Oregon is sandwiched on our west coast, between California on the south and Washington on the north.

The eastern portion is rather dry, while the western part is wet.

The Cascade Range, marks the dividing line.

We begin on the east side, where the history of the landscape is easier to see.

Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was provided by Agnese Haury ♪ Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was also provided by the Guilford Fund.

♪ ♪ In the Americas with David Yetman theme People who have lived for a long time in Oregon, say Oregon not Oregon (Ore-gone) their state is different indeed, and a lot of that difference is apparent in Oregon's landscapes.

Oregon is the ninth largestof the U.S. And it has a huge variety of landscapes, it has hundreds of miles of coast on the Pacific.

It has rainforests, it has high mountains, it has drier forests and it has a lot of desert.

What more than anything else... has shaped the Oregon landscape is its volcanoes.

More than any other of the contiguous 48 states, Oregon has been shaped by volcanoes.

I'm crazy about volcanoes and Oregon has an endless variety of volcanic landscapes, from little oceanic islands of lava to vast old lava fields to flows that could've happened, while last week.

Who made this path up here, John?

I'm glad I didn't have to.

Me too David.

And you definitely don't want to fall on this stuff.

Whoever did it, must be careful because you can slice your hand on this obsidian, it's that sharp.

Obsidian is a volcanic glass and it emerges from lava flows on only very peculiar, unusual conditions.

The lava that comes out has to be the right composition and cool very quickly, but here we have one of the greatest deposits... of obsidian anywhere in North America.

Hard to believe that any tree could grow, in this jumble of lava.

There's no nutrients here.

They make their own.

Look at the size of this obsidian boulder.

Oh my goodness.

♪ This is East Lake, one of two lakes in the bottom of Newberry Caldera.

It's a crater lake.

And a pretty good size, it's become fairly popular for boaters.

Few of them actually realize that this lake is right on top of the most active Volcanic area in all of Oregon.

Newberry Caldera lies a little bit east... of the main spine of the Cascade Range.

It's part of a, perhaps independent lava field.

The lava action has been around for at least 400,000 years.

But 75,000 years ago, rising magma carried a whole bunch of water and this place exploded.

The whole area in the Caldera is about 25 sq.

miles.

It's the biggest lava field in the state of Oregon.

East of Cascades in Oregon, have forests, instead of becoming this mix conifer area, rich of firs, spurs, hemlocks, cedar, becomes mostly big pines, especially ponderosa pines.

It goes on for miles and miles, and miles.

Then all of the sudden you're going east and it quits boom just like that, and you're out in the Sage Desert and that stretches all the way to Idaho or even into Nevada.

From a distance, Fort Rock looks like just a big rock mesa jutting out of the plain.

But when you get closer, you realize it's a huge caldera, that actually looks like a fork, so it's a rock that looks like a fork.

And the reason it looks like a fork, is that about a 100,000 years ago, magma coming up from below encountered a bunch of water, there was lake out here at the time and when that steam met the bottom of what is now the plain, the whole thing exploded and formed this huge ring around here, throwing up all that earth.

As we look closely, we can see all tiny little particles of ash and various rock and then the finer grained stuff... that was mud and sand, it was so wet that when it got deposited here after this massive explosion it made like a cement, and over the thousands years dried formed this very hard rock, this resistant rock.

And so here we have the remnants... of a 100,000-year-old explosion.

No lava, but plenty of fossilized mud.

♪ That backdrop is amazing.

Yeah.

My friend John DiTomaso, is a doctor who has become enamored of Oregon.

It's typography and its history.

Right off the highway, near Fort Rock is what they call homestead village, this clapboard collection of buildings.

I don't think it's a very hospitable place.

They tried in 1905.

A bunch of homesteaders came and tried to set up shop and built a community and grow.

And they couldn't, it was just too dry and and arid and they eventually gave up and moved away.

They got 168 acres, so without land... Wow free!

The government gave it to them.

Bonanza, and then they find out the reality..

Lack of water, hard soil to till.

How cold does it get here in the winter?

Oh, definitely below zero.

Get minus 20, easy.

Oh my goodness.

They had no idea.

No idea.

This is Fort Rock Cemetery, and I got to tell you, you know, I'm gone... to be cremated when I end this life, but if I change my mind this is where I want to be buried, because my headstone would be Fort Rock.

That's a massive cliff.

Nothing more beautiful than this backdrop for a cemetery.

It's true, but what's odd is you see here there are tombstones, wooden and stone going back over a 100 years, but has still maintained and there are new ones in here.

So, the families here, have been here a long time.

Long time, just local farmers and families... that have buried people in the cemetery You can tell what they did here's one with horseshoes, barbwire fence, horses on the tombstone...

I have a feeling that this is a family, connected with cowboys.

Correct.

Cattle raising.

And if we look over, we see beer cans, full of beer.

Full beer cans.

♪ From the top, it just looks like, you know a hole, and then you get down here... my god, it's very different.

Very deep, very colorful.

Actually, it's my wife's, Mariam's favorite spot.

I can understand.

You've got algae growing over the volcanic rock here.

I've never seen anything like that.

So it's always cool, then here.

Always cool.

The crack in the ground is a bizarre feature.

It's two miles long, seventy feet deep, and...

I think the narrowest or the widest place is... probably no more than say 10 feet wide.

There's a kind of fault along here, a fracture in the rock and magma, lava pushes up and out, through the top just like toothpaste coming out of a tube.

Only two miles long.

And that just keeps spewing and spewing, and then after thousand years or so it quits.

And the magma that was coming in here, has dropped out in the bottom, so there's nothing to hold the bottom in.

So, it just drops out.

So, I suspect that 20,000 years ago, So, this was probably a thousand feet deep and over the time the rock then has filled it in.

And given another 100,000 years... it might even be closer to the top.

We're lucky to have this north side of the crack, where sunlight never gets in and it's seldom hit by rains.

So, we have here an image of the molten lava that hit the side of this, left part of it here, but bubbles formed and perhaps even large rocks were picked up... and then this lava disappeared, part of the cover fell off and we see the image of a huge bubble in here and in some cases, probably some rocks and it's not weathered, so over these thousands and thousands of years we had this perfect impression of what the lava was like, from the reverse side.

♪ Back towards the Cascades where forests and rivers are bound, John talks me into hopping on a mountain bike.

And following a river shaped by lava flows.

♪ The Deschutes River drains a lot of central Oregon and it flows northward into the Columbia river.

A lot of the snow that's in the Cascades, when it melts, comes right into this.

But it also cuts right through an enormous lava field, that lava when it poured into it changed the course of the river, and now the state of Oregon and the National Forest Service... and other private individuals have seen the nature, terrific mountain biking.

♪ ♪ We've been road biking for 20, 25 years together.

I've never mountain biked much, until I came out here and saw some of the spectacular river trails and that convinced me to buy a mountain bike and pick up this sport.

This scenery, this river, the lava, the mountains, it's spectacular.

The dry weather, 300 sunny days a year compared to Willamette valley.

It is extremely common to see multiple mountain bikers and hikers, just as multi used trail.

And you can take this Deschutes River trail from Sun River all the way to Bend.

That's 17 miles one way.

♪ The Deschutes River flows on the east side of the Cascades, a few highways take jus west to a pass.

People from Oregon, distinguish between the western part of the state and the eastern part of the state.

And the dividing line is the spine of the Cascades, that great mountain range.

Behind us, we see the three sisters, who are all over about 10,000 feet and always have snow on them.

To get to the west, you have to go through a pass.

The pass isn't real high, it's little over 5,000 feet, but the difference becomes quite noticeable and as we get up here the forests get a few more firs, gets thicker and thicker and then through them we will get two timber line above, and we'll be able to see the Cascades in their full glory.

In North America, if you want to see lava, come to Mackenzie pass in Oregon.

It's not hard to get to and it's only about 5,000 feet elevation, but tourists do come here because the highway goes right through... one of the largest lava fields in North America.

It's also the point that separates eastern and western Oregon.

Lava destroys, it's very, very hot and it burns all the forests and everything in its path that can be burned.

But it also creates.

As lava breaks down, and ash comes down from the Volcanoes, the soil is very slowly enriched and volcanic soils are richest in the world.

And so, western Oregon is an immensely fertile place.

♪ From the pass, we head west, down, down, down, into the wet part of the state of Oregon.

♪ For about 10 months of the year, air mass is very wet, from the arctic swing into the Cascades from the west.

They drop most of their water, their moisture as rain falls, snow fall on the west side of the cascades and out to the coast.

The other side, most of that moisture is gone, so here we have a much richer vegetation, there are hemlocks, there are cedars, there huge firs, spruces, and a bunch more.

It's as if you live in two different countries.

And the beauty of this place, harmonized with our brains longing for green.

This defines green.

Snow falls in immense quantities on the western slopes of the Cascades.

As much as 50 feet a year, even more.

In the higher elevations, it may never melt, there is so much snow.

When the sun hits the lava, it warms that lava quickly and a lot of that snow melts, and provides innumerable waterfalls, like this one were seeing, proxy.

♪ In the middle of the 19th century, settlers moving westward from the eastern United States from the eastern U.S. often looked for the Oregon trail.

Many of the parts of the Oregon trail, passed through this area right here.

But as they continue downward, they finally began to see the valleys, that make western Oregon one of the most... griculturally productive areas in all of the United States.

I know about this because my grandparents in the 1920s... were among the settlers who homesteaded in the Willamette Valley.

The Willamette Valley is Oregon's agricultural heartland, a big variety of crops, tree crops such as hazelnuts and there are garden crops.

There's a lot of alfalfa, but the biggest single crop of all is timber.

♪ This is a Christmas tree plantation.

This whole plot right here, has about 4,000 little seedlings.

They are genetically all the same, so that they grow at the same rate, they look all the same, they have the same symmetry so after a few years, 5, 6, 7 years boom they can be harvested, bundled, shipped off to Arizona, to Florida, to Maine, even to Central and South America.

Where they're growing now is former virgin forest, which was cleared for farming then back to Christmas trees, and maybe someday back to forest.

♪ Oregon west of the Cascades is never more than a couple hours drive, from the Pacific Coast.

It's usually windy, chilly and damp.

When the sun does come out, Oregonians flock to the beaches.

For sand dunes, you need a source of sand and a constant strong wind, and both of those are present as the wind comes out of the Pacific, blows the sand up and it's great for people to come and slide up and down the dune.

Native Oregonians love their state.

Miriam Fults is a doctor married to my friend, John DiTomaso, She was born near Eugene and spent a lot of her younger days around the ocean.

She has no desire to live anywhere outside Oregon.

It offers you almost every environment possible, that you might want to visit.

From the beach to the mountains to a dry plateau to, there's a part of Oregon where it's called the Wallowas, Or like the alps of Oregon.

Sometimes we laugh about going on a vacation, away from Oregon especially in the summertime we think why have we bothered going anywhere else, it's all here.

[laughs].

Waters of the Pacific Ocean, along the coast of Oregon are cold and that always produces a lot of fog.

Many mornings of the year have been socked in, drizzly, gloomy and the residents here don't get to see a lot of sun.

But, this is where the fish is.

I sell to a lot of restaurants, and you know, they want a perfect fillet.

This is a albacore.

This the white-meated tuna If you have an estuary, where you have fresh water coming in, meeting salt water.

If you have cool, cold water and not a lot of wave action, you're in oyster territory.

And there is no greater creature in the world, it works to help us keep cleaner environment, then the oyster.

You can eat them and they clean the water for you.

it's a very simple way of maintaining water quality.

We're the oldest oyster farm in Oregon.

We were founded in 1907.

We grow our oysters here, in Yaquina bay, by getting the seed from Whiskey Creek hatchery.

They come to us as larvae, we'll get typically about 15 million babies at a time, we put them in a controlled environment, we use a tank, fill it with bay water.

The livelihood of the babies, is that they must attach to something, or they will die.

So, we hope that they attach to the empty shells, as it gives us good tool to work with and a good use for all the shells we get from shucking the oysters out.

As we pull up this bag, the babies at this point will be about the size of a grain of sand.

We'll keep them in this tank for about 5-6 days, and that will take them out, and because there are natural predators that affect the baby oysters and can eat them and prey on them, we'll stack these bags on a palette, tie it together and put a little buoy on it and set it out on the water for about 2-3 months, 4 months.

The flow of the tide, puts enough nutrient throughout the oysters of the babies are feeding just fine and will grow bigger, and by the time they are 2-3 months old, they're about the size of, well, probably about the size of your pinky finger, yeah.

We have several sizes, we start with the petite, which are about the smallest and are about a year old, 12 months.

And our medium is about 4 years of age.

We do have some clients that prefer the extra-large oysters, and they can take 6-8 years to get to the size of their requirements.

This is one oyster?

That's one oyster.

This is one oyster.

So, you need a drill press to open it... but it's got, it will have a huge oyster in here, and you can cook it like a pork chop?

Like a stuffed pork chop.

Oh my goodness!

Normally you open an oyster with a shucking knife, but this would take a shucking crowbar.

We're a year-round employer and a year-round harvesting and planting our oysters.

I love eating oysters.

[laughs] I like to eat them raw.

I like to eat them cooked, fried, poached, steamed, many different ways a person could eat oysters.

See you take you knife, cut the muscle on the bottom, flip the oyster over to make sure that it's loose.

Then you have an oyster shooter and... you can put whatever topping you like on it.

Or none.

Or none.

Ohhhh.

You do not want to add salt.

It's perfect.

Okay that was really good.

That was good.

...See like this, this would be cool to paint on... One of the virtues of oysters, in addition to their great taste is that the shell is a resource that has a lot of value, these shells can be ground up, used in aquariums, additive to animals feeds as a source of calcium.

They're great for yards, they will stabilize soil... and if you have a lot of them you can stop erosion.

This is a year's accumulation but the oyster not only cleans water... but gives us all kinds of applications.

We're looking for shells to make bases for our candles... and we also give the shells for a friend who paints on them.

I don't eat them, but I think they're wonderful.

♪ One of the catastrophic events on earth, in the last 100 million years or so, is the eruption of the Columbia Plateau Basalts, a massive outpouring of lava that basically covered.... the entire northwestern part of our country.

Wave, after wave of lava, each of these forming a layer.

Here at this waterfall you can see where the layers were left... and now visitors looking at the waterfall, can look through the falls and walk behind it, on that very convenient layer left down between lava flow and lava flow.

♪ Throughout the 19th century, settlers by the tens of thousands almost hundreds of thousands poured into the Oregon territory via the Oregon trail.

Over the Cascades with the vast lava fields and into the moist western part, what is now Oregon.

By 1890 they had reached the Pacific Ocean, and had nowhere else to move west.

So, they moved inland, northwards and southwards.

And the rest is history.

♪ Until well into the 21st Century, most foreign visitors to Cuba spent their time in the Havana area.

Far to the East is a different Cuba, one of immense historical and cultural importance to the nation.

The best place to begin a visit is in the old city of Santiago in Cuba.

♪ ♪ Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was provided by Agnese Haury Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was also provided by the Guilford Fund.

Copies of this and other episodes of In the Americas with David Yetman are available from the Southwest Center to order call 1-800-937-8632 Please mention the episode number and program title Please be sure to visit us at intheamericas.com or at intheamericas.org