Every spring, the Umatilla people of northeastern Oregon join other Columbia River tribes in celebrating the return of the salmon. Growing up on the reservation in the foothills of the Blue Mountains east of Pendleton, Patrick Luke learned to appreciate the bond between fish and people. When he wasn’t helping to tend the family’s horses, he was fishing with his dad for salmon and steelhead on the Columbia and the Umatilla rivers.
When Jeremiah Oxford, a master’s student from Coos Bay, Oregon, isn’t in class or writing a paper, he puts his mind to that most unacademic of tasks: grinding rocks.
“They have offered me every opportunity a graduate student would ever need. They have picked me up when I was down, and they have pushed me to become my best and to go beyond what I thought I was capable of. I feel lucky to have been able to work with them.”
When Marcy Cottrell Houle headed to the Zumwalt Prairie in the 1980s with her topo maps, tree-climbing gear and raptor leg bands to study hawks, she assumed wildlife and cows were incompatible. After all, that was the prevailing view — and there were millions of overgrazed acres across the West to prove it. So when the OSU grad student found hawks flourishing alongside cows in the northeastern Oregon rangelands, she was stunned.
OSU researchers, studying aspens with scientists in Sweden and Virginia, were seeking a solution to a genetic mystery: What makes trees start reproducing after years of vegetative growth?
As OSU volcanologist Bill Chadwick watches live images of a violent series of explosions deep in the Pacific, he searches for words that capture the otherworldly scene.