How many of us take the time to look beyond the beauty strip? How many of us really want to? Aren’t many of us, much of time, content to avert our eyes? After all, what you find around and beyond the strip of natural beauty can be painful. If you ride a bike on our public roads, hike the trails, walk to do your shopping and pick up mail, or paddle on public waterways, then maybe you’re less likely to look the other way.

I’d like to encourage everyone to look through the beauty strip. To that end, every third Monday Outside Up North publish a new Beyond the Beauty Strip feature. Here’s this month’s edition.

 
Fall is in the air along The River, and when a drizzly day dawned, I knew that it was a good day for a photo shoot, so I headed down the portage trail to a favorite place on the bedrock above a ledge drop. I set up my tripod to blur the water’s flow, and was rewarded with dozens of lovely photos, including this one:

 

 
It’s too beautiful a scene to restrict it to column width. For a larger image, go to this page. I had been concentrating so much on the distant landscape that I didn’t notice right away what was almost right at my feet:

 

 
The orange and white plastic shopping bags had been floating in the shallows. I pulled them out of the water and placed them on the rock to drain before collecting the trash to carry it away. Look carefully, and under the boulder you’ll see the remains of a beer party.

 

 
The photo doesn’t capture all the Bud Lite cans which littered the area, some of which are decorated with an autumn camouflage graphic (aimed at hunters who apparently don’t want to alert deer as they quaff their brew) instead of being colored plain blue. I can sure understand coming to this spot to enjoy the beauty, but can’t comprehend the laziness of lager louts to carry out their detritus. Clearly they’re weaklings, and the cans are too heavy to carry the half mile back to the parking lot.

 
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