Winter has been exiting like a lamb, and March came in with gentle days. Plenty of sun, with daytime temperatures above freezing, eroded the thick ice along The River, melting away a bit more of the natural crystal sculptures each day. But one ice sculpture hung on tenaciously, deep in the cool confines of a small canyon. I call it Old Man River:

Do you see him? His beard is washed by the falls, his dreadlocks drip into the flow, and his mouth is agape. Further downstream, the banks rise but the gradient moderates—until the next waterfall.

This small canyon, where The River necks down in the narrows, is starkly beautiful, with ragged outcrops of ancient rock:

Last year’s growth of ferns is draped over the brink. Fiddleheads are not ready to spring forth yet, but once the days warm some more and the snow melts away, they will. This canyon is rich in beauty, a haven for nesting birds, lush greenery, and delicate wildflowers. I made my way along the ice shelf under the outcrop shown above, feeling for handholds in the crag. And I only just managed to avoid placing my palm on broken bottles that someone had tucked back on a hidden shelf beneath an overhang:

He or she went to considerable effort to break those bottles and shove them into the cul-de-sac where a bird might choose to build a nest, or where a small animal might seek shelter for the night. I carried those broken pieces of bottle out. But I wonder, how many more shards are there in the lovely little canyon?

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, than maybe you’re less likely to look the other way.

We’d like to encourage everyone to look through the beauty strip. To that end, every third Monday Tamia Nelson’s Outside will publish a new “Beyond the Beauty Strip” feature. If you have an example that you’d like to share, please do send it along.

 
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Winter along The River is harsh and unforgiving, but that doesn’t diminish its stark beauty. Now, as the sun rises higher and stronger, it clears the flanking hills for more than a few minutes and warms the rocky banks. Diurnal shifts in temperatures lead to thaw-freeze cycles which create interesting ice sculptures. Here’s a view upstream:

 
The scalloped ice in the lower right side of the photo is a thick shelf suspended over the water and lower banks. The five-foot diameter round depressions and their bordering motes in the ice are mysterious—how did they form? In the background you can see a sugarloaf-shaped mount. That’s an ice-shrouded boulder the size of a mini-van. Here’s a closer view of it:

 
To my eye, the long, pointed icicles hanging below notched ice give the sculpture the appearance of a walrus. The icicles suspended from the hanging shelves on the left are uniform in length—they’ve been eroded by flowing water. The ice over the boulder is smooth and polished in some places, pitted and scalloped in others.

The view downstream shows the brink of another step in the staircase of falls:

 
You can see another large mound of ice, this one standing sentinel over the boulder garden beneath the falls. Here it is from a vantage point further downriver:

 
Looks almost as if this Volkswagen Beetle-sized rock has been spread with sweet cake icing.

Scrambling back upriver a few dozen yards, you can see how water levels have dropped. High ice shelves overhang lower shelves, and fissures in the pan of ice in the foreground indicate the breaking of a shelf:

 
I stood there appreciating the view for quite a long time, but then my eyes drifted down. A tangle of cedar boughs trapped in ice almost, but not quite, hid an empty plastic bottle which once held iced tea:

 
And then I noticed other bits of trash trapped in ice—more plastic bottles, labels off of bottles, a couple beer cans, and snacks bags. The trash was scattered here and there, most of it inaccessible to me or my long lens, washed downstream from some other location.

I scramble on the riverbanks through the year, for miles upstream and down, and on both sides. Every time I do, I find trash, usually beer cans, soft drink containers, and worst of all, plastic bags and broken beer bottles. I do what I can to remove these eyesores and hazards, but a lot of it is inaccessible. What is it that makes slobs want to despoil such lovely places? I can only guess.

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, than maybe you’re less likely to look the other way.

We’d like to encourage everyone to look through the beauty strip. To that end, every third Monday Tamia Nelson’s Outside will publish a new “Beyond the Beauty Strip” feature. If you have an example that you’d like to share, please do send it along.

 
Send a Comment