In the Northwest, it’s been another week of April showers. But despite the soggy weather, it’s also the time of year when the outdoor adventure season begins to kick into high gear. But if you’re starting to think about planning your first camping trip of 2022, you’re not alone: competition for campsites and congestion in scenic areas has been growing steadily for years, and that boom has only been intensified by two years of pandemic summers.

So what can you expect once you head into the great outdoors this year? With Zach Urness,  host of the Explorer Oregon podcast and Outdoors Editor for the Statesmen Journal. 

Since the beginning of the pandemic, 45 people in the custody of the Oregon Department of Corrections (DOC) have died after testing positive for COVID-19. Another 5,000 people have tested positive for the virus while in custody. Last week, a federal judge approved a class-action lawsuit over the state’s response to the pandemic inside Oregon’s prisons.

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It’s estimated that there are 4,000 people who identify as descendants of the Kalapuya people living in Oregon today. But for the last half century, there have been no native speakers of the Kalapuyan language.

Now there’s an effort underway to preserve the Kalapuyan language. There’s a new dictionary, and some descendants of the Kalapuya people are now working to learn their ancestors’ language.

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Suzanne Hale can be gruff, but there’s a reason why her legions of adoring fans call her “The Lovely Suzanne.” Hale’s restaurant, The Roxy, was an anchor for downtown Portland’s nightlife aficionados for 27 years. Open 24 hours a day, except Mondays, the diner attracted partygoers, cab drivers, and graveyard shift workers in droves. It was also an anchor for the city’s LGBTQ community. For queer or homeless teenagers, it was one of the few places they could always find refuge, no matter what time of day.

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This is the first weekend that many Oregonians are going to feel free of the coronavirus pandemic, as mask mandates end statewide.

But even without masks, this pandemic is still very much a concern for a lot of us. Healthcare workers, who are still struggling to keep COVID-19 patients alive today. Small business owners who are barely hanging on after two years of accruing debts. Immunocompromised Oregonians, who still can’t take part in the simplest routines. And so many people who are still dealing with the fresh grief of losing the nearly seven thousand Oregonians who have died in this pandemic.

For those of us, the right answer might be to scream.

We just passed the two-year anniversary of the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in Oregon: on February 28, 2020, an employee at an elementary school in Lake Oswego was diagnosed with the virus. In the two years since then, students, teachers and school staff have struggled through remote learning, masking, and uncertainty.

But this week, state officials announced plans to shift masking decisions to the local level beginning on March 12th. 

So, the big question becomes: without statewide mandates, what rules will be put in place? 

As a soloist with the Oregon Ballet Theatre, Chris Kaiser plays the role of the Prince of Darkness in the company’s staging of the ballet Dracula.  It’s a world away from where he was in early 2020, when, like all performing arts venues, the Oregon Ballet Theatre had to shut down abruptly.

Ballet is physically demanding, so the closure presented an altogether different physical challenge for Kaiser: How do you stay in elite dancing shape when you have no instructor, no dance company and no studio?

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The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife recently had no idea of their population — not even an estimate. The agency classified them as a ”strategy species,” a category of wild animals with small, declining, or unknown population levels that could be at risk and may be in need of conservation.

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In My Shoes was started by the local nonprofit Word is Bond, whose mission is to change the relationship between young Black men and law enforcement. Word is Bond founder Lakayana Drury says the idea came after watching the program’s participants do ride-alongs with the Portland Police Bureau. He saw a need for a reciprocal program, where the young men could tell their stories too.

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The omicron variant of COVID-19 has ripped through Oregon, forcing dozens of schools to suddenly close last week. We'll take a look at how districts across the state managed the abrupt transition.