Oregon Facts

There is a giant mushroom in Oregon that is over 2,400 years old, covers 3.4 square miles of land, and is still growing!

The Japanese pilot who attacked a town in Oregon during WW2 returned years later to present his family's 400-year-old samurai sword to the city as a symbol of regret.

In 1970, a dead whale washed up on an Oregon beach. Officials decided to dispose of it with half a ton of dynamite. A WWII explosives veteran warned them it was way too much. They ignored him. The explosion launched car-sized chunks of blubber 800 feet. One crushed a brand new Oldsmobile in the parking lot. The owner had just bought it from a dealership running a "Whale of a Deal" promotion.

A timber beetle larva was gnawing through a tree stump. Its jaws curled left, then right, in alternating C-shaped bites. Oregon logger Joe Cox stopped to watch it in 1946. He spent that summer in his basement copying the shape into steel. The first Cox Chipper Chain sold in 1947. That idea became the basis of modern saw chain, still widely used today. Look at your own chain: the cutters still alternate left, right, left.

In August 1923, a 2-year-old Scotch Collie named Bobbie was separated from his family during a road trip through Wolcott, Indiana - 2,551 miles from home. Six months later, on February 15, 1924, he turned up at his family's door in Silverton, Oregon: gaunt, paws bloody, claws worn to nothing. He had crossed the Continental Divide alone, in winter. He came home.

Two 14-year-old boys climbed to God's Thumb - a sheer volcanic bluff on the Oregon coast - and froze 30 feet from the top. A firefighter climbed up to rescue them and got stuck too. Coast Guard lowered a crew member from a helicopter and hoisted all three off the cliff face.

Oregon's Coast Range forest was written off as dead for good after repeated wildfires. Some believed the land was too damaged to ever grow trees again. Oregonians proved them wrong. Between 1949 and 1972, crews hand planted 72 million seedlings. Schoolchildren bused in planted nearly a million of those trees themselves. In 1973, Governor Tom McCall stood in the regrown forest and renamed it Tillamook State Forest.