Major support for Oregon Field Guide is provided by... [ ♪♪♪ ] WOMAN: Come on!

There he is, there he is, there he is.

[ exclaims ] Get him out of there, buddy!

Good boy!

[ laughing ] WOMAN: Whoo, high five!

Yeah!

JAHN: Next, on Oregon Field Guide: Hidden within the grand forest of the Olympic Peninsula is a strange, undulating bog that's unlike anything else in the Northwest.

Then, think cats are lazy?

Uh-uh.

These adventure cats are born to be wild.

Sky hook!

But first, from central Oregon...

In a few hours, this section of the Deschutes River in Bend is going to be loaded with tubers and river surfers and kayakers, and inevitably people are going to start losing sunglasses and cell phones and, yes, even wedding rings.

But thankfully, a group of locals got together and they found a way to reconnect people with some of that lost river booty.

[ people screaming joyfully ] CASSANDRA PROFITA: This part of the Deschutes River in central Oregon used to be home to sawmills.

Now it's a haven for summer fun.

Roughly a quarter of a million people float the river through Bend in the summer.

[ boy exclaims ] The floaters bump down whitewater rapids especially designed for safe passage.

[ all whooping ] But that doesn't stop them from losing control.

I lost my glasses, my shorts... [ laughs ] Thankfully, she managed to hold on to her dog, Kovee.

Fun day.

There's a lady with a hat on that's about to go over in a lawn-chair tubey, and those never go over well.

Sideways...

Here it goes.

Aw, yeah, there we go.

Lled Smith takes mental notes as the chaos unfolds.

That way he'll know where to go searching early the next day.

Lled is one of the founding members of Loot the Deschutes.

These volunteer divers have become the river's unofficial clean-up crew.

You have to pick up the trash to find the treasure.

When you're picking up trash, you'll see other stuff and you'll be like, "Whoa!"

Or you'll think something's trash and you'll start to pull it up, and it'll be treasure.

Lled and his crew have built a reputation.

We find people's personal items, like their phones, their rings, their sunglasses.

They come to us now asking, "Hey, I lost a duffel bag and it has my two phones in it, and here's where I lost it," and then we go looking for it.

He's part of the surfing community in the Bend Whitewater Park.

And when he first started scouring the rapids on his own in 2018, he didn't expect to find another community of fellow divers... or hundreds of valuable rings.

I love this section because you can pull gold out of the river.

It's even better when we get it back to the person that owns it.

So how do people reconnect with their lost loot?

I go to Instagram, create a Reel of it, boom.

[ app chimes ] When the river is busy, the pleas for help flood in to the Loot the Deschutes Instagram account.

We try to get an X on a map where they lost it.

Then the hunt is on.

[ woman whoops, laughs ] Yeah, guys!

Good morning.

The core members of Loot the Deschutes usually cover different parts of the river at different times.

Good to see you.

But today, they're joining forces.

We haven't all been together.

[ woman laughs ] They all met on the river and they bonded over a shared mission.

LLED: The X is where there's a diamond lost.

[ spits ] They're hoping to find stuff people want back... Found an earring.

[ chuckles ] ...but along the way, they pick up anything that doesn't belong in the river.

I don't think it's a harpoon, but it's definitely metal.

WOMAN: Did you find anything?

DIVER: All kinds of stuff!

I think some people get bent out of shape when they see our feed.

They get mad at the floaters or the fishermen and they think there's a lot of trash down there.

But there will be days that we're wishing to find something.

[ sighs ] But today, in the peak of summer, they're finding plenty.

Oh, who is that?

Oh, hello!

What do you have?

I don't know.

Oh, an anchor?

Yeah!

Fun.

A nice one, too.

[ both laugh ] KEA: When you get down there, time stops.

Your mind just gets so clear.

It's so relaxing.

It's like you're going into a whole 'nother world.

What is that?

WOMAN: That's what I want to know.

A few years ago, Kea saw another person diving.

It was another kindred spirit.

I pop up and I see Lutra pop up, and we're like two otters looking at each other.

My happy place is just being underwater, and that's why I started diving, is just to be underwater.

It feels like flying to me.

Then I started noticing things and picking them up.

Lutra has been finding things in the river for nearly 20 years, but until she met the other looters, she didn't have a good way to return anything she found.

Some things, you're like, "Well, if nobody claims this, I'm going to be happy to keep it," but at the same time, there's more joy in finding the owner and hearing the story.

I think this is the phone we were looking for.

We'll put that in the special bag.

LLED: That's a good day.

MIRANDA: What?

Where'd you find that?

LUTRA: In the deep water.

That's the find of the day.

Ahh!

They drive the haul to Kea and Miranda's place to be sorted.

KEA: What is-- who got this?

A full beer.

Oh, look, it's always good to get lithium batteries out of the river.

Those are pretty toxic.

People's keys.

Yeah, look, here's another pair.

This would hurt to step on.

Once they get rid of the trash, the unclaimed items go into a backyard shed that's become an ad-hoc museum.

Yeah, we have a throwing-away problem.

You name it, they've probably found it.

That's our marble collection.

LLED: Gas mask.

MIRANDA: Toys.

KEA: Morphine.

MIRANDA: An old tin of condoms.

LLED: Baby head.

MIRANDA: Our Italian switchblade.

MIRANDA & KEA: Depeche Mode!

MIRANDA: Those are dentures.

LLED: Somebody had a bad day that day.

We were scared when we first found them.

We didn't know they were dentures.

We were like, "Oh, no!"

There is some stuff they don't keep, like guns... or that time they found sticks of dynamite.

So we actually called the bomb squad on that one and we got to send them on a little scavenger hunt.

LLED: Yeah.

[ all laugh ] Miranda finds magic in the more mundane discoveries by using them as art supplies.

You know, we used to find vapes, and you're just like, "Oh, another vape."

But then, like, now that I have a collection of vapes, I'm like, "Oh, another vape for my collection!"

It's a tally.

You just keep getting more, and it's like, "Oh, look at how good I'm doing."

MIRANDA: Or like, you know, you find the sunglasses that are all river sludged and broken and, you know, they used to be trash.

But now that we have a huge collection of them, you're like, "Oh, I have sunglasses for my collection."

[ people chattering, screaming joyfully ] But if one thing motivates the looters the most, it's the rings.

Here is kind of the past years of rings.

Each of these copper wires are the rings that have been returned.

You know, this is probably my best find of all, these two rings.

Here's the rubber band-- found it just like this.

So it looks like somebody shot it into the river.

Nobody's claimed it.

But most people do want their lost rings back, like the couple Lled is waiting to meet now.

The people that are coming right now contacted me on Instagram about a ring they lost.

And they called it a memorial ring, and I didn't really know what that was at that time.

We were just going back and forth, and then all of a sudden, I said, "Hey, meet me there.

I know exactly where to search."

And within minutes, he lucks out.

MAN: That's crazy!

Yo!

[ exclaims ] Lled, what's up, brother?

How you doing?

Doing good, man.

Hi, hello.

[ chuckles ] [ Lled chuckles ] This ring, it came from my dog.

My dog passed away, so we sent my dog's ashes and we turned it into a diamond.

And it was kind of hard for me to think about that I lost the ring.

It's kind of like, you know, how am I going to tell my wife that I lost the ring?

His wife, Miya, gave him the ring on their wedding day to memorialize their dog, Atlas.

He's always said, like, he wanted Atlas to walk down the aisle with them, and unfortunately he was not able to do that, and so I kind of presented this ring to him on our wedding day, so that's why it's really important to us.

One ring Lled hasn't been able to find is his own.

One day, I was like, "Ah, where's my ring?!"

So I lost my ring.

So I'm still looking for it.

Lutra is in the same boat.

LUTRA: It just slipped my mind to take the ring off before I got in the river, and it just slid right off into the weeds.

I think about it every time I go through there.

"Will I ever find it?"

[ chuckles ] If we could find their rings... Yeah, oh, man.

...we would be the master looters.

[ laughs ] Yeah, we win.

Yeah.

[ both laughing ] MIRANDA: We're all competing for master looter status.

KEA: Yeah, yeah.

For now, they'll take whatever the river decides to give back.

Whoo!

[ laughs ] [ ♪♪♪ ] This is Crowberry Bog, and it is the only bog of its type in the entire Western United States.

If you get down on the ground and you start looking around, it is absolutely fascinating what you'll find here.

This is the story of one man whose passion it is to learn everything there is to know about this place.

Washington's Olympic Peninsula is full of the kinds of things that you'd expect from a rainforest: big trees, lush undergrowth, delightful creeks.

But there's something else hidden away here, something no one had ever identified before in the Western U.S. until Joe Rocchio found it one day in 2011.

Came out here one morning.

As I made my way in, I was not expecting to find what I did at this place.

Joe is a natural heritage program manager for Washington's Department of Natural Resources.

His job is basically to seek out and identify the state's natural wonders.

We always feel like we're on a little bit of a treasure hunt, and I felt like I found that chest of gold when I came out here.

What Joe found is called a raised bog, and the first indication that this is a different kind of place is that the peaty, mossy ground isn't just squishy, it actually moves in waves underfoot.

[ dull echoing ] Some people think, like, it's like a waterbed.

I think it's more like walking across pillows.

So when you jump on it, the surface can undulate pretty far out from where I'm located.

You can see the water moving.

But even that's not the strangest thing about this place.

A raised bog is different than an ordinary bog because it sits higher than everything else around it.

The water levels over here are actually lower than they are at the top, which is counterintuitive.

[ chuckles ] The way it works is like this.

Most bogs are like sinks, or filled-in ponds, lush with grasses and plants and fed by streams or creeks.

What Joe found seemed to defy gravity.

Imagine a bubble holding water and earth together like an inflated bladder and sitting nine feet higher than the surrounding landscape.

And there are no streams feeding into it.

Instead, a raised bog captures only rainwater and then drains that water down slowly out toward the shoreline.

And that's what makes Crowberry Bog so unusual.

They weren't thought to exist here.

The entire bog is only 40 acres in size.

It's surrounded by Western hemlock and cedars.

But the heart of the bog is treeless because decomposing moss and rainwater create an acidic soil that's tough on trees.

It's an unusual combination of conditions that provides home to an equally unusual variety of specialized plants.

There's so much biodiversity that we just lump into the ground surface, where you can just stand from here and you see brown and red.

And if you don't get on your hands and knees, you don't see the small little sundew that right now is hidden.

There's all these little bugs crawling over the surface.

There's just so much diversity that is at a micro scale.

Some of it you can't even see with a hand lens, you need to put it under a microscope.

Crowberry Bog is filled with skunk cabbage and bog laurel, cranberry, and the bog's namesake, crowberry.

There's even a type of moss called small capsule dung moss.

It only grows in bogs like this and only on the poop of elk or deer.

And so this is, I think, the second or third location in the state where this moss has been documented.

Everyone finds their own space.

What is it about elk dung here that makes it very unique to this particular moss?

I don't know, um, but it's very cool.

The ecology is just amazing.

In this microscopic world at our feet, we saw battles under way between tiny insects and carnivorous plants called roundleaf sundew.

And the spongy soil itself is almost all peat moss.

Peat mosses are the ecosystem engineers of bogs.

They built this place.

It's remarkable that this area remains intact.

That's all peat moss.

Peat moss is often sold as a landscaping material, and many bogs like this were heavily mined in the past.

And historically, it had other uses as well.

I came across a paper, and it talked about a national effort to harvest peat mosses for World War I because sphagnum served as an incredible bandage.

Sphagnum peat moss absorbs 20 times its weight in water.

So it's very absorbent, plus it's very acidic-- it's an antiseptic.

The community would go out and collect-- it looked like live sphagnum-- put them in these big bundles and send them off to the Army for use in World War I.

At the far end of the bog, Joe spots another oddity: shore pines standing only about four to six feet tall.

You can see that most of these trees look relatively young and short, and they're actually quite old.

It almost takes on like a bonsai-like form in some areas just because of the harsh growing conditions.

Some of these dwarf trees may be as old as the towering timber of nearby Olympic National Park.

We pulled out one of these trees at one point: 70 years old.

[ ♪♪♪ ] Crowberry Bog is now a state natural area, and Joe had a lot to do with that effort.

This place is near and dear to my heart.

I was coming out so often that my kids started calling this "Daddy's Bog."

"Dad, where you going?"

"I'm going to the bog."

And they knew exactly which place I was talking about.

Public access is limited for now to educational visits by appointment to help ensure the bog's health but also to preserve any unknown wonders still waiting to be discovered.

You know, I've spent 20 years doing this kind of work, and this place still surprised me.

We really just have kind of a cursory understanding of what's here, but if we're protecting representative examples of all the different ecosystem types, then we hope by default we're providing some level of conservation to all of those species we have no idea even exist in these sites.

[ ♪♪♪ ] This is Snicklefritz, and like most cats, she's pretty content just to chill and do this and not much more all day long.

She has no idea that out there in Oregon, there are cats paddleboarding and snoeshoeing and hiking.

And, no, I'm not "kitting."

[ ♪♪♪ ] Stay.

NOAH THOMAS: Meet Nicol Alcain and her cat, Kazuki.

[ meows ] He's an adventure cat.

You want to get out?

I think we were doing adventure catting before adventure catting was a thing.

You know, I treat him like a dog.

He goes with us.

He just prefers to be outside.

[ meows ] Go ahead.

[ meowing ] There you go.

People ask me on the trail, like, "How do you get him to do this, why is he here?"

And I'm like, "This is the only thing he knows."

He will get in his backpack first thing in the morning because he knows, like, we're on an adventure and he's like, "Where are we going?"

Kazuki always gets to come.

But as far as just, like, a quiet nature trail, like, that's my thing.

And that's what Kazuki loves.

This is Jory Olson and his Siberian Forest cats, Lewis and Clark.

He trained them to shoulder ride-- Clark on the left, Lewis on the right.

Okay, well, here it is.

This is what they're supposed to be doing.

Not this.

They're always screwing around and turning around.

Clark likes to ride backwards.

Well, stop growling at me.

I didn't do anything.

Just turn around.

Turn around.

Adventure catting can be challenging, especially when you're wrangling two cats on top of a mountain.

Come on.

Come on, this way.

Come on, this way.

You see any birds?

Small woodland creatures?

No, but Clark mistakes our microphone for a woodland creature.

[ dull pop ] STEPHANI: Whoo!

See, yeah, he thinks so.

He just smacked it.

[ laughing ] JORY: Did he?

STEPHANI: He totally did.

I bet you never thought cats and water would be a thing.

Well, that's because you haven't met Jason Van Horn and Enoki.

JASON: So got Enoki as a kitten during the pandemic, and we've done everything from mountain biking to hiking, road trips.

My goal was a cat that could follow me everywhere.

And, of course, being a paddleboarder, paddling was the next thing, so that was pretty much what we've been doing.

She's pretty chill, so hopefully she doesn't get mad at me.

Sometimes she loses her patience.

Of course, she's a cat.

You never know.

One thing we learned on this shoot: adventure cats are unpredictable.

Holy [ bleep ]!

Just grab her by the scruff.

Okay.

[ all laughing ] Been a while since she's done that one.

STEPHANI: What if she just bombs it?

[ ♪♪♪ ] Now, you might be thinking, "How on earth do you train a cat to ride a paddleboard?"

JASON: I always tell people, lots of baths, get 'em used to water.

I think with Enoki, I got really lucky.

She would just walk around the board and look around, and it never really bothered her.

For a lot of folks, seeing us cruise by out along the river is the first time they've seen a cat on a paddleboard.

Hey, morning.

Oh, it's a cat!

Oh, my God!

[ chuckles ] [ meows ] It's not a great idea to let your adventure cat roam free outdoors.

To keep them safe-- and the wildlife and birds-- harness training is a must.

NICOL: When they're really little, I will walk them up against a wall so they learn to follow a line.

So when you see a trail, you'll see, like, the dirt and then you'll see, like, bushes, and Kazuki definitely knows that we're following the lines.

[ meows ] [ meowing ] The Bengals are usually, like, a very vocal kind of cat.

What you got there?

A friend or not a friend?

She's pretty laid back.

Sometimes the dogs, they're unsure about what to do with a cat on a trail.

My son has a cat that kind of... [ laughs ] ...explained to her the rules, so she's actually a little shy with cats, I think.

She's like, "Oh, my goodness."

[ ♪♪♪ ] [ wind whistling ] Back on Mount Hood, things get windy... very windy.

And the cats are not pleased.

[ meows ] JORY: It's too windy, I agree.

[ meows ] Yeah, you tell the wind, Lewis.

They find a trail further down the mountain where the wind's much calmer.

Lewis is up for a snow hike.

Clark, well, he's enjoying the view.

[ meows ] What?

Hey, Lewis.

Yeah, there we go.

You walk funny in your jacket.

If you go out with the cats expecting to have a highly aerobic experience, you're probably gonna be disappointed.

This is, uh, adventure cat nirvana right here.

It's like walking two toddlers.

Come on, buddy, let's go this way.

No, we're going this way.

It's an exercise in patience.

Sky hook.

Oh!

Adventure catting isn't for everyone.

But the rewards make it all worthwhile.

For me, it's about taking the focus off of yourself and putting it outside.

And by having adventure cats, their needs have to come first.

I consider it a privilege and an honor to have them in my life.

NICOL: We're very bonded.

So we share a lot of time together and we just kind of get to know each other and, you know, he's like one of my best friends.

And, yes, he's a cat, but he's still a best friend of mine.

JASON: Why bring Enoki everywhere with me?

The reality is, if I didn't bring her on the adventures, she'd be stuck sitting in the van.

She really is like my feline best friend.

She goes with me everywhere.

I couldn't ask for a better companion.

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

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