(floaters cheering and screaming) - [Host] 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.

(water splashing) The floaters bump down whitewater rapids especially designed for safe passage.

(floaters cheering and screaming) But that doesn't stop them from losing control.

- I lost my glasses, my shorts.

- [Host] Thankfully, she managed to hold on to her dog, Kovee.

- [Sophie] Fun day.

- There's a lady with the hat on that's about to go over in a lawn chair tubey.

Those never go over well.

Sideways, there it goes.

Oh yeah, there we go.

- [Host] 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.

- [Host] Lled and his crew have built a reputation.

- [Lled] We find people's personal items, and, 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.

(water burbling) - [Host] 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.

- [Lled] I love this section because you can pull gold out of the river.

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

(water bubbling) - [Host] So how do people reconnect with their lost loot?

- [Lled] I go to Instagram, create a reel of it, boom.

(Instagram chime) - [Host] When the river is busy, the pleas for help flood into the Loot the Deschutes Instagram account.

- [Lled] We try to get an X on a map where they lost it.

- [Host] Then the hunt is on.

- Wooo hooo.

Hi guys.

- [Member] Good morning.

- [Host] The core members of Loot the Deschutes usually cover different parts of the river at different times.

- Good to see you.

- [Host] But today they're joining forces.

- We haven't all been together.

- [Host] They all met on the river, and they bonded over a shared mission.

- [Lled] The X is where there's a diamond lost.

- [Host] They're hoping to find stuff people want back.

- [Lled] I found an earring.

- [Host] But along the way, they pick up anything that doesn't belong in the river.

- [Lutra] I don't think it's a harpoon, but it's definitely metal.

- [Floater] Did you find anything?

- 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'll be days that we're wishing to find something.

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

- [Miranda] Oh hello?

What do you have?

- [Kea] I don't know.

- [Miranda] An anchor?

- [Kea] Yeah.

And a nice one too.

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?

- [Miranda] That's what I want to know.

- [Host] 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.

- [Host] 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.

- [Lutra] Some things are 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.

- [Miranda] I think this is the phone we were looking for.

I'll put that in the special bag.

- [Kea] That's a good day.

- [Miranda] What?

Where'd you find that?

- [Lutra] In the deep water.

- [Kea] That's the find of the way.

- [Miranda] Ah.

- [Host] They drive the haul to Kea and Miranda's place to be sorted.

- [Kea] What is, who got this?

And 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.

- [Lled] This would hurt to step on.

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

- [Miranda] Yeah, we have a throwing away problem.

- [Host] You name it, they've probably found it.

- [Miranda] That's our marble collection.

- [Kea] Gas Mask.

- [Miranda] Toys.

- [Kea] Morphine.

- [Miranda] An old tin of condoms.

- [Kea] Baby head.

- [Miranda] Our Italian switchblade.

- [Both] Depeche Mode.

- [Miranda] Those are dentures.

- [Kea] Somebody had a bad day that day.

- [Miranda] We were scared when we first found them.

We didn't know they were dentures.

We were like, oh, no.

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

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

(laughs) - [Kea] Yeah.

- [Host] 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 now.

(floaters screaming and laughing) - [Host] But if one thing motivates the looters the most, it's the rings.

- Here is kind of the past year's of rings.

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

This is probably my best find of all, these two rings.

Here's the rubberband.

I found it just like this.

So it looks like somebody shot it into the river, and nobody's claimed it.

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

- [Lled] 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."

- [Host] And within minutes he lucks out.

- [Alvin] That's crazy.

Whoa!

- [Miya] Oh.

- What's up brother.

- [Lled] How you doing?

- [Alvin] Pretty good, man.

- [Miya] Hi.

- 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.

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

How am I going to tell my wife that I lost the ring.

- [Host] 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 him, and, unfortunately, he's 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.

- [Host] One ring Lled hasn't been able to find is his own.

- One day I was like, where's my ring?

So I lost my ring.

So I'm still looking for it.

- [Host] 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 off right into the weeds.

I think about it every time I go through there.

Will I ever find it?

- If we could find their rings.

- Yeah, oh, man.

- We would be the master looters.

- Yeah, we win.

(both laughing) - [Miranda] We're all competing for master looter status.

- [Kea] Yeah, yeah.

(water splashing) - [Host] For now, they'll take whatever the river decides to take back.

- [Miranda] Woo, ha-ha.

- Great people just doing their thing in their own north-westy way.

We love bringing you stories like this.

Support what you love, opb.org/video.