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: Next, on Oregon Field Guide: We explore the wintry mountains of the North Cascades, looking for a reclusive predator, the wolverine.

Then, there is a mill in Oregon where things have been running pretty much the same way for over 130 years.

But first, how about a little fun aboard the Sumpter Valley Railroad?

You know how the Christmas carol goes: ♪ Dashing through the snow On a one-horse open sleigh ♪ Well, few of us actually ever get that opportunity.

But you can go dashing through the snow on the Sumpter Valley Railway.

Up in the Blue Mountains a few miles west of Baker City is one of Oregon's most famous mining towns.

MAN: Sumpter was actually quite large when gold was discovered.

And then once the gold gave out, everything kind of dwindled down to what we have now.

The once-busy streets and massive mining dredge are now quiet.

But when winter sets in... [ horn blowing ] ...this sleepy mountain town transforms into something right out of a storybook.

Our Christmas train and the city of Sumpter's Christmas celebration is the second weekend in December every year.

You think about how many people have had a train going around their Christmas tree at home, this brings that toy train to life.

[ steam hissing ] We have two steam locomotives that we like to use for it, and that just drives that picture everybody has in their head home.

And it all comes courtesy of a dedicated group of volunteers.

So the Sumpter Valley Railroad is an all-volunteer organization.

We have about 360 members, and there's probably two dozen of us that actually come up and work on the trains.

These venerable machines are an impressive sight.

But they can also be a bit cranky.

This is the number 19.

It was built in 1920 for the original Sumpter Valley Railroad, and we hoped to use it for the Christmas trains this weekend, and unfortunately we fired it up yesterday and discovered a couple leaky flues.

So we're going to have to do a full inspection of them and then replace those.

Fortunately, there's a backup.

This is our 50-ton General Electric locomotive.

These are quite rare.

There's only a few in the United States.

There's probably three or four.

This is actually more rare than a steam locomotive, yeah.

So even though there's no steam this year, there's no stopping the Christmas train.

[ horn blowing ] MIKE: We decorate our locomotive with Christmas lights and wreaths to make it really a Christmas train.

Good morning!

How are you guys?

My name is Mike.

I am one of your two conductors today.

And if you have any questions, let me know.

Have fun.

Whoop, hello!

[ laughing ] [ woman chuckles, people chattering ] We have the crackling of the wood stoves to keep everybody warm that want to be warm.

We have an open car for everybody that wants to be outside in the weather.

Merry Christmas!

Oh... We also have Santa Claus making appearances throughout the weekend.

[ all laughing ] Yeah, Merry Christmas!

MIKE: We want everybody to feel the Christmas spirit and just relax.

The snow keeps coming out the top, so it messes up our deck.

Among the volunteers definitely not relaxing is depot manager Kim Svaty.

Hi, guys.

Really, really getting Christmas-y up here.

Yeah, it is.

There's cookies and hot chocolate in there.

Go ahead and make yourself at home, guys.

The depots are my main things.

And I think they call me the den mother.

So the 800 cookie-- 850 cookies that I got here, then the hot chocolate, and making sure that everybody's happy.

Another thing I do is all of our merchandising.

Ticketing and calling, cleaning decks, cleaning toilets.

It's nonstop, but it's rewarding.

Oh, that was a cute one I got for you looking at Santa!

That's your card, and just give me a second here, and I'll get you a copy.

Did you guys do good on the train?

All right.

You know, it's so refreshing when they come up to the counter and the kids are excited, and their little faces out the smudge in the window.

And I don't know if I've ever heard anybody complain about the Christmas train.

It's just a happy spot.

[ yelling excitedly ] Last call!

Leaving track number one!

All aboard!

[ bell ringing ] [ horn blowing ] You didn't see a reindeer?

Aww!

Maybe later.

You never know.

Watch out the windows.

Give me five?

There you go!

I do this for the fun of it.

And I've always loved trains.

I still have a train set at home.

All right, so we are going to come into the Sumpter depot here in just a couple minutes.

Ah... Oh, look, who's that?

Who's that?

CHILDREN: It's Santa!

Merry Christmas!

Ho-ho-ho-ho!

So this car was restored two years ago.

This is a childhood dream to run a steam locomotive, and I get to do that now as an adult.

[ bell ringing and horn blowing ] Up in the cab, engineer Dan Roberts will give you a slightly different perspective.

There's locomotives you swear by and you swear at, and this one I presently swear at.

[ air hissing ] You always have to keep an eye on it and figure out how to make things work.

I just happen to be one of the few people knows how to argue with it and will usually win.

[ horn blowing ] It's Justin Shopland's first year on the train, and he's already a qualified brakeman.

Brakeman's on.

JUSTIN: The job of a brakeman ensures that all the brakes on the train are functioning properly, giving hand signals, throwing switches, tying up air hoses, just making sure that everything on the train is in safe working order.

We try to keep things as historical as possible.

Hand signals were the first forms of communication on the railroad, so anytime we're in the engineer's view, it's always hand signals.

[ bell ringing and horn blowing ] It's going to be a few years down the road, but I would like to become an engineer and just come out here on the weekends and play with steam.

WOMAN: Okay.

RIDERS: ♪ O'er the fields we go ♪ ♪ Laughing all the way ♪ ♪ Ha, ha, ha ♪ ♪ Bells on bobtails ring ♪ ♪ Making spirits bright ♪ ♪ How fun it is to ride ♪ ♪ And sing a sleighing song Tonight ♪ ♪ Oh, jingle bells Jingle bells ♪ ♪ Jingle all the way ♪ ♪ Oh, what fun it is to ride ♪ ♪ In a one-horse open sleigh ♪ [ bell ringing and horn blowing ] MIKE: Wait till the train stops!

WOMAN: Santa's coming!

Santa's coming!

He's coming with candy canes!

He's giving out candy canes!

Ho-ho-ho!

Here you go.

Here you go, a Christmas bell.

All right.

Merry Christmas!

MIKE: We want to make an experience for young and old.

We want everybody to feel welcome and just bring that picture everybody has in their head to life.

Thank you, sir.

MIKE: Who did you guys get to see?

CHILD: Santa!

KIM: There's something about a train that just kind of does something, especially at this time of year.

It gets you in the spirit, and everybody's happy.

And the world is a little crazy right now, and it's nice.

[ bell ringing ] [ ♪♪♪ ] I've come a long way from my home in Oregon all the way to Washington's beautiful Methow Valley in search of a rare and elusive animal that calls these rugged mountains its home.

Every winter, the North Cascade Highway gets snowed in.

The only way into these mountains from the Methow Valley is by snowmobile or ski.

Stephanie Williams and David Moskowitz are prepared to do both because the wild animal they're studying lives only in remote mountain environments.

STEPHANIE: We're going to service one of our monitoring stations, and it's about-- you know, it's well over five miles from the end of the plowed road, so we get here with the snow machine and then we get our skis on and we skim out to the site.

-Don't forget the meat.

-DAVID: No.

Stephanie and David's passion for wildlife biology in these mountains have inspired them to take on a mission that most might consider too inaccessible and impractical.

Stephanie is a professional mountain guide, and David is an award-winning wildlife photographer.

These are handy skills to have when trying to locate and document what is surely the most elusive animal on these mountains, the wolverine.

DAVID: This animal is literally mythical, right?

I mean, this is like this creature that has this ability to survive in this harsh landscape where other creatures flee and go down out of the mountains or go to sleep for the winter.

Wolverines just stick around.

STEPHANIE: I think of them as the spirit animal of the alpine.

It's almost like they're playing in this terrain, up and over steep chutes, over ridges, onto the top of mountain peaks in the dead of winter as if it was flat ground.

Finding wolverines takes funding, staffing, and government support that has been hard to come by.

So in 2017, David and Stephanie teamed up to create the Cascade Wolverine Project.

It's a citizen-science effort to answer some very basic but unknown ecological questions, like are there wolverines in this area, and if so, where exactly?

They set out cameras where they think a wandering wolverine might travel, like mountain saddles and confluences of drainage valleys.

Then they return to see what their cameras recorded.

Bait's gone.

-What's that?

-Bait's gone.

All right, we'll make sure-- This has been out for three weeks.

So we'll see if the camera's working anymore.

Yeah, it still has half the battery.

Already we can see a martin in here.

All of their bait is gone, but it wasn't a wolverine who feasted.

It was one of their cousins of the Mustelid family, a martin.

You can kind of see his bushy tail.

Since their last visit to this monitoring station, their camera's taken several hundred images of a martin.

A very well-fed martin.

Yep.

Typical.

DAVID: We should actually be called the Cascades Martin Project.

-STEPHANIE: Word.

-Yeah.

With the occasional wolverine mixed in.

Yeah, you know, you kind of get your expectations up for a wolverine.

It's so rare to get them that there's, like, some disappointment.

But that's normal.

Like, this is usually what happens.

Wolverines are hard to study because they are solitary by nature.

And they are wanderers of great distances.

DAVID: A single wolverine might have a home range of 100 square miles or more.

They're a small animal in a huge environment, so it's just the chances of coming across them are very low.

I've almost seen a wolverine once.

It ran behind my back, and I looked around and found its tracks across my ski tracks.

STEPHANIE: Among the research community in Washington, I think we had a roundtable of 20 field biologists asked to raise their hand how many times they'd seen a wolverine, and I had seen the most, twice.

I had seen the most.

So this is like... it gives you a sense of how rare they are.

No one can say for sure how many wolverines once lived in the North Cascades.

Like their Mustelid cousins the sea otters, they were hunted for their fur and by the early 20th century had vanished completely.

Now biologists believe that wolverines from Canada are slowly reestablishing in the North Cascades.

David and Stephanie's camera stations provide an on-the-ground way of witnessing what is happening in these remote and rather inaccessible mountains.

STEPHANIE: We have usually 10 to 12 stations throughout the winter, and we maintain them over the course of the winter, hoping for images so that we get simply presence.

Do these animals show up?

And for changes over time as land use changes.

DAVID: All right, let's see what we got here.

Five hundred photos, all of a plain martin.

That's about like what it usually is here.

Part of what makes this grassroots effort so unique is the photography element.

Let's try to bring this down to about-- Yeah, I guess that's as far down as it'll go.

They use typical trail cameras, but David has developed his own setup with DIY ingenuity, trial and error, and literally duct tape.

I'm doing like studio photography here.

We've got, like, different lighting set up at different powers, and, like, I'm using a really nice camera to get portraits, essentially, of these wildlife.

[ shutter clicking ] The photos of wolverines at night have a really particularly kind of ethereal sense to them.

You're kind of like pulling back the blinds on this animal, so it's like you just imagine them out here on this, like, snowy night in the winter in the wilderness, and then there's just this split-second where there's lights exposing them, and you get this kind of window into their world.

STEPHANIE: And that's what we're going for.

Awareness, excitement, a sense of wonder about a very cool animal that is facing a very unknown future.

The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife estimates that there may be as few as 25 wolverines in the North Cascades.

Conservation groups have advocated listing the wolverines under the Endangered Species Act for more than 20 years.

Without federal protection as an endangered species, it's hard to get that continuous monitoring effort going.

Boom, green.

Green is good, right?

The need for monitoring has been picked up by grassroot volunteer groups forming a patchwork of survey areas from the North Cascades to Mount Hood.

STEPHANIE: We're always kind of scraping by.

Each year, it's sort of like, okay, how are we going to pull this off?

And then somehow we do.

With the cameras reset, the last thing to do before heading back is to hang fresh bait.

Stephanie hangs a piece of roadkill that a local donated to the cause.

All right, that's it.

We try to be as resourceful and scavenging as a wolverine is, but we run on a shoestring budget.

No wolverines on the cameras today.

There's our martin.

But they'll be back in a couple weeks to check again.

Dang.

At least the trip out of the mountains is downhill.

I just the other day, actually, came across fresh wolverine tracks.

That's kind of one of those things where you're like, "Oh, they really do exist!"

They're not just like showing up in photographs, you know, like a mirage or something.

That definitely kind of catches my breath.

It's like, "Oh, this happened within the last maybe 12 hours.

I just crossed paths with a wolverine."

It refuels my desire to do this.

[ ♪♪♪ ] [ saw whirring ] Back in 1889, Jonathon Samuel Yoder came to this corner of Clackamas County and built a small family sawmill.

Since that time, it's burned down and been rebuilt three different times, but it endures and it's still a family operation.

Photographer Todd Sonflieth came here to show us just how little has changed.

MAN: 1889 is when they built the first sawmill.

J. S. Yoder started it with sawmill parts from Missouri, and there's some still in here being used that went through all the fires.

So we got a fresh sharp saw on this morning because I wanted to make sure everything was going to run good.

My name's David Yoder at Yoder Mill Incorporated.

The address is Canby, Oregon, but it's out in the country, the community named Yoder.

You can actually find it on a map, kind of.

[ saw grinding ] My hired guy, Lowell, he's been here for a very long time.

I think he was like 19 years old when he started here.

We buy logs and saw and sell lumber to the general public.

The rough sawing, it's rounded and it's a little bit rougher cut than the band saw.

That's why most mills are a band saw, because it's a lot smoother cut.

But to retool up for stuff, it wouldn't be worth doing that, because there's enough niche for the circular saw, and this works fairly well, even as old as it is.

The customer we're working for, he had logs hauled in, and he wants to have them sawed to his lumber list, like 2 x 6s, the want to be planed.

The 2 x 12s are left rough.

So we're processing those logs for him.

Daily exercise.

What do you think, be done by the end of the week?

Be done cutting it this week, yeah.

MAN: There's only a few mills around, and this is one of them, that I know that still cut rough cut.

My project we're doing right now is getting ready to rebuild our cabin.

It burned down in Detroit, Oregon, back in the 2020 fire.

And I'll do this cabin out of rough-cut 1 x 12s, and I just like the look of it.

So, you know, that's why I come here.

It comes out rougher, it's not smooth, and it's kind of cool, being able to use my own trees off the property to rebuild what-- you know, what burnt down.

Yeah, it looks a little scary because it's the same saw setup.

It's electric, obviously, now.

It used to be steam.

Well, that's the old steam engine.

They used to use that as the power.

They just left it set the way this is when they hooked up the electric.

When they turned electric here, they went to an old sawmill and bought parts.

So they bought this wall with all the components on it, cut it off, brought it over here, mounted it, wired it.

Well, you did what you had to do.

So that's what we run the saw with even up to today.

I take out a lot of sawdust.

So there's a little danger with all the sawdust, and it's burnt three times and put a mill back on the same property.

LOWELL: I started here in 1976.

SONFLIETH: Have you ever heard of retirement?

Uh, no.

[ saw grinding ] DAVID: Lowell's role here is basically anything and everything.

He shows up, gets everything ready to go.

As he's preparing the logs out there, we run a metal detector over, because you find nails and hardware at times.

Nails, iron, anything goes beep, that means problems.

DAVID: Ah, just hit nails.

Thought we had 'em all out, didn't beep with the detector, so it's not always 100 percent.

This is the true metal detector, because it'll find 'em.

If they're in there, you're going to hit them with this and upset yourself.

Once I hit a bolt in a log, and it knocked teeth out and bent the saw.

Pieces kind of went flying around.

It's replaceable teeth, and you can see the difference when they get worn out, the size difference.

And there's 44 teeth, and each tooth costs about $5 apiece.

So you don't want to hit too many nails.

That upsets a person.

It's always no fun making the small stuff, because it just takes longer.

The bigger the piece, generally you get it out of here quicker, but the small stuff, it's just all this cutting.

It's down to just stacking this job out and counting it, making a bill, and it's done.

Which, that's always the best part of the job.

[ saw grinding ] It'd be pretty neat to have it go on more generations.

I'm the fourth, and I got a couple nephews that they're interested.

That means a lot to me.

[ ♪♪♪ ] 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.

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