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.

 
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The temperature hovered around zero Fahrenheit, but the sun struggled to peek through a thinning bank of clouds. My breath fogged before my face and formed a skim of ice on my collar. However cold it was, it was wonderful to feel the sun, feeble as it was, on my cheeks. And the scene was beautiful, too. The River’s strong current resisted icing, and the open water smoked in the frigid cold. The hillside beyond the bridge was gilded with hoarfrost from the steam freezing on trees’ limbs and branches. Even the wires crossing The River didn’t detract from the loveliness.

 
But then the faint breeze made something glint over the bridge. A tangle of monofilament spanned several of the utility wires, a bobber (and, no doubt, a hook) on the upper end, and a wad on the lower end.

 
Then, as I contemplated this hazard to birds, I looked overhead and saw another tangle of mono, a bobber, sinker, and hook dangling from the nearby wires.

 
A sudden snow flurry blew in on a chilly gust, but that’s not what made me shiver. Monofilament is deadly to wildlife. A pair of kingfishers build a nest near this place, and they perch on those wires over the deep waters to watch for fish. No way could I reach the mono and hooks to pull them down, and made a mental note to ask the utility crew next time I saw them if they’d remove the hazards in both places. Mono wraps around necks, beaks, legs, and wings, causing gangrene and eventually, after an agonizing period of pain, it causes death. Hooks can blind, pierce limbs and bodies, and be swallowed by birds and wild animals, also causing a prolonged death.

As I walked back home, my face lowered to keep warm inside my muffler, I saw this:

 
A discarded plastic cup, straw, and some cola. Not the most egregious display of a disregard for the world we live in, but dangerous in its own way. Skunks and raccoons often poke their noses into cups to lick out the contents, their faces are trapped inside, and they wander blindly until they suffocate, starve, or meet some other horrific end by trauma. The cup was more evidence of a complete lack of interest, an ingrained insensibility to the integrity of the places where we live. A trash can was a few steps away. I have to wonder if the person who discarded this cup and straw would have done so on his or her own lawn, or inside the house.

 
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 Outside Up North publish a new Beyond the Beauty Strip feature. Here’s this month’s edition. If you have an example that you’d like to share, please do send it along.

 
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