15,000 years ago, Eagle Landing Park was buried under 3,000 feet of ice.  If you stand on the beach today and look across at the Olympic Mountains, that's about half way up the highest peaks you see.  Solid glacial ice.  The glacier retreated by about 11,000 years ago, and Douglas-fir trees marched back into the barren landscape to repopulate the lands where they lived before the glacier.  Those first pioneering Douglas-firs grew on soil lacking any organic material, any life.  As those trees lived and died on this land for 10,000 years, the soil became alive, full of decaying organic material and teeming with bugs, microbes, and fungi.

Over 100 years ago, most or all of the trees were stripped off the land.  The soil remained, mostly untouched.  The living, breathing soil of Eagle Landing Park is 10,000 years old.  The individual organisms may be young, but their genomes are ancient.  The above-ground portion of the forest had to start anew, but the below-ground forest lived on after the logging, mostly unaffected.  When the Douglas-firs grew again, those micorrhyzae were waiting for them.

The soil is very fluffy in most places.  When I want to plant a small plant, I just stick my hand into the earth and feel around for the openings.  I push the soil aside a little, distrubing it the least amount.  To plant a larger tree, I need a shovel, but that is to chop through the roots of other plants in the way.  Although I hate to disturb the soil, the living skin of the park, I do enjoy the feel and smell of having my hands in the soil.

Jon Luoma tells us there may be thousands of creatures under your foot each time you take a step.  If I could count those critters, I would have no trouble reaching 365 species this year.  One critter that does not belong there is the earthworm.  Most worms that you see are not native.  When the glacier retreated, the Douglas-firs marched into lands without most of the worms that we think of as naturally being in the soil.  Those invasive worms may be changing the makeup of the soil, and they may make it difficult to restore Eagle Landing Park to the way it once was.  Of course, no one made an accurate record of the forest before it was cut down, so we have to make educated guesses as we restore the forest to its former state of health.  But as much work as there is to do above ground, removing invasive species, below ground the park is fairly healthy, as far as I know.