Scott Swanson
Of The New Era
Brad Newport was in his element, in more ways than one.
Chauffeured by his son Brady, 6, he rolled in a Yamaha Rhino four-wheeler toward a camera crew from the Travel Channel, which was at the Newports’ Hollywood Ranch recently to film a segment on the treasure trove of petrified wood buried on the property on Old Holley Road.
Producer Brendan Moran directed the Newports and the show’s host, Kirsten Gum, of “Best Places to Find Cash and Treasures” on how to meet in front of the cameras.
“I want you to be able to tell your story in a TV time frame,” Moran told Newport. “Tell her the important parts.”
It took several takes to get all the pieces together, but soon the show was rolling and Brad Newport was explaining to the visitors how he learned about the petrified wood on his ranch and what he planned to do with it. The show will likely air in the spring, Moran said.
“This is pretty cool,” said Steve Speer of Aloha, a rock hound and petrified wood expert who was present to provide informed perspective. “It’s a great opportunity to promote petrified wood as a hobby and a hobby business.”
Speer, who normally works as a director at Intel, said the camera crew and he would visit several other locations in the state before they finished filming the show.
Speer has spent 17 years hunting and studying petrified wood and enjoys visiting Newport’s ranch, which is one of many in the valley that have such deposits, he said.
“This is part of one of the largest petrified forests in Oregon,” Speer said. “For 10 or 15 miles in any direction around here you’ll find petrified wood.”
Amy Newport, Brad’s wife, said her family discovered the “Cash and Treasures” show last year and “we loved it.”
Brad Newport, 45, said he got into rock hounding after meeting Amy and her parents, Dave and Janice Miner, in 1996.
“Amy’s family would go rock hounding and I would go with them,” he said. “It was awesome exercise. You don’t think about anything except finding beauties.”
Back then, most of what they were looking for were agates and petrified wood. The Newports collected their finds in buckets and plastic tote bins, which they lugged along as they moved from house to house, from Foster to Pleasant Valley to their ranch.
They had been running mini-marts and storage lockers in Lebanon and Newport, and a pizza restaurant in Lebanon, before they found the 100-acre ranch on Old Holley Road, after looking “for quite a while” for such a spread.
“I had absolutely no idea that there would be any petrified wood on the property until after they accepted my offer,” Newport said.
They made the move in January, but the previous owner offered to let them bring some of their things in early, during the holiday season.
“I said I’d bring up some petrified wood and agates,” Newport said. “She went berserk. ‘Petrified wood? Why would you want to bring petrified wood? It’s popping out of the ground on this ranch.'”
In February he bought a new pair of Danner boots and went out to explore.
“Right off the bat I found pieces of petrified wood that were better than anything I had,” he said. He ended up wading into a pond, in his new boots, to pull out pieces of the rock.
Because of business interests – he says he was working on opening a new auto body shop, Sweet Home Auto Body, in town at the time, Newport said he didn’t pursue petrified wood too aggressively. But when he got a chance, he called Speer, who came down to take a look at the ranch.
This summer, Newport has used an excavator to dig up even higher-quality pieces that he eventually plans to cut and sell.
Amy Newport said the process has been enjoyable.
“It’s just fun to do this,” she said. “It’s just good-quality family time. Brad has been here 2 1/2 months straight. He’s started as early as 5 in the morning.”
While they were filming the show, Newport and Speer found a “killer” piece of petrified log.
“We found a little bitty piece that was worth about $40,” Newport said. “The next one was worth about $500. The next one was worth about $5,000 – a big log with a lot of personality. The footage was crazy.”
Newport said an Oregon State University study done in the 1970s indicated that there are at least 70 species of trees on the property and that because of the diversity of species that don’t exist there now, they were likely washed in by a 10,000-year flood.
The most valuable tends to be wood that has imperfections that have filled up with minerals and petrified, creating beautiful patterns amidst the rings of normal growth.
“We’re just digging it out for fun right now,” he said.
Speer was the one who got the Newports hooked up with the Travel Channel, Newport said.
“He asked if we were interested in being on an episode of ‘Finding Cash and Treasures.’ I told him I really wasn’t really interested – I had too many other things going.”
Speer was persistent and when he visited the ranch again, Newport agreed. After working out the schedule, they got the deal done.
The crew, from the San Francisco Bay Area, spent most of the Wednesday before the Oregon Jamboree at the Newports’ ranch, then moved over to local rock hound Joe Cota’s shop in the Waterloo area on Thursday to film the cutting of some of the wood they found.
Moran, the director, said they do about six episodes of the show a year, usually spending three and a half days to shoot an episode. After their local shoots, they were planning to head to Idaho to look for star garnets, then to the Northern California coast to look for jade.
Brad Newport, who can turn a phrase, clearly enjoyed himself while shooting the show, particularly in repartee with host Gum.
“The crew was outrageous,” he said. “They were all funny, nice people. If I were a single person, I would love that career – a different shoot, every time, finding cash and treasures.
“At the end, the camera guys and crew were getting down in the hole, digging when they weren’t shooting. It was pretty funny.”