Immerse in Five Moments Along the Nooksack

Grab your headphones and crank the volume.

Four Western Washington University students spent time this fall creating something we didn't know we needed—a way to slow down and listen to the river from five specific places along its length.​

Their interactive StoryMap invites you to stand virtually at each location through 360-degree panoramic photos, hear the wind and water through on-site audio recordings, and read short vignettes that capture the students’ experiences in these moments.​​

How It Started

The project grew out of the October 5 Common Waters gathering, where the students, Haley Radde, Jacob Crain, Samantha Boulware, and Tessa Beecher, helped facilitate a day of river walks and watershed storytelling with tribal members, farmers, and community partners. They arrived early for parking and setup, participated fully in the walks and conversations, served dinner, and stayed late to help clean up.​​

Their involvement came through Connor Harron's Environmental Communication course, a capstone for graduating seniors at WWU's College of the Environment. Connor had presented participation in Common Waters as an option for their final group project—an invitation to immerse themselves in the experience, reflect on what they learned, and then co-develop a communications tool to help advance the project's mission. Four students chose to take part.​

Afterward, they kept thinking about what they'd witnessed—not just the event itself, but how much changed when people left the meeting room and walked to the water together. Drawing from their experience along the river and their conversations with members of the Nooksack Tribe and Lummi Nation, they developed the idea for an audio story map that could make connecting with the Nooksack more accessible for those who can't physically navigate the watershed.​

What They Were After

In a planning call with our team, the students wrestled with how to create something useful beyond a grade. They wanted to center listening over advocacy, honor complexity without flattening it, and make something accessible to people who might never attend a public meeting but care deeply about this place.​

One described the value of "seeing how this is getting resolved in a real scenario" rather than just reading about water rights adjudication in a textbook. Another reflected on the power of bringing everyone to the river as common ground, even when disagreements remain. The resulting StoryMap reflects those commitments—humble, place-based, and genuinely invitational.

An Invitation

The StoryMap adds something important to this growing archive of stories from the Nooksack—it gives younger voices a way to document how big questions about water, justice, and climate feel when you're actually standing in the floodplain. Their work represents a generation learning what it means to show up for a watershed in real time, bridging academic learning with lived experience and deepening our collective relationship with place.​​

We're grateful for what they've created, and we invite you to move through it slowly, location by location, and consider what might shift if more of us learned to listen this way.