October 29, 2026 I By Katie Cox, Executive Director
Dear Curious Friends,
Two weekends ago, one of our former summer interns, Elizabeth Couch, returned to Pine Street Woods with a shovel and a mission. She was home from the University of Idaho and had a class project that required her to dig a soil pit and study what lay beneath the surface.
What warmed my heart was that Elizabeth reached out to us because she wanted to do this project at Pine Street Woods. Having grown up in Sandpoint and spent a summer working alongside us, this place had become meaningful to her. And now, as she continues her education, she wanted to come back to a landscape she knows and loves to learn something more about it.
Seeing Elizabeth light up about Pine Street Woods soil makes me giddy!
We spend so much time thinking about how to connect children to nature. We build outdoor classrooms, take kids into the woods, teach them to recognize plants and animals, and encourage them to get muddy, curious and wonderfully lost in the natural world. We hope that somewhere along the way, these experiences take root, and that the land becomes something more than a pretty place to visit. We want the land to become part of who they are.
And here was Elizabeth, coming back on her own, shovel in hand, wanting to know more about the place she loves. What she found two feet beneath the meadow was pretty remarkable.
Elizabeth discovered layers of volcanic ash and loam resting over glacial till derived from granite. Think about that for a moment. Beneath the grasses and wildflowers of a meadow we walk past every day is a story of volcanoes, glaciers, mountains and the extraordinary forces that shaped this landscape long before any of us were here.
She identified the soil as most closely resembling the Pend Oreille soil series. And she even found a little evidence of the meadow's more recent life as a cow pasture, where grazing appears to have affected the structure of the uppermost soil.
All of this just two feet below our bikes, skis and hiking shoes!
I love thinking about the incredible story that soil can tell us. How many thousands of years of history are tucked beneath our feet? What might we discover if we dug a hole in the forest, along the creek, or up on the hillside? How much of this place do we walk over every day without ever really knowing it?
Elizabeth's project sparked something else, too.
Our education team began dreaming about how we might create more opportunities for all of us to be curious about the natural world. And from that conversation, Nature Lab was born!
Nature Lab will be a series of workshops where we invite our community to learn alongside us. We might dig into the soil, explore the life in a pond, discover what makes a healthy forest, learn to recognize the birds singing overhead, or uncover the fascinating world of insects living right under our noses. Rocks, trees, flowers, wildlife, water, dirt! Oh, the possibilities are endless. And we have a feeling you are interested in all of it.
And the best part? We don't have to be experts to participate. We just have to be curious.
I keep coming back to the idea that Elizabeth's story is really two stories woven together. One is about the extraordinary history of a landscape, written in layers of soil over thousands of years. The other is about a young woman whose own story has become connected to this place, and who is now helping the rest of us discover something new about it.
There is something incredibly comforting about knowing that Pine Street Woods is protected forever. The land will continue to change, as nature always does. Trees will grow and fall, meadows will shift, and new layers of history will slowly become part of the earth. But this place will remain a place for people to discover, love and learn from.
And perhaps someday, another young student who grew up exploring these woods will return with a shovel, wondering what stories lie beneath their feet.
Thank you, Elizabeth, for reminding us that curiosity is a wonderful thing, and that our connection to the land is something we can carry with us for a lifetime.
Keep digging,
Katie
