White Cliffs of Conoy, Lancaster County. December 2020
When pollution is beautiful
During those long pandemic walks with my brother, we repeatedly came across references to the "White Cliffs" along the Susquehanna River in Lancaster County. Walking south on the Northwest Lancaster County Trail from Bainbridge, we finally found them. The entire site is much more than the white cliffs themselves because an old dolomite mine and processing center used to exist there spread on both sides of the railway tracks. From the looks of it, hundreds of people once worked there. The cliffs are easy to find because they create a natural clearing to the river from the trail. They are not dazzlingly white but certainly white enough. Something like a small moonscape devoid of plants, the cliffs extend toward the water as a chalky outgrowth with a steep edge leading down to the river. The views over to York County are lovely. As the photo above shows, out of place for anything in Lancaster County (or Pennsylvania for that matter), the place attracts the curious.
Dolomite is a kind of limestone that occurs in the area, so pit mines (now filled with water) were dug to extract it and a nearby processing center built to refine it. The leftover "dust" was dumped along the river and over time congealed into a hard, cement-like terrain. After a rain, the stone dust dissolves a little and becomes a white paste that is tracked up and down the black tarmac path. Today, the White Cliffs are just a big, old industrial dump site. The land was acquired by Conoy Township in 2014 and, with the creation of the river trail, the cliffs became easily accessible. Sunsets seem popular with the local college crowd (Elizabethtown, Penn State-Harrisburg, and Harrisburg Area Community College are all close by) as we ran into groups of young people hurrying down the trail to the cliffs as we were leaving on several late afternoon, winter visits.
Lemons from lemonade? Mine tailings become a local attraction. I don't know how polluting dolomite is to the Susquehanna, but compared to the spill from nearby Three Mile Island 40 years ago, it seems minor. What other pollution and environmental destruction has become accepted and "loved"? My friend, PM, points out that sunsets worldwide might all be a little more spectacular due to air pollution. Driving through the above mentioned Elizabethtown provides whiffs of chocolate from the Mars Factory (who does not smile when they smell chocolate in the air?). The lovely highlands of Scotland, so windswept and barren, are the devastation wrought by having cut down ALL the trees ( factoid from a TV nature program hosted by HRH Prince Charles). We do LIKE all these things - a funky place to visit on a river, dazzling sunsets, the smell of chocolate in the air, the craggy Scottish highlands (of which I have only seen the edges), but are they not ALL a result of something sinister?
Is something only "bad" until enough people like it and then, suddenly, it is "good"?
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