(lively marching band music) (crowd chattering) (crowd cheering) - There are nearly 8 billion people on this planet, (children screaming) and we make a lot of noise.

But what if we could escape it?

(car door slams) What if we could find the quietest place in all of Oregon?

That's where photographer Brandon Swanson and I are headed.

Out of Portland, over the Cascades, and into the high desert, in search of a place that right now exists only as a data point.

So we're looking for the quietest place in Oregon.

Our journey started here back at OPB headquarters.

We were given three GPS points that have been published in something called the "Noise Control Engineering Journal."

The points indicated three candidates for the quietest place in Oregon, based on airplane flight paths, proximity to population, roads and industry, but.

- These dots are just what an algorithm spit out.

- These three places all meet the criteria, but no one's actually checked it out.

- Okay.

- [Ed] We traveled to two of the three locations for other stories, one on Hart Mountain, another in the Owyhee Canyonlands, and they were quiet, but we focused our attention on one spot in extreme Southeast Oregon that we'd never been to.

This one is out there.

I mean, if this is field, which is near the Alvord Desert, and this is probably a couple hours of dirt roads to get there.

- I think that what it looks like will be pretty straightforward, I've got a handle on that, but for recording sound at the quietest place, how do you capture an absence of something?

(trunk clicks) - [Ed] To answer that question, we invited an expert.

- [Nick] Here we go.

- [Ed] Nick McMahan is a natural sound recording artist.

We joined him at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, where he invited us to experience the world as he hears it.

(trunk slams) Nick gives a lot of thought to where and how he places his microphones.

It helps justify his love of wandering.

(footstep thuds) (critters twittering) (wind whooshing) - Initially, I came here two years ago and it was fascinating sounds, the birds like I'd never heard before.

And I think we're starting to hear them picking up again, which is exciting for me.

You can kind of hear it settling even between the wind, and you can start hearing the communication between the animals, and just the silence really starts to feel like a part of you too.

You kind of feel that settling.

It's just really beautiful.

(critters twittering) - [Ed] And this is the chorus of wildlife that Nick recorded after leaving his microphones out all night.

(critters twittering) (critter cheeping) (critters continue twittering) (wildlife bellowing) - Yeah, I think it sounds awesome.

(vehicle purrs) - At this point, we are feeling the groove in our two-car desert caravan.

We had time to ponder the scenery on our way to find that waypoint that we hoped would be the quietest place in Oregon, which frankly wasn't where we thought it would be when we first imagined the story.

I would've thought like the quietest spot would've been like in the woods with a canopy of trees muffling the sound.

- And see, I would've thought it would've been like in the middle of some slot canyon or something.

- But where we were headed was not that.

Southeast Oregon is wide open country, and after a certain point, it was just our two cars, sagebrush, and long gravel roads.

Just like I-5, buddy.

Until we entered a zone, where even our GPS got a little weird.

It's finicky.

(chuckles) So I didn't think we'd hit this kind of problem so early, but GPS is telling us, go down here.

There's no trespassing.

- Yeah.

- [Ed] Instead of giving us the road route, now it's trying to get us directly to it.

- [Nick] Cross country.

- I know that there's a good gravel road this way.

I'm going to go with my gut here because I think we're going to keep running into this issue, where it's going to keep trying to route us onto the roads like this, which are not going to take us there.

- [Nick] Yeah.

- This is going to be more of an adventure, actually, than I originally anticipated.

Harney County traffic slowed our progress even further.

Come on, sirloin, giddy-up.

Miles and miles, and hours later, deep into a county that has less than one person per square mile, even the gravel roads vanished.

Wow, this is a blank spot on the map for sure.

But that GPS location and our guide to the quietest place in Oregon was pointing us to somewhere beyond even this faint two track.

Well, I think we're going to park it and huff it.

What do you say?

Are you up for it?

- Yeah, let's do it.

- Okay.

(gear clicks) My read of this thing, I think we're going to be going out a couple football fields that way.

- [Nick] After all day in the car, I'm actually getting kind of excited.

- Yeah.

(chuckles) - It feels good to walk.

- But how would we know if this was the quietest place in Oregon?

How would we measure it?

Well, we made a few stops with a decibel meter before we got here to get a reference.

(traffic droning) First was a street in Bend.

We're getting about 74, 80 when it's loud.

Not too bad out here.

Then to a surprisingly noisy downtown Burns.

(vehicle rumbling) - 93.

- There we go.

- That was a good one.

It's interesting 'cause human conversation is kind of known to be around 60 decibels.

Here, that car that just went by was at like 73, which means we have to talk a little louder to be able to hear each other, right?

- [Ed] Decibels are a measure of sound volume.

It's a crude measurement that's affected by how close you are to a noise.

But the numbers you see on the decibel reader are logarithmic.

Each decibel increase equals a tenfold increase in the intensity of the sound.

Zero decibels is the quietest audible sound, so 10 decibels is 10 times louder than zero.

And 20 decibels is 100 times louder than zero.

But decibels don't say anything about the quality of sound.

(sandhill cranes chirping) And efforts to protect both natural landscapes where the sounds of wildlife dominate and naturally quiet places are part of a new national movement.

It's a movement that piggybacks on longstanding efforts to protect aspects of the natural world that we're losing.

Think about early conservation efforts when you think wildlife refuges, national parks, wilderness areas, wild and scenic rivers, and even dark sky sanctuaries.

(critters twittering) Nick belongs to a group called Quiet Parks International that's taking the next step.

- [Nick] Quiet Parks International, you know, I think it's almost like meeting like a human need as we're losing quiet spaces.

It meets the need of people to have that awareness of listening and of being in quiet when they have an opportunity to, and it's surprisingly few and far between.

- But what is it about this spot on our GPS that is so special, it's worth a nine-hour drive for us to be here?

(footsteps rustling) This is it.

- Oh, nice.

- Right here.

(laughs) - Sweet.

- Hey, this is the quietest spot in Oregon.

At least, that's what the remote data said.

- When the wind stops, you have to whisper, it feels like.

- [Ed] But a breeze was picking up and distant jets did occasionally rumble overhead.

Only a few scattered across many hours, but still, we knew that the real test would come at night after the sun set, when the breeze died down, and the birds fell silent.

So we settled into camp and Nick got ready to record.

- Real silence through a microphone is tricky 'cause it's the lack of sound, and that's also part of the challenge, and the excitement of it is trying to figure that out, problem solving for the environment.

This whole place is very subtle.

The lack of lights on the horizon, that's really hard to find anywhere.

We're seeing for like 40 miles, we're at 5,000 feet, and you can't see a single light.

- As night fell, the air stilled, and this is the silence that Nick recorded.

(recording hissing) (critters chirping) But it didn't last long.

Just before dawn, the wildlife began to wake up.

(critters twittering) (wildlife howling) Soon after, the silence was shattered by a cacophony of birds.

(critters twittering) Oh, wow.

But as the sun rose, all life again went silent, jets were nowhere to be seen, and we were left with hours of this.

(recording hissing) (wind whooshing) (critters chirping) (critters continue chirping) (wind whooshing) - It's almost like this sensory deprivation type of quiet.

The birds are keeping us from losing our minds because you don't really find places like this anywhere.

I was, like, I think this is probably the quietest place I've been.

- [Ed] It's interesting, right?

We're almost talking in whispered tones.

- I feel like I'm talking too loud actually.

(critters chirping) - [Ed] When we set out to do this story, I knew it wasn't total silence I was hoping for, so much as peace, natural peace, uninterrupted by jets or cars or leaf blowers.

A peace exactly like this, however you measure it.

(wind whooshing) (critter chirping) (no audio) (no audio)