we ever imagined.

Not only can we do large areas of beach relatively fast, but because it's a polymer mesh screen, we found it generates a low static charge.

And we've discovered that we were collecting plastic dust with that screen that you can't even see in the beach, particles the size of a grain of sand.

That was a big bonus.

Okay, now we've got to make sure we get everything, every bit of this dust, all this stuff, because we're going to analyze the sand, too.

The data collected by the group's painstaking surveys are part of a variety of research and conservation projects all targeting plastic pollution.

Recent innovations, like the System 001 Ocean Cleanup project to catch plastic before it gets to shore, are underway.

But the press was quick to point out that this effort didn't live up to its promise.

The majority of plastics are subsurface.

There's no technology out there that's going to remove that plastic without doing potentially great harm to the marine food web, because you're going to be harvesting a lot more than the plastics.

So when it comes to the beach, we have an opportunity.

Oh, there's one of those nurdles I was talking about.

The industrial pellets, they go into a plastic injection mold, and you get your sunglasses or your car parts.

That's the raw material that makes all plastics.

And there are billions upon billions of these in the ocean now.

So many polymer pellets in this load.

WOMAN: Marc, this is so bad.

WARD: Yep.

This beach needs a full cleanup.

This year, from Cannon Beach, we've probably taken a ton, you know, just in Cannon Beach.

In one day at Fort Stevens, we took 550 pounds.

You know, it's on that kind of a scale.

Multiply that by all the beaches in the world, and the problem can seem insurmountable.

That point is not lost on Marc Ward.

You know, it's really bad.

It's bad everywhere.

It's not just here.

There's no end to this issue in our lifetimes or our kids' lifetimes.

But I have to keep a positive attitude.

We have shipped hundreds of screens all over the world, So there's thousands of people filtering now.

And the other thing is, you don't filter the whole beach.

The microplastics are all in a band maybe 5 to 10 meters wide.

The bulk of the material will be in that high tide wrack line.

We don't have to filter down there, thank God.

That would be impossible.

And we're removing several tons of microplastic with our crew right here every year.

But that's not enough.

Our use of plastic is completely out of hand.

Plastic things wrapped in plastic encased in plastic.

Any way you can get away from using plastic is a benefit.

This is not the ultimate solution, filtering these beaches and doing our work.

But we're a vital part of the solution.

WOMAN: I'll grab the shovels.

WARD: And I look at the beautiful sand we just created as I move forward one meter at a time.

You've got to focus on the good.

[ birds chirping ] There was a time not too long ago when poachers used to come to Steamboat Creek along the North Umpqua River.

There they'd drop sticks of dynamite into pools filled with steelhead.

It happened often enough that locals started calling it the Dynamite Hole.

Then Lee Spencer came along, and he started spending his every day by the river to watch the fish and keep poachers at bay.

We joined him 10 years ago for this story, and we recently learned that now, 20 years on, he's still at it.

ED JAHN: Lee Spencer begins each morning like many of us.

But that's where any similarities between what Lee does and what most people do ends.

The first year I came up here, I lived in a tent for the seven months I was here, and about three years later, decided to upgrade the trailer to an Airstream.

And right now it's as comfortable a place for me to work as anyplace I know or really ever have had.

Lee's Airstream and a creekside workbench are his office.

And what Lee does here is watch fish.

[ birds chirping ] But if not for Lee, these steelhead might not be here.

This pool below me here holds hundreds of wild steelhead, and it used to get terribly poached, including dynamiting it.

It's known to a lot of local people as the Dynamite Hole.

In 1993, there was a final dynamiting event.

After that, people all got together and said, "We've got to get a volunteer presence up here to make sure this doesn't happen again."

And of course, for every dynamiting, there were 20 or 30 snaggings of other types.

They dynamiters targeted one of the most productive steelhead spawning areas around.

30% of North Umpqua steelhead spawn in this tributary.

This vandalism threatened to destroy the steelhead runs that make the Umpqua River famous.

Lee stepped up to make sure these fish had a future.

My agreement is to spend 12 of every 24 hours at the pool, which includes every evening.

Basically, just being here is enough to dissuade people who would be interested in poaching, I think.

These steelhead began their lives as tiny trout emerging from Steamboat Creek.

From there, they descended to the North Umpqua, dropping over raging falls and navigating long reaches of whitewater to enter the ocean near Reedsport.

They spend years at sea dodging fishermen's nets and sea lions, only to return as adults to spawning beds at the place of their birth.

But here's the mysterious part: before they reach their spawning beds, they come to the Dynamite Hole, a pool that's kept cool by inflow from surrounding creeks.

The fish stop -- not for days, but for months.

They need to have a temperature refuge.

If they're at ease, if they're not spooked, they're holding very still, and they're trying to use as little energy as possible because they're not feeding.

The steelhead will wait here up to 10 months.

When spawning season comes in February, the rest of the creek is cool enough that the fish can then comfortably move upstream.

But for as long as the fish feel like sticking around, Lee will be here, watching over them.

This is my ninth year and my -- whatever, 200 days a season, my 1,800th day or something like that here.

And it's a delight.

Lee does take advantage of the perks of the job, namely access to the fly-fishing paradise of the North Umpqua just downstream.

The things that draw steelheaders to this river or fly anglers to this river is it's a long tradition of fly angling, goes back more than 50 years.

The fish average 3 to 4 pounds heavier than the average for summer steelhead in this part of the Northwest.

And there are very large steelhead in this river -- 20-pound fish.

Lee doesn't really care if the fish don't bite.

Likewise, success on the job at the Dynamite Hole is judged by what doesn't happen.

I decided after the first day of deterring poachers that there had to be a little bit more than that to it, so I hauled out a notebook and I jerry-rigged a platform to sit at and I just started taking notes about the wild steelhead, which have burgeoned into notes about the creek, about other animals on the creek, about the interactions of them all.

A kingfisher just flew by.

I've learned to appreciate the fish more as a curious creature that's aware of the world around it in an intimate scale and watches the world around it.

So will this pool get completely full of salmon?

WARD: I'm regularly asked, "So you count the fish?"

And I do keep track of how many fish are in the pool, but my purpose here is a little bit more fundamental than that.

It's to make sure that people don't harass the fish.

WOMAN: It's a bit different to our jobs, which are working in offices and dealing with telephones and computers, and it must be just amazing to watch a pool of fish instead of a computer screen.

MAN: You can't do anything but admire it.

Thanks a lot.

See you later.

WARD: It's a good, positive, simple way to do something for the world that I've lived in for the last 57 years.

It has allowed me to read books that I would not otherwise have read, to watch very interesting creatures interact with their environment, to give my dog a good life, and to occasionally go down to the river and cast a fly for steelhead.

I think it's a good life.

[ ♪♪♪ ] We want to leave you now with a peaceful slice of life as captured by Oregon Field Guide photographer Brandon Swanson on a recent visit to Garibaldi, Oregon.

[ engine sputtering ] - MAN: Good morning.

- MAN: Morning.

[ pump humming ] [ engine revving ] [ birds cawing ] [ birds chirping ] [ gull crying ] [ engine rumbling ] [ water bubbling ] MAN: Oh, yeah.

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

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