Major support for Oregon Field Guide is provided by... [ ♪♪♪ ] Ho, ho, ho!

[ man whoops ] WOMAN: Oh, my gosh, she's huge!

WOMAN: So we have a sevengill... [ bird chirping ] WOMAN: This is history.

We are currently creating history.

NARRATOR: Tonight on Oregon Field Guide: WOMAN: [ gasps ] Here we go.

MAN: Oh, yeah, that's gorgeous.

WOMAN: Yeah.

We explore the extraordinary ecosystems that live below everyday docks.

And then we journey to Elk Flats to see the summer blooms.

[ wind whistling ] But first, we learn what it takes to climb a mountain.

WOMAN: Are we lost?

We're currently on Mount Tahoma, also known as Mount Rainier.

We're following a group of Native youth as they attempt to do something that not many of their peers get to do.

WOMAN: We're gonna move mountain pace today, which feels slow at first, but after seven hours, you're gonna be moving at that pace.

You guys will be doing 4,600 feet up, 4,600 feet down.

This is one of our training hikes that we do.

We have a month to go for the big climb on Mount Tahoma.

I want visibility of Native people back on the mountain, but I believe that in order for that to start happening, we have to get our younger generation out on the mountain.

There's five of us total.

Well, six including me.

Everyone is Native.

I'm training to climb Mount Rainier... with Rachel.

[ giggles ] RACHEL: I thought, "Well, if they fall in love with this climb, now I can connect them to resources that can actually safely guide them to the summit."

I'm interested in the summit to Camp Muir because I attempted once to summit with Rachel and, um, it was tough.

I watched her train and I was like, "That looks horrible.

Let me in."

[ chuckles ] [ all laughing ] RACHEL: I wanted them to experience the mountain in a way that I could teach about the mountain, the spirituality, us connected to it as Native people.

This is Devil's club.

It's an anti-inflammatory.

It's a natural pain reliever.

People usually see the spikes and stay far away from it, but super awesome medicine to get to know.

[ breathing heavily ] We did it.

Yay!

We did it.

[ softly ] Yay.

That was a good one.

RACHEL: So this is a thousand feet in just under a mile.

So the big Tahoma, we'll have to do this five times.

[ girl chuckles ] Woo-hoo!

RACHEL: [ laughs ] I don't know if there's real excitement behind any of that.

Camp Muir is 10,100 feet, which is still a substantial climb on a technical mountain.

Once you go beyond Camp Muir, there's a whole nother set of tools that come with being able to climb.

You're on rope teams.

You have ice axes.

Crevasses that are 200 feet deep.

[ exclaims ] Camp Muir is a huge climb in itself.

You're literally still on glaciers.

It's not just a hike in the woods.

[ birds chirping ] I feel like this is the storm for me.

Just making sure, like, everybody has their gear.

Because if they don't have it on them, there's, like, no turning back.

What's up?

RACHEL: Hello!

Hello.

RACHEL: You're right here, Chayton.

Okay.

Beezy, you're over there.

Today is like, "Got my pants, got my leggings, got my poles."

We want to make sure that you limit all of your weight.

So right here, I have never separated milk.

Number two is pure fruit juice.

Here, I put nine servings of electrolytes, so it tastes like the ocean.

Then I have kefir.

This is because kefir never goes bad.

RACHEL: Your pack is going to be exceptionally heavy.

Uhh... All right.

You ready?

Yeah.

You're at 40 pounds.

Oh, my God.

I had 10 pounds of liquids in my backpack.

[ Rachel laughing ] RACHEL: Mountaineering is not a cheap hobby to have.

That gear has generally been outpriced for our communities.

And that has been a huge issue, is definitely the price barrier.

You could easily spend 5- to 20,000 depending on what mountain that you're doing.

Without Rachel, I don't believe I would've really got the opportunity to hike Rainier like this.

Because I'll be able to have all the gear and not have limitations in hiking.

RACHEL: Getting the gear is the huge piece, because just beyond this climb, they'll be able to go outdoors and be successful outside.

They'll have that gear.

And so everything that they've received, they'll get to keep.

RACHEL: --glasses.

Perfect.

[ engine starts ] RACHEL: Ready as you can be?

It's gonna be a long day.

[ laughs ] One thing I wish for youth is: Do one thing in your life that pushes you so far out of your comfort zone that you think that you might not be able to do it, or maybe you don't do it, but you pushed yourself the hardest that you possibly could.

I think those are the things that change people the most.

[ birds chirping ] There are six tribes around the base of the mountain.

All of those tribes had different names for the mountain.

Taquoma.

You'll also hear Tahoma, Teqwube.

Mount Rainier, Teqwube.

But that's how you say Mount Rainier in our language.

RACHEL: A lot of our rivers that are significant to our tribal communities are directly fed by the mountain.

A lot of names actually mean, like, "mother of all waters."

[ groans ] RACHEL: This is almost 5,000 feet elevation gain.

The snow melt is happening and crevasses open, and if you're not navigating those correctly, somebody could fall into a crevasse.

So there's risk just in this one climb.

We are going to sing one verse of the Mount Rainier prayer song because we-- You know, we have to.

We are here.

So while you're out there on this mountain, Taqwoba, keep a prayer in your heart and know that what you are doing is making us all proud.

[ rattling ] [ group singing in Lushootseed ] [ groans ] [ grunts] RACHEL: All right.

Are we ready?

Let's go!

First steps.

[ group singing continues ] ARIYANA: When we were first starting, I was like, "This is gonna be so hard."

I mean, I expected it, but not, like, in the very beginning.

The weather's kind of... It's kind of chill right now.

It's not too cold out.

It's just a little cloudy.

But that's okay.

We'll be above the clouds.

RACHEL: I think we've turned nature into a sport.

It's who can get the fastest through this?

Who can get to the tallest peak?

And I... I wanted to change that.

So I've been on Tahoma about eight times.

And I have done Kilimanjaro.

But that's not my journey anymore.

My journey is not the summit.

My journey is introducing people to the mountain in a sacred way.

That's what I'm doing differently, is connecting that spiritual aspect.

There's no tribe in the entire world that you can talk about without talking about their relationship with the land.

That mountain happens to be our backyard, so that's the piece of land that I get to connect and connect other people to.

[ people exclaim ] HILARY: Oh, hello, creek!

Oh, my gosh!

TAYLA: We're taking a break.

RACHEL: Fashion, fashion, fashion!

Oh, yeah.

HILARY: Holy-- Those are dope!

[ laughs ] Oh, I love mine.

[ chuckles ] I don't know who packed this, but they did a horrible job.

[ laughs ] RACHEL: It was you.

I was like, "It was her!

She packed her own bag."

[ all laughing ] HILARY: Hi, bro.

How you doing?

[ speaking in Native language ] RACHEL: I was constantly watching the weather.

HILARY: Whoa!

RACHEL: It wasn't going to be, like, this beautiful sunny day.

That I knew.

But I had no idea what was in store.

TAYLA: I don't even see Muir yet.

[ wind whistling ] You know, it stresses me out when it's foggy, because I can't see where I'm going.

Maybe that's a good thing.

[ all breathing heavily ] [ Rachel groans, sighs ] TAYLA: Are we lost?

No.

[ wind whistling ] TAYLA: Okay.

That was crazy!

All right, guys.

I'll give you an update.

So we got a little over a thousand feet.

[ breathing heavily ] [ hikers chattering ] RACHEL: Okay.

[ camera shutter clicks ] This last stretch is probably the hardest because you got the snow, you got the elevation, and you have the... you've already been doing this all day long.

So, yeah, the last stretch is usually the hardest.

TAYLA: Hey, look, blue sky.

HILARY: Where?

TAYLA: Right there.

[ Hilary gasps ] Wow, that's so beautiful!

[ laughs ] RACHEL: That's amazing.

There she is, guys.

Oh, my gosh.

I don't think I've ever been so happy.

Yeah, I might cry.

HILARY: Bro, you should cry.

[ laughs, sniffles ] I just feel really emotional because I feel like I belong on this land.

I feel more connected-- Like, connected down generations.

I don't know.

Like... You know?

Like... I'm crying for my ancestors, not me.

[ wind whistling ] TAYLA: It's so much easier when there's actually a view.

HILARY: After the third break, you're wondering when it's gonna end.

And after the fifth break, that's when it becomes mental.

And after the sixth break, you don't want to stop because you just want to get there.

TAYLA: You see the top and you're gonna be going up for like three, four more hours.

And then it's just you versus you the whole way up.

RACHEL: Get comfortable with being uncomfortable, because that's really what life is.

Life is gonna constantly throw uncomfortable situations at us.

You're gonna push yourself so hard out there and you're gonna have moments where you're like, "I don't want to do this anymore."

But I hope that they walk away realizing, "If I can get up that mountain and I can push myself through that and I can mentally tell myself I'm gonna be okay," they're going to be able to handle so many other uncomfortable things that come at them.

[ groans ] I know I'm almost there.

Couple more steps.

We made it.

We made it.

TAYLA: Oh, my gosh.

I'm dying.

[ sighs ] RACHEL: That wind was insane.

I have been on that mountain so many times, but I have never witnessed wind like we did on this climb... Oh, my gosh!

[ laughs ] ...constant 50-mile-an-hour wind all night long.

You're probably gonna hang out in your tent a lot and not really socialize.

[ laughs ] [ wind whooshing ] RACHEL: The wind never stopped.

It was like having a trash bag in each ear.

ARIYANA: Literally wanted to cry because my tent was slapping me in my face the whole night.

And I really wanted to call my mom and be like, "Bro, please bring the helicopter here."

Like, I wanted to leave.

[ wind whistling ] RACHEL: All I heard was growling from the wind.

Our tent snapped completely.

Just from the wind.

This is why no one hikes with me.

[ laughs ] CHAYTON: Oh, my gosh.

We just made the decision at 5:00 a.m.

: We're gonna pack up camp.

And we got our miserable butts out of there.

[ laughs ] TAYLA: Wow, I did that.

I did something that was super hard.

I just was proud of everybody else who did it with me.

I was proud for the people around me that I got to meet.

I finally, like, took it all in.

[ wind whooshing ] We're gonna go glissading so we don't have to walk down.

[ all laughing ] I couldn't have had a better group to do this climb with.

CHAYTON: Okay.

Three, two, one.

RACHEL: Their energy... [ Chayton shouts excitedly ] ...was everything that I needed for this to be what it was.

[ exclaims ] [ all laughing ] RACHEL: Oh, my God!

[ laughing ] I stood up and I kept going.

It kind of hurts your butt, but it's way better than how your legs are feeling.

My main goal was to inspire a group enough that they would want to continue to get out there.

Because when we're on our mountain, that means our stories are there, our language is there, our songs are there.

Having this group of youth out there is gonna accomplish that.

And so I'm thankful for that.

[ ♪♪♪ ] Come down to a dock like this one, and there's a lot of familiar things to see.

But you might be surprised at what you find if you peek underneath the dock.

[ gulls cawing ] WOMAN: It's really cool to look around and see this really urban environment with people coming and going and living their lives and ferries passing by and fishermen in their boats, and you go to the dock and if you don't look over the edge of it, you would never know there was this whole little world in miniature right underneath your feet.

[ ♪♪♪ ] Docks, to me, are like portals to other worlds.

The side of a dock is basically a living reef.

It's here kind of both because of the human existence and kind of despite of it at the same time.

I think of it as a liminal space that doesn't really exist in one realm or another.

It's an interface of these two both oppositional and collaborative forces coming together to create this ecosystem.

People, I think, get really confused by the concept of dock fouling.

It hasn't really been done as a... almost like a systematic hobby until more recently.

Technically, when you talk about dock fouling, you're talking about organisms that are settling on manmade structures that are submerged in the ocean.

When I use the term dock fouling, I'm referring to the activity of going out to the structures and observing the organisms that are "fouling" the structures.

To dock foul, you just position yourself on the edge of a floating dock, just as I am, and you're just looking over the surface.

It definitely looks a bit goofy.

And that's just because people don't know what you're doing.

People are so weird.

LUAN: It's absolutely nerdy.

Like bird nerds, but different.

I think it's a bit more like punk rock than birding-- sorry, birders-- but you are having to do a lot of things which people haven't really officially established and you have this funky name for it, "dock fouling," which sounds like something you might get in trouble for with your landlord.

It's definitely, like, a bit out there still.

One of the great things about dock fouling is that it's an easily accessible way for anybody to participate in science.

There they are.

[ ♪♪♪ ] Throughout the year, I'm going to docks once every other week, once a week when I can, and I'm contributing around 100 to 200 observations every other week.

We don't really even have a baseline of what we would expect to see when we go out and look at these places.

So I started a bioblitz, and a bioblitz is where you're trying to get as many people as possible to document observations.

I just started calling it "Docktober," because that seemed obvious.

I had folks coming from out of state to come visit during that first Docktober.

I've just been trying to do that every year since.

So far we have about 32 people who've contributed and almost a thousand observations of 180 different species.

There's some in Scotland, some all the way, it looks like, in South Korea as well this year, which is super exciting that we've gone international with the project.

My friend Jolee designed this card the first year of Docktober.

The inspiration was to just give people, like, a basic guide of what they might expect to see when they go out to the docks.

And I like to give a prize to the first five people who get a bingo just to add a competitive element to it.

Just right now I've seen skeleton shrimp, bryozoa, colonial tunicates, bivalves, lots of anemones, a jellyfish, lots of gulls, sea stars, solitary tunicates, tube worms, plumose anemones, and barnacles.

I think for a lot of people, they almost need to be given permission to go out and do it, to feel like it's something that they're allowed to participate in.

Sometimes people need that little nudge to get out.

Nice and quiet today.

Yeah.

Basically, I'll hold an open session where anybody can come along and just come hang out and look at the organisms together.

[ gasps ] Here we go.

See, like way back in there.

Oh, yeah.

That's gorgeous.

Yeah!

[ ♪♪♪ ] Dock fouling has given me something meaningful to spend my free time doing.

That's something I've been seeking kind of my entire life.

I don't see myself stopping doing it.

There's always an element of something new that makes it exciting and renews your interest constantly, recreating that sense of wonder and curiosity over and over again.

You never know what else is going to be out there.

[ birds chirping ] [ ♪♪♪ ] You can now find more 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, Instagram, and YouTube.

[ exclaims ] [ all laughing ] [ giggles ] MAN: Technique called GoPro on a stick.

There's a slug right here.

You just gotta be careful not to bop him.

[ bird chirping ] [ wind whistling ] Major support for Oregon Field Guide is provided by... Additional support provided by... and the following... and contributing members of OPB and viewers like you.