VALE, Ore. (AP) — Green has returned to the landscape in far southeastern Oregon, where the Long Draw fire burned across nearly 900 square miles of grass and sagebrush territory in July, killing livestock and damaging the prospects of ranchers...

2012 will likely go down as the warmest year on record for the lower 48 states, but it may be remembered just as much for its extreme events – and Oregon was no exception.

The last building block of the Obama administration's strategy unveiled Wednesday to keep the northern spotted owl from extinction nearly doubles the amount of Northwest national forest land dedicated to protecting the bird by the Bush administration four years ago.

"It won't take long, a few years tops," Portland native and bigfoot hunter Cliff Barackman told a Springfield High School club. "These things are real, and soon everyone is going to know about it."

Fire investigators in Deschutes County said lighting caused a wildfire that burned over 40 square miles of the Deschutes National Forest in September.

There's no room in the county jail for burglars and thieves. And the sheriff's department in a vast, rural corner of southwest Oregon has been reduced by budget cuts to three deputies on patrol eight hours a day, five days a week.