By Caroline Woodwell

Neither Wes Hanson nor Gertie (Carder) Gosselin knew how to play tennis. But when she appeared at his dorm room door looking for his roommate, she spotted a canister of tennis balls. Wes didn’t tell her it was full of coins. When she asked if he’d like to play sometime, he said yes.

He didn’t play tennis, and “she was horrible,” Wes said. “So that worked out. We hit it off.”

A few years later, they were married and building a house on Gertie’s family land in Coeur d’Alene. And twenty-four years later, months before Gertie died of cancer in 1998, they signed a conservation easement with the Inland Northwest Land Conservancy (INLC), protecting 158 acres of forest and meadow above Lake Coeur d’Alene’s Cougar Bay. It was INLC’s third easement.

In the early 1990s, they learned about land preservation together, visiting protected lands and listening to lectures on conservation easement law. They worked for years to keep Cougar Bay’s shoreline undeveloped. The now publicly owned Cougar Bay Preserve saved much of the natural shoreline. Its land was purchased by the Idaho Nature Conservancy in 1997 and eventually transferred to the federal Bureau of Land Management.

Since then, Wes, a retired high school English teacher, has devoted himself to additional land protection around Cougar Bay.

“Wes has anchored INLC’s efforts to save land in the Cougar Bay area and beyond,” says Chris DeForest, INLC’s sole employee at the time, “first by preserving Carder Farm, then by helping others to imagine preserving their lands.”

A life-long painter and writer, Wes’ first book, Hardscrabble: Life on the Land, was published this summer, its title taken from Gertie’s father’s description of their land. Recently, Wes has put up swallow boxes on that land. He’s raising red oaks from acorns, he’s planting white oak trees, and of course, he’s chopping wood to heat the house. When he roams, it’s to the meadow, the forest, and sometimes, to the “Buddha rock” where there’s room for one person to sit and look out over the countryside.

The only thing missing, this avid fisherman says with a laugh, is a trout stream.

For Wes, land conservation and stewardship exist seamlessly with writing poetry and painting, and doing good work in the world. Gertie’s family, Wes said, seemed to know intuitively that this land should never be developed. And Wes, who recently urged his son-in-law to “do good while you still can,” has his own immutable belief in the importance of goals that reach beyond the span of a human life.

* Check out this story and others in our Fall 2025 Newsletter below.