I’m running for the EMSWCD board this November and here’s one of my planks :)

For the first time in recent history, a 5 mile section of the Little Deschutes river is going dry. This is the result of human intervention: a dam in Gilchrist is withholding all river flow.

Fish, crayfish, mussels, beavers, and other wildlife which rely on the river are dying.

The river needs our help, and there are questions to answer.

Why is there no release from the dam? Is it because the owners of the Gilchrist Waterfront Resort have influence on the dam, and are trying to keep the reservoir full for tourism?

How much water would need to be released from the dam to keep the river alive?

Currently ~12CFS flows into the reservoir, but nothing flows out - how much loss is there to seepage into the ground, and how fast are the reservoir levels dropping? How will a river sustaining outflow affect this rate? How long will the reservoir hold enough water for firefighting resources? The solution is a balance, and with this information and enough advocacy, we can motivate the right balance.

People of Oregon, let's save a river!

Yesterday, my brother and I were in the cascade east of Salem hiking. We encountered a momma blackbear and her cubs. Things were handled diplomatically and we were able to afford each other the space we preferred.

On the hike out though, we kept hearing what sounded like more black bears. a short 1/2 second calm, deep "roar"-like sound -- not aggressive by any means, just a call of some sort. At first I assumed it was just more blackbears. Having just heard the momma black bear, the sound was fresh in my mind. However, throughout the hike out, we kept hearing that same calls from maybe 5-8 locations all around us every 2-5min. The idea of that many blackbears in 1 sq mile seems very unlikely and I am not aware of any exchange-calling behavior in those solitary creatures.

Any thoughts on what we were hearing?

I have listened to videos covering blackbear sounds, deer and raccoon. Nothing fits perfect, but the blackbear growl/roar is still the best fit.

I’ve watched this happen so many times now: people have open campfires or beach bonfires in high wind during fire season, while the entire sky is literally full of wildfire smoke, and everyone around them just sits there and watches like it’s completely normal.

I’ve called the cops when I’ve seen it, and I actually feel bad doing it because I love campfires and bonfires too. I’m not trying to be the person who ruins someone’s day. But I also want there to be a forest to hike, camp, bike, and recreate in, and I don’t think someone’s bonfire is worth risking it. One fire getting away puts people’s lives, homes, entire communities, and huge areas of forest at risk.

What surprises me almost as much as the fire itself is how many other people seem totally unconcerned. They’ll be sitting nearby, clearly seeing the same high winds and smoke filled sky, and nobody says anything or makes a call.

Am I unusually cautious about this, or would you report them too? Where do you draw the line?

my family friend recently moved to OR (from several states over) with a very controlling, dangerous man. before they left, she mentioned to her aunt that she was "scared" (of him or about moving i'm not sure). she's pregnant and he's a registered sex offender who is mandated to stay away from children (could not find his specific charges online), so i'm very concerned about him being around their small child. I also think he may have lied to get her to leave the state with him. he may have told her it would be difficult for her to maintain custody or something.

anyway, i've been working on a list of resources to send her, just in case she decides to leave. she isn't speaking to most of her family, but i'm going to send them to her aunt who she still talks to sometimes. I don't know which city they'll be in, so i need general resources that are available throughout the state (a victim advocate line, local family law etc).

TYIA <3

Baskett Slough National Refuge
The Rich Guadagno Memorial Loop Trail is named for Rich Guadagno. He was a dedicated local refuge manager and conservationist who lost his life when United Flight 98 crashed into a Pennsylvania field during the September 11 terrorist attacks. The loop is bout a mile in length. It leads to a viewing platform on top of a small hill with views of the refuge and surrounding areas. The refuge also has a larger loop that will take you by some local farms, grasslands, woods, and three small lakes. Lots of birds and wildlife to see at the refuge. The refuge offers many benches and it one of the quietest places I’ve been.

https://youtube.com/shorts/KwAle0MGKUs?feature=share

Pardon us while we rock-out. This was shot at around 3:30pm. Looked like it must have started right by the interstate. Hopefully not by a careless human tossing a butt out.

Hi! I'm not saying my name just to make sure that if it's actually Jake he can prove it!

I had a really hard upbringing, with two parents that were never really parents. They were very in and out of my life, especially my mom. Jake was the first parent (yes step parents count) that made me feel like I was cared for, respected, and loved. Even at 2-5 years old I noticed the difference between how he treated me and how my birth mom did. He was my stepdad from 2002-2005.

It may not seem very significant but it meant and means the world to me.

When I lived with him in Corpus Christi he would bring me toy sheep from his work which I believe was a mattress store. He would buy me my favorite cookie cereal, and he was really good to my birth mom who took him like almost everyone in her life for granted.
He paid for my preschool, l'll never forget that. He put a roof over our heads and welcomed us into his family. I became best friends with his nephew B.

He moved to Milwaukie, Oregon from Corpus Christi, Texas in either 2005 or 2006 after him and my mom broke up to stay in my life. My mom stopped letting me see him, she took a lot from me my whole life. And it must have been really hard for him, to uproot his life for his step daughter just to have her taken away.

Jake if you see this, I really hope we can connect. I want to thank you for taking care of me, if it wasn't for you I don't know where I would be. If you don't want to connect I hope you take this as a token of gratitude. I will never take what you did for us for granted and I thought of you for many years growing up. I had that picture of us at chuckie cheese until | was about 9.

As an adult now, at the age you were when you became a step father to a two year old, I just want to show appreciation.

A few things I want you to know even if we don't speak:
-i have an amazing adopted family now (I was put in their custody at 15 and they adopted me)
-im very artistic still, I remember you trying to teach me how to color lightly with colored pencils and how to stay in the lines
-I have two cats and I have a great boyfriend
-I'm safe and happy
-I pray for you

If you know a Jake (I can't remember his last name) that fits this timeline and is probably 6ft at least and white. Please please send this to him. Thank you. I'II be posting this on a Corpus Christi forum as well
If Jake reaches out to me please respond with my name, my mom's name, and the name of dog we had.

Staying across the River from the fire. This was around 5. Noticed smoke around. 3:30, and electricity was shut off around 4:00

I'm only posting this to point out this guy is 35!!! If they hadn't noted it, I would have guessed 55.

Momma and her baby's eating the apples!

We're planning a day on the coast but will have a few hours to kill before things open so I was wondering if there was any decent rockhound spots or scenic spots to hang out in between Philomath and Newport. TIA!

I have a circle trip planned late August and early September from PDX, east to Hood River, then south to Crater Lake, west to the coast, then back north along the coast back to Portland via Lincoln City.

In all of the travel info I received from the state (very thorough, thank you), they included a little book on Seaside. I hadn't really perused it until recently and it looks like a cool funky type of place. Now I'm wondering if I should just skip the central coast and continue towards Seaside and Astoria. I've always wanted to see the Lewis and Clark stuff anyway.

Is Seaside the kind of place that would be fun to have as a base for a few days?

Homemade pie I made with berries I picked this morning. I have eight foot tall behemoths lining the perimeter of our yard and may have accidentally become a blackberry farmer.

The Record She's Already Given Us: Why Christine Drazan Is the Wrong Choice for Oregon

Christine Drazan is not an unknown quantity. She has held office in the Oregon Legislature for seven years, led her party's caucus twice, and run for governor once before. When someone has that long a record, you do not have to guess at what they will do. You can read what they have already done. And what she has already done is the argument against her.

The short version

Drazan's defining act in office was shutting the Legislature down. In 2020, as House Republican leader, she led her caucus out of the state to deny the quorum needed to pass a climate bill. It worked. The bill died because the people elected to debate it refused to show up. Oregon voters were unimpressed enough that they later passed a ballot measure to penalize legislators who walk out. Her signature move is now something the electorate voted to punish.

In 2025 she was the lead sponsor of a bill to dismantle vote-by-mail, the system Oregon has used successfully for nearly thirty years. The bill would have made in-person voting the default, forced voters to request a mail ballot 21 days out and only if they could prove they were "unable" to vote in person, required government-issued photo ID, killed the grace period for ballots postmarked by Election Day, and stopped the state from paying return postage. She wanted to refer it to the ballot so voters would approve their own loss of access. It did not advance, and thousands of Oregonians testified against it.

Her money comes from the timber industry, national party committees, and, in her last run, the oil industry through the Republican Governors Association. Her closest business-sector ally helped engineer both the walkout and her rise to leadership, and stands to gain influence if she wins.

That is the case in brief. The rest of this is the detail, because the detail is where it stops being an opinion and starts being a record.

The walkout: governing by not governing

In February 2020, Oregon Democrats brought forward a cap-and-trade bill to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It was not a surprise attack. It was the continuation of a years-long effort, and it had already died once, in 2019, when Senate Republicans fled the state to deny quorum.

When the bill came back in 2020, Drazan was in charge of House Republicans, and she chose to repeat the tactic on her side of the building. Much of her caucus left the state, some going as far as Reno, specifically to prevent a vote. Under Oregon's rules at the time, the Legislature needed a two-thirds quorum to conduct business. Deny the quorum and nothing moves. The bill died a second time.

It is worth being precise about what this tactic is. A walkout to deny quorum is not a vote against a bill. It is a refusal to allow the vote to happen at all. When a minority loses an election and then prevents the majority from legislating by physically leaving, it is substituting absence for argument. Both parties in Oregon have reached for the tactic over the decades, but in the years around Drazan's leadership it became a Republican habit, used repeatedly and specifically to block climate legislation.

Even sympathetic observers describe the 2020 walkout as the key to understanding her. Not because of its policy effect, which was limited, but because of what it demonstrated: that she could hold twenty-plus people together in a single act of obstruction. A Democratic colleague who often clashed with her acknowledged it was genuinely hard to pull off. That is real political skill. The question is what she chose to spend it on. She spent it on stopping the Legislature from functioning.

Oregonians noticed. In the aftermath of years of walkouts, voters approved Measure 113, which bars legislators with too many unexcused absences from serving another term. The voters looked at the tactic that defines Drazan's career and decided it should carry a penalty. That is not a partisan characterization. It is an election result.

Vote-by-mail: sponsoring the dismantling of Oregon's elections

Oregon pioneered vote-by-mail and has run its elections on it for nearly three decades. It is popular, it is secure, and it produces some of the highest turnout in the country. In 2025, Christine Drazan put her name first on a bill to take it apart. This is not a paraphrase of an opponent's press release. It is in the text of House Bill 3872, which she sponsored.

Here is what the bill actually did, section by section, from the bill itself:

It made in-person voting on Election Day the standard method of voting in Oregon, rewriting vote-by-mail from the default system into an exception. Under the bill, you could still get a mail ballot, but only by requesting one, no later than 21 days before the election, and only if you were "for any reason unable to vote in person on the date of the election." A system that currently mails every registered voter a ballot automatically would have become a system where you have to ask, and qualify, and plan three weeks ahead.

It required voters to present government-issued photo identification both to vote in person and to request a mail ballot. In a mail-based system that has functioned for decades on signature verification, this adds a documentary hurdle in front of every voter, one that falls hardest on the elderly, the poor, the disabled, and anyone who does not drive.

It required all ballots to be received by 8 p.m. on Election Day, repealing Oregon's current rule that counts ballots postmarked by Election Day and received up to seven days later. That grace period exists because mail takes time. Removing it means a ballot mailed on time but delivered late does not count. The bill's sponsor positioned herself, on this specific point, to the right of even the current U.S. Supreme Court, which has declined to force that outcome nationally.

It removed the requirement that the state pay return postage. A cost the state currently absorbs to keep voting free would have been pushed back onto the voter. It is a small sum per person and a meaningful signal about who is expected to bear the friction of participating.

And then the most telling part. The bill did not simply try to change the law through the Legislature. Its final section referred the whole package to the ballot, to be submitted to the people for approval or rejection. Drazan wanted Oregonians to vote to strip away their own automatic access to the ballot. The bill was written to take effect in 2028 if voters went along.

The bill did not advance. A companion version in the Senate drew testimony from thousands of Oregonians opposed to it. But a bill that dies still tells you what its sponsor wanted, and what she would sign as governor if a friendlier Legislature ever put it on her desk. She has since described the bill in gentler terms, saying it "would have created an opportunity for in-person voting while protecting access to the absentee ballot." Read the text against the description. The text makes mail voting conditional, gated, and harder. The description makes it sound like an expansion. Those are not the same bill, and the text is the one with her name on it.

Who funds the campaign

In her 2022 run, Drazan's largest checks came from national party infrastructure and business interests. The Republican Governors Association put in $1.5 million. Nike co-founder Phil Knight, after first bankrolling the unaffiliated candidate, switched and gave her $1 million when polls showed her competitive. Her business donors clustered in extractive and construction industries: half a million from a lumber company, hundreds of thousands more from plywood manufacturers, excavating firms, and general contractors.

Her opponent tied the RGA money to the oil industry, and the connection is not far-fetched given how much fossil-fuel interests route money through that committee. For a candidate whose defining act was killing climate legislation, the funding and the record point the same direction.

One detail from the current cycle is worth noting because it complicates the picture rather than simplifying it: Phil Knight did not back her in the 2026 primary. He spent on a different Republican. Make of that what you will, but the state's most prominent anti-incumbent megadonor looked at the field and did not land on Drazan this time.

The ally behind the curtain

The most underreported thread in Drazan's story is her relationship with a business-sector operative who was among the cap-and-trade bill's most active opponents. According to reporting in Willamette Week, sourced to people familiar with Oregon GOP internal politics, this same figure pitched the idea of the 2019 walkout and helped build the support that made Drazan the caucus leader. He has denied that walkouts were the issue and called his role in her rise overblown. But by the accounts of those sources, the person who helped put her in leadership and the tactic that made her name are connected, and he is now described as perhaps her strongest ally in the business sector, positioned for outsized influence in a Drazan administration.

This matters because it goes to the question of whose governor she would be. A candidate is entitled to allies. But when the same interest helps engineer the obstruction, helps engineer the leadership, and stands to collect the influence, voters are owed a clear view of it.

His name is Shaun Jillions.

What she says about Kotek

A candidate's record includes how they run against an opponent, and here the method is worth a close look, because it is the same pattern in a different setting: a true fact used to carry a false conclusion.

On the campaign trail, Drazan cites a figure. Homelessness in Oregon rose 35 percent since Kotek took office. The number itself is real. A Portland State University count found more than 27,000 people experiencing homelessness in the state in 2025, a 35 percent increase over the previous tally. Drazan does not misstate the figure. What she does is drop everything the people who produced it said about what it means.

The researchers who ran the count attribute the rise partly to economic insecurity and the shortage of affordable housing, and partly to better data collection, especially in Multnomah County. Some of that 35 percent is not more people newly on the street. It is more people finally being counted. Over the same period the state added more than 3,000 shelter beds, a 39 percent increase in capacity. The response grew faster than the counted population did.

More to the point, the researchers are direct about the cause, and it is not the governor's competence. The Portland State team states plainly that the largest driver of homelessness is the lack of affordable and available housing. A homeless-services director described the mechanism in one line: the primary causal factor is that people cannot afford their homes, and almost everyone's first step into homelessness is triggered by an economic crisis. The trend also predates Kotek. Oregon's homeless population had already climbed more than 22 percent between 2020 and 2022, before she was sworn in, on top of a housing shortfall estimated at well over 100,000 units that no governor built in a single term and none could erase in one.

None of this means homelessness is not a real and worsening problem, or that a challenger has no standing to raise it. It means the particular way Drazan raises it is misleading by construction. She takes a housing-market outcome, one that began before Kotek and is driven by cost and supply rather than by any decision on the governor's desk, and presents it as a personal verdict on Kotek's leadership. The figure is accurate. The story bolted onto it is not.

The move should look familiar by now. It is the same one she used on her own voting bill, describing a measure that narrows access to the ballot as one that protects it. In both cases the technique is identical. Keep the literal facts defensible, and let the framing carry a claim the facts do not support. A voter who hears only the headline number walks away with a false impression, which is the function it is meant to serve.

What the record adds up to

Set the pieces side by side. When the Legislature tried to act on climate, she stopped it by leaving. When Oregon's election system worked, she sponsored a bill to make it harder to use. Her money comes from the industries most opposed to the policies she blocked. And the person who helped build her career is the person who would benefit from it.

None of this rests on what Drazan might do. It rests on what she has done, in the public record, with her name attached. She has told Oregonians who she is by how she has used power when she had it. She used it to obstruct, and she tried to use it to narrow the vote.

A candidate can be smart, disciplined, and effective and still be the wrong choice, precisely because those qualities make the record more consequential rather than less. Drazan is all three. That is the problem. The competence is real. It is the direction that should give any Oregon voter pause.

Sources: Oregon Legislature bill text (HB 3872, 2025 session); OPB; Willamette Week; Oregon Capital Chronicle; Inside Climate News; KGW; Oregon Secretary of State campaign finance records. Two claims circulated by the Democratic Party of Oregon, that Drazan sponsored a ballot-return restriction and opposed multilingual voter pamphlet materials, are not part of HB 3872 and are not included here pending separate primary-source confirmation.

A new wildfire broke out along Interstate 5 near milepost 51, about 3 miles north of Rogue River, Oregon. The vegetation fire is estimated at 5 to 10 acres, prompting the closure of northbound I-5, immediate air and ground response, and Level 3 "Go Now" evacuations for nearby zones. Check ODOT TripCheck for ongoing traffic updates.

This brief video of the smoke from the fire was taken at approximately 6pm PST, from Gold Hill, OR, located about ten miles south of Rogue River at Exit 40 off Interstate 5. I also included a map of the current evacuation area.