(light music) - William O. Douglas was one of the 20th century's most influential U.S. Supreme Court justices.

He hailed from the Yakima Valley.

He was an avid hiker and climber.

From boyhood, he explored the mountains and river valleys of the Cascades.

He felt truly at home in Wild Country.

During his Supreme Court years, he became one of the greatest advocates for wilderness preservation.

In the 1950s, he led a group of activists and enthusiastic hikers down the wild Pacific coast of Washington from Cape Alava to La Push.

The object was to protest a proposed highway down that coast.

Through groups like the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society, and using his celebrity to motivate the grassroots, he helped save wild areas all across America, from the Potomac to the Pacific.

He was a judicial activist for the wilderness.

East of Mount Rainier, there's a William O. Douglas Wilderness, not far from Douglas's offseason home in Goose Prairie in Yakima County, a beautiful spot where he could get respite from his toils in Washington DC.

He served on the court for a record 36 years and 211 days from 1939 to 1975.

No wonder (chuckles) he needed a respite, and don't we all.

Many people consider the Northwest a natural refuge, a place where we can escape to enjoy recreation and inspiration in the wilds.

Yet, while we love to go camping, hiking, boating, and hunting, we've learned that the wilds have their own history.

What is wild here today has changed radically over time.

The Pacific Northwest was entirely different in the distant past.

Let's take a look.

(birds chirping) Today we're at the Burke Museum in the paleontology department.

The one thing people in the Pacific Northwest think they know is our climate.

But what a lot of people don't know is that the Pacific Northwest wasn't always the gray, rainy haven that we think of it today.

(light music) About 50 million years ago, palm trees thrived here.

So imagine the Bellingham area, you're in a palm forest, something like you would find in Central America.

Think Costa Rica.

You move ahead maybe to 40 million years ago, you're getting ginkgo trees.

That's a climate that's similar to the deep south.

In central Oregon, they've actually found fossils of banana plants.

You think of the Pacific Northwest, you think of apples.

44 million years ago, it was bananas.

We're gonna take a great leap forward to 12,000 years ago.

As the glaciers are receding, you begin to find plants that are much more like some of the plants that we have today.

Conifer cones.

These aren't fossilized, they were described to me as mummified, but these are at least 12,000 years old or so.

When would I like to have lived if I could live in one of these climates?

I'm not a fan of hot humidity, so I don't think I would've been living in Bellingham 50 million years ago.

Nor particularly the climate in Republic, (chuckles) the deep South.

The one that I think I identify with would be that post glacial period when the forests are moving in, and ground sloths and mammoths and whatnot are lumbering around.

Scientists are doing a lot of detective work using fossils to see what kinds of plants grew, what kinds of animals lived.

Human-caused climate change is happening very rapidly.

The more we understand about the past climate changes, even ones that occurred well before humans were around, will help us understand how the planet operates.

(birds chirping) There are folks who probably love the idea of returning to a Costa Rican climate.

Some of your next-door neighbors might even plant palm trees.

For some, climate change means get out the shorts (chuckles) and sunglasses.

That banana climate period was in contrast to the following ice ages when enormous glaciers spread south.

The Puget Lobe ice sheet was 3000 feet thick over Seattle.

That's five space needles deep.

Over the millennia, ice covered the Puget Sound area at least seven times, and scoured and gouged out a new landscape 14,000 years ago.

Humans moved in as a whole new environment emerged.

They brought new tools and hunting techniques to survive in a transformed landscape that included massive prehistoric animals like giant bison.

Yes, buffalo once roamed around the Salish Sea.

Here's the proof.

(birds chirping) More than 10 years ago, property owners on Orcas Island were digging a new pond on their property when workers uncovered some old bones.

The bones didn't reflect the fauna that live in the islands today.

They were the remains of a massive prehistoric bison, bison antiquus.

But they found some other things that made the bones an extremely interesting find.

The bone showed signs of human contact.

For another, they turned out to be very old, about 14,000 years old.

Upon close examination, the researchers found signs of butchering.

No tools or spear points were found at Ayer Pond, but the bones had fractures, scrapes, and concussion marks indicative of human activity, perhaps meal prep.

These were some of the bones that came from Ayer Pond, and they show signs of human butchering.

This is a cut mark, probably a chop mark that was made on the bone.

These are fresh fracture marks that were made when the animal was freshly killed.

And you can tell that other animals didn't break these bones open because there are no teeth marks or claw marks.

They're just very clean breaks that would've been made by humans.

(light tense music) Very, very large.

We know that these early peoples had the tools to leave such marks.

Also, the main carcass of the animal seems to have been removed to another location, and that wouldn't have been easy.

Such critters were much bigger than the buffalo we know today that chase (chuckles) foolish tourists at Yellowstone Park.

These could grow seven and a half feet tall and weigh 3,500 pounds.

Given their age, they're the earliest physical evidence of human activity in the Salish Sea Basin, according to a recent survey of "Salish Sea Archeology".

And here's another eye-opening thing, they're among the earliest evidence of coastal human migration on the west coast.

(light music) As the ice retreated due to a warming climate, the landscape changed.

The area around Ayer Pond would've been a tundra like meadow with lodgepole pines in a park-type setting.

The fact that massive bison were here suggests some kind of link to the mainland.

The Salish Sea was brand new at that time, carved out and flooded only a thousand or so years before.

(light music) The sea was shallower, and much of the coastline of that era is now underwater because the melting ice eventually raised the sea level.

Ice bridges, swimmable channels, or direct connections could explain how the buffalo, ground sloths, and other large mammals roamed the islands.

Eventually, the animals were stranded by surrounding water.

At the same time, across the strait of Juan de Fuca on Washington's Olympic peninsula, mastodons, caribou, and bison were also browsing the flora that followed the glacial retreat.

The ancient bison that fed early inhabitants went extinct about 10,000 years ago.

Victim with other prehistoric megafauna of the Pleistocene era because of climate change and overhunting by humans, (birds chirping) Oversized bison, mammoths, and mastodons.

Giant ground sloths.

These were the wildlife here 10,000 years ago.

They eventually disappeared, likely from climate change and human predation.

But one forest critter has endured since time immemorial, and is perhaps the strangest symbol of the northwest wild side.

Immune to the passage of time and the intrusions of modernity.

(birds chirping) There are some scientists in the Pacific Northwest who think Bigfoot might be real.

Pioneer studier of Bigfoot was Grover Krantz.

He knew a lot about the anatomy of human ancestors.

His theory was a giant primate lived in China, came across the Bering Land Bridge, and populated remote parts of the northwest.

- This is an example of one footprint.

This is a plaster cast.

- [Knute] And he collected casts of footprints.

- This cast, I've drawn in the approximate reconstructions of the bones.

This is what is evidently a crippled individual.

You just need one.

- [Interviewer] Meaning?

- One real one.

And then you know that the species is real.

- [Jeffrey] 300 plus footprint cast later, it's probably the most compelling body of data for the existence of an unrecognized species.

- There's another anthropologist, Jeffrey Meldrum, incorporated Grover Krantz collection into his own, and he can see aspects that suggest they're not fake.

The pressure of the toe, it's typical of an ape of some kind.

A flex point in the foot, not typical of a human.

When you actually look at it, there's a lot more evidence for Bigfoot than I think most of us thought.

- [Jeffrey] Hair, which cannot be attributed to other animals.

I've heard vocalizations, (creature warbling) and photographic evidence, including the Patterson-Gimlin film.

I'm quite convinced of its authenticity.

(light music) - The Pacific Northwest, there's still places people don't go, or don't go very often.

We project our imagination into these mysterious spaces.

I consider myself a Bigfoot agnostic.

but I would like to know.

I would like people like Jeffrey Meldrum and other scientists to work the problem and give us a definitive answer.

(birds chirping) Bigfoot has been spotted throughout the region, including the William O. Douglas Wilderness.

I'm not sure if Justice Douglas ever saw one, but he sure did his best to save Sasquatch habitat.

Most of us still wait to encounter a "Harry and the Hendersons" style Bigfoot, but such critters remain mostly a kind of enduring, furry Hollywood mirage.

And there's another forest animal that resists petting.

Don't try it.

They remind us that our beloved wilderness habitat might be pretty, but it can also be cruel.

A lesson learned painfully up in the Okanogan back in the day when a boy named Jimmy took a shortcut.

(birds chirping) (light music) We're in the mammal department of the Burke Museum.

So in the 1920s, there was a fatal cougar attack.

It was an attack that generated national publicity.

It would suggest that even as we were coming out of the frontier period, cougar attacks were very rare.

They're very unusual, and they scared the bejesus out of people.

Over 40% of Washington is considered suitable cougar habitat.

You can hike your entire life in the Washington wilds and never see a cougar.

But cougars are sometimes a problem for ranchers, farmers, and occasionally they will attack something they usually don't attack.

These are the bones of a cougar that was killed in Renton in the 1980s, and it was going after killing chickens.

This cougar had a lot of physical problems.

At some point, the cougar had a terrible encounter with a porcupine, and the porcupines quills actually worked their way into the cougar's bone, and that also caused a bone-like tumor to form.

So this is a cougar who was probably very distressed, and this cougar was shot because it was creating problems.

The interesting part of the story with little Jimmy Fehlhaber was in the ensuing weeks.

There were more than one tracking team.

They each tracked a cougar down and killed the cougar, and then there was a big dispute over who got the right one.

One group cougar was stuffed and is on display at the Okanogan County Museum in eastern Washington.

I've come across cougar tracks in the wild, (chuckles) makes you look at your environment very differently and more carefully.

(birds chirping) Cougar attacks are rare.

But as more people live near wildland sightings grow more common, and we have to learn the lessons of how to coexist.

Speaking of shortcuts, while many people embrace what we think of as pristine wilderness, most of us wouldn't be here.

But for those who came with axes and saws to transform the landscape, as surely as the glaciers did, making homes was their first priority.

And early settlers discovered that the ancient old growth that abounded offered huge challenges.

And for a few, a unique opportunity to literally move right in.

(birds chirping) Known for its forests, the northwest had appeal for its moderate climate and fertile lands.

(gentle twangy music) Indigenous people had been cultivating crops and game with periodic burnings to promote the growth of berries, camas root, and oak prairies.

(gentle twangy music) But when settlers poured into the region, they were dazzled by the forests, which they fell upon to chop down, to build with, and for lumber to sell.

Cleared areas for cultivation were comparatively scarce, So homesteaders sought to raise the forest for farming and grazing land.

But that often left them with fields of stumps.

Massive stumps, endless stumps.

These rugged allotments were called Stump Farms.

You know those souvenir postcards showing giant fruit or potatoes or ears of corn on flat cars?

They were a joking way to show off a region's pride and its abundance.

Here, we didn't need fake photos.

Real photos of real trees and their stumps showed what the pioneer class faced.

Trees so big, they could only be felled one or two stories above the ground by loggers with whipsaws and axes standing on springboards.

You could still see some of those springboard notches on old growth stumps today.

The logs and stumps from mammoth furs, spruce, and cedars became trophies of pioneer era industriousness.

While we might weep over these fallen giants today, postcards and images once featured people standing next to felled big timber, much like someone might pose with a record-size fish.

As forests came down, fast fields of stumps couldn't easily be removed.

What do you do with the stumps of trees so huge and so deeply rooted in the soil?

You could burn them, you could dig, chop, and pry them out or haul on them with horse and oxen.

(gentle twangy music) Some took a shorter route.

Dynamite.

(rousing music) An exploding stump could be dangerous.

Dexter Horton, a Seattle pioneer and early banker, is said to have stopped by a stump being burned.

(tense rousing music) He decided to warm himself by the fire, when an unexploded shell from the U.S. Navy warship Decatur, it was apparently lodged in the stump, exploded and knocked him down.

Perhaps a lesson was learned.

He later built a fireproof bank that survived the great Seattle fire of 1889.

Stumps were not unusual in growing frontier cities.

Portland was nicknamed Stumptown during its expansion in the mid 1800s.

Portlanders are said to have hopped from stump to stump to avoid the mushy rain-soaked ground if need be.

Geniusly, some found uses for the larger stumps.

One in the Olympic peninsula's Elwha country was turned into a post office in the 1890s.

Another in Tacoma's Wright Park had stairs installed and became a kind of observation platform.

A kind of early space needle.

(uptempo music) People danced on stumps, played music on stumps, performed acrobatics and posed for family photos on stumps.

Near Olympia, some enterprising guys turned a giant stump into a barn for their livestock.

Massive cedar stumps often had hollow or soft interiors at the base.

Why let them go to waste?

Why not carve out some space and move in?

In Vancouver, BC, someone built a three-room stump house.

Much easier than throwing up a log cabin.

(birds chirping) If you think living in a tree stump is going back to nature, there were also those at the turn of the 19th century who thought modern society had stripped us of both health and courage, and that getting back to basics was the way of the future.

In other words, we need to look at the wild for lessons from the past on how to live now.

Back in the day, long before hippies, they were called nature men.

(birds chirping) He had a biography that sounds familiar.

(gentle music) His actual name was Ernest Darling, but he was known more widely as Nature Man.

He lived in Portland, Oregon where his father was a prominent physician.

In the 1890s, he went to California to attend Stanford, but dropped out due to ill health.

He was scrawny and struggling.

Traditional medicine, including his father's administrations, failed to work.

So at 90 pounds of skin and bones, he went off to the Oregon woods.

He shed his shoes and clothes, most of them anyway.

He advocated eating only uncooked fruits and vegetables, nuts and berries.

Later he shifted to warmer climbs like California and wandered around near naked.

He became one of those Bay Area eccentrics, of which (chuckles) there have been so many.

He met the famous author, Jack London, who first saw him on the streets of San Francisco, and later scampering in the hills outside of Oakland.

Darling wanted a world in which people could be wild and natural, naked and healthy.

In the late 19th century, gadding about barely clothed was enough to turn more than heads, it could get you arrested.

(gentle twangy music) So Darling decided to find more welcoming environments.

(smooth light music) In 1904, he tried Hawaii.

But they were ready for him.

The "Hawaiian Star" reprinted a San Francisco newspaper report about Darling, warning of his nakedness and strange lifestyle.

In it, the 30-something young man tried to explain himself.

"I am not a religious crank, nor out to attract cheap attention to myself.

I am an earnest student of good health and right conditions of living.

I wish to discard clothing as rapidly as (chuckles) society becomes pure enough to stand it."

After six months, he learned that Hawaii wasn't interested in what he was selling, which included near nude pictures of himself.

The sheriff charged him with obscenity and being a vagrant.

So, facing jail time, he took a steamer for Tahiti.

It was here that darling became more famous because his old acquaintance from California, Jack London, came sailing in to Papeete, a stop on he and his wife's tour of the South Pacific.

Darling greeted London in an outrigger, flying the red flag of socialism.

And London sympathized.

Darling shared his theories about levitation, it was possible, and how he would not need sleep at age 100 and would be able to live on air alone.

Nature Man left Tahiti and traveled in Asia and the South Pacific.

Despite his health regimen, there was one affliction he couldn't outrun.

In late 1918, as the influenza pandemic swept Fiji, fresh air, fruit, and sunshine were no vaccine for the so-called Spanish Flu.

Nature put an end to Nature Man.

(gentle twangy music) But wait, Darling wasn't the only nature man in the news at that time.

There was another, not an imitator, but a man who went into the woods around the time Darling was gamboling in Tahiti.

He wasn't doing it for his health, but to prove the superiority of the modern White man.

And unlike Darling, Joseph Knowles became a major national sensation.

Knowles said that he could live without clothes or food in the wood for 60 days.

"I wondered if the man of the present day could leave all of his luxury behind and go back into the wilderness."

he said.

Knowles was inventing the kind of spectacle that we see today on reality TV.

The press lapped it up.

Nature Man Knowles went into the Maine woods in a loincloth weaponless, and eventually came out weeks later wearing a bearskin and claiming to have survived by his wits and woodcraft alone.

Soon after Joe Knowles' sojourn in the Maine woods, he faced accusations that he had cheated.

That he had lived in a cabin, and that the bearskin he wore had a bullet hole in it.

Could it be that Knowles was a fake?

So Knowles went to the West Coast to recreate his stunt in the Siskiyou Mountains of southern Oregon.

In the summer of 1914, Knowles entered the wilds outside of Grant's Pass, Oregon.

He was sent off by the press and his watchers, who would stay in regular touch.

Knowles passed out notes written in charcoal on bark to report his progress.

This time, Knowles lasted about a month without any apparent fraud.

Unlike in Maine, when he came out from his stunt, the public's attention had been diverted by the start of World War I.

(birds chirping) If nothing else, these nature guys foreshadowed (chuckles) reality TV.

They lived in transitional times between the wilds and the vaudeville stage.

They entertained with their antics, then faded from the scene.

But they added to the history of the wild Northwest.

Banana plants (chuckles) and bison, bigfoot and cougars, stump dwellers and nudists, our wilderness has featured intriguing characters and dramatic changes.

It has also been a place resonant with spirit.

One artist who did so much to capture the feeling of the forest was British Columbia's Emily Carr, who left a legacy that many believe comes closest to conveying the natural essence of Cascadia.

(birds chirping) Emily Carr was born and raised in Colonial Victoria, British Columbia.

(lively music) She lived from 1871 to 1945, and spent most of her life there.

Although she studied art in San Francisco, London, and Paris, her work was heavily influenced by the art she encountered.

The poles and figures of First Nations people, the fauvists of Europe, French Impressionists and German expressionists.

Carr was eccentric, often worked in solitude.

She was a female artist in a profession that was male-dominated.

She had an artistic style that was unique.

(gentle music) Her work has been seen through the critical lenses of feminism, colonialism, Canadian nationalism, romanticism.

She became well-known in Canada for her paintings and for her writing, which had a very specific focus: the damp forests of Vancouver Island.

And late in life, from her fifties to her seventies, she entered a phase that was especially powerful.

No one has captured the Cascadian trees, forests, and skies like Emily Carr.

As artist Georgia O'Keeffe is to flowers, Carr is to our trees.

(gentle music) We now know, as science has shown us, that forests are vast connected communities that communicate, that cooperate, that can listen, smell, and perhaps even think.

They have networks of fibers and fungi, a way of sharing resources like water and sunlight.

But before these discoveries, Carr intuited that web of life and captured it on paper and canvas in her own unique way.

She wrote, "I am always asking myself the question, what is it that you are struggling for?

What is that vital thing the woods contain, possess that you want?

Why do you go back and back to the woods unsatisfied, longing to express something that is there?"

(gentle music) Carr takes you into the forest dark places too, (light music) like moving through multiple drapes into an interior space at once alive, mysterious, inviting, oppressive.

My father worked on a logging-camp survey crew, deep in the old growth of the Olympic Peninsula in the 1930s at the time Carr was painting her forest pictures.

He described places that were silent, where sound was muffled.

When the forest went quiet, he said, "You might spot an indigenous tree burial in the canopy above."

If much of her work captures, as one critic put it, the trembling luminosity of the sky, she also painted the intensity of the coastal forest that can seem like a living womb or tomb.

Great art is unique but speaks to a larger truth, often feelings that are hard to put into words or images.

Before science uncovered secrets of living forests, Emily Carr's paintings captured their essence, and their knowing.

(birds chirping) The lesson of Carr is that if one can't get out to the deep woods, her work can still transport you there in spirit.

Hiking boots not required.

Justice Douglas was trying to do much the same thing, to create a series of physical galleries, parks, preserves that saved wild areas from mining, logging, damning, and development so that some vestige of what was here before settlement could be experienced and appreciated by people today.

If Carr used paints and canvas, Douglass used policy and law.

He certainly thought big.

He said, "I would hope to be remembered as someone who made the earth even more beautiful than it was before he came."

That's a (chuckles) mighty big wish.

Douglass didn't make the world more beautiful, but he worked to preserve as much of the wild beauty found here as he could.

And we're better for it.

(gentle music)