For this Small Shacks sketch I headed to Capitola on Monterey Bay.
My subject was a small one room shack built in 1907. It was in Santa Cruz right next to the Santa Cruz Boardwalk in “Cottage City”. The Beach Cottage was used as a home away from home for summer beach visitors who were escaping the hot summer heat of Central Valley summers.
The interior of the Beach Cottage.
The cottage could be rented for a dollar a day and a family would enjoy their seaside vacations for weeks or months.
This cottage provided a pleasant abode to vacationers for over 30 years. In 1941, the cottage was sold to make room for a parking lot and moved to Capitola, where it remained in a backyard on Oak Avenue.
In 2004 the cottage was moved to the Capitola Museum and restored to its present condition.
The historic blue “Historic Landmark” plaque on the beach cottage.
This post is my Memorial Day Continuous-Line Sketch from downtown Santa Cruz.
The World War I monument was dedicated on Memorial Day 1928. This monument of an eagle on a nest is at the start of Pacific Avenue near the Veterans Memorial Building.
The last time I sketched Hanger 1 at Moffett Field near Sunnyvale, the side panels had been removed leaving the skeletal supports. The massive hangar was in the process of being restored.
The hangar was built in 1933 to house the dirigible USS Macon. It covers eight acres of floor space. It is one of the largest freestanding structures in the world.
The hangar size comparison with the RMS Titanic at the Moffett Field Museum.
After Moffett was decommissioned as a Naval Airbase, the hangar sat unused. Eventually Google agreed to restore the hanger to the tune of $33 million. This would be my first time sketching the hanger reborn.
To enter the former Naval base you have to show an id at the front gate. This morning it was manned by four policemen. I was a little early for the opening of the Moffett Field Museum but I figured I would get a sketch in of Hangar 1 with the P-3 Orion in the foreground.
The newly restored Hangar 1 and the aircraft of my youth: the P-3 Orion.
I picked a spot in the shade and set up my sketching chair. I planned to sketch and paint the scene before me.
Hanger 1 and the distinctive MAD boom or stinger tail of the P-3A.
For this sketch I first penciled in the shapes in my panoramic sketchbook and then laid in washes. When the washes dried, I tied the scene together with pen work.
Around this time I noticed some movement behind me over my right shoulder. I turned to see a young police officer approaching me.
Oh no, here we go!
He asked me what I was doing and I told him that I was drawing the refurbished hangar and the P-3. He said he saw me photographing the airplane and (in his head), I might be photographing classified equipment on a military plane (that wasn’t there) on the tarmac.
The young officer was soon joined by three other squad cars. This was clearly the most exciting thing that has happened all week!
At this point a more senior officer took over the questioning. Perhaps to see if I had any dangerous weapons about me like a mechanical pencil or a soft eraser.
I told him that I was drawing the hangar and the Orion (at which point he complemented my work) and that I grew up in Sunnyvale and the P-3 was the plane that flew past my bedroom window. With this explanation and the evidence of my field sketch, I think he realized I was not a threat to National Security and perhaps his young officer had overreacted a bit.
The officers retreated to their vehicles and talked shop as if they were reluctant to leave me to my sketch. They eventually left, I finish my sketch, and then headed over to the museum.
This is one massive building. The structure is so large it generates its own weather system inside usually in the form of fog.
When I visited the museum I related my encounter with the police to a docent who was retired Navy and was also very opinionated. He said their behavior was chicken sh*t and that was one reason he left the Navy.
I talked to another docent at the museum about what Google planned to do with the new and improved hangar and no one seems to know. Mysterious.
After work I headed to do a San Francisco neighborhood to sketch a portal to the past.
I was in the Ingleside neighborhood and my sketching subject was a large timepiece.
This timepiece was dedicated on October 10, 1913. The irony is that this massive sun dial is in an area of San Francisco known for fog.
I see by the sun dial that it is almost 4. The skies were uncommonly sunny.
I sat on a bench and started to sketch.
The sundial was built as the centerpiece of the Ingleside neighborhood that was being developed in the early twentieth century.
The area was formerly a racetrack first opened in 1895 for horse racing. Horse racing at the track proved to be so popular that Southern Pacific Railroad built a branch line to the entrance of the track.
From this Google map, the oval of the race track is still intact. The sundial on the western side of the oval.
The track later featured early auto races. Businesses slowly declined and the last race at the track was held on December 30, 1905.
The site was later developed as the Ingleside neighborhood.
In 2026, the Bigfoot Discovery Museum in Felton, California is about as hard to find as the Sasquatch itself.
I always love curious roadside attractions and it seems when you combine a highway (Highway 9) with coast redwoods, you are bound to find a Bigfoot museum.
The museum was founded by Stanford grad Michael Rugg in 2004. At the age of four, Rugg saw Bigfoot and claimed to have locked eyes with the mysterious being. He later worked in Silicon Valley during the dot com boom and the eventual bust. After the bust he opened the museum.
A friend and I visited the museum, just up the highway from my cabin, about 15 years ago.
The museum contains a curious mix of artifacts including plaster foot casts, Harry and the Hendersons memorabilia, a picture of Chewbacca, supposed Bigfoot scat, and a section about the famous Patterson-Gimlin film.
The famous frame 352 of the Patterson-Gimlin Film. Should the fact the it was filmed at Bluff Creek be an inside joke? The jury is still out if this is indeed a hoax.
My friend thought the museum was creepy and we didn’t stay long. In truth you could see the entire small museum in less than 15 minutes.
This museum is very reminiscent of many private museums on highways; they are a mixture of hard science (cryptozoology), cheesy gift shop, and the really ridiculous.
The cheesy, ridiculous side seems to undermine the main purpose of the museum: proving the existence of Bigfoot.
In 2025, there was a fire in a cabin behind the museum but the museum and its collection was spared. Maybe the blaze was set by Sasquatch, to destroy evidence of his existence.
After 20 years in business in the San Lorenzo Valley (not really known as a hotspot for Bigfoot sightings) the museum closed with Rugg’s retirement.
An odd carved bear has replaced the wooden Bigfoot carvings. The statues were definitely cheesy including an adult with a young one on its shoulders.
By the time I sketched the former museum, the only evidence left that this was a building dedicated to the search for hidden life was the mural painted on the side of the red barn.
I would firmly put this mural in the cheesy, ridiculous column.
Sometimes sketching is a form of time traveling; A way to time travel to your own past.
On a March Saturday morning, before the sun was above the horizon, I found myself at the end of the Santa Cruz Municipal Wharf.
Before me was a long building that looked more like a seagoing vessel than a restaurant. My panoramic sketchbook was open and I started my continuous line sketch as the day was coming to life.
The building is designed in the Streamline Moderne style. The aerodynamic lines makes it look like an art deco ship. The bar upstairs looks like the pilot house.
This is Stagnero Bros, a Santa Cruz institution.
In my youth I spend much time with my dad and brother on the wharf watching the sea lions, inspecting what fisherman were reeling in, looking at the fish on ice at Stagneros, and eating burgers at Nelson’s.
A lot has changed in those 40 odd years. Nelson’s is gone and so are my father and brother and I don’t eat burgers anymore.
But the business on the wharf has been going since 1937.
The Stagnero’s was founded by Italian immigrants from a small fishing village in the province of Genoa.
Matteo Stagnero worked various jobs including fishing in the waters of the bay before opening a seafood market and cocktail room on the wharf in 1937.
The restaurant and seafood market has expanded since then with it’s latest Streamline Moderne building.
There should be a warning: DO NOT LOOK AT THE SUNRISE.
I love sketching the curved lines and portholes of this style of architecture. This style also lends itself nicely to a continuous line sketch.
Stagnero Bros is now the last building and business on the wharf after about 150 feet of the wharf, containing a restaurant and restroom, collapsed into the bay during a storm in December of 2024.
The restaurant and fish market has some cinematic pedigree as well. It was featured in the highest grossing Dirty Harry film, Sudden Impact, of “Go ahead, make my day” fame. Sudden Impact (1983), was the only film in the series directed by it’s star, Clint Eastwood.
Three scenes were filmed here. It was at the fish market that two of the baddies are employed that Harry dispatches at the Boardwalk during the climactic ending. Perhaps this is why no mention of the film is to found on the restaurant’s website.
When the filming took place in the spring of 1983, the restaurant looked a bit different. Since then, the restaurant was remodeled in its neo-Streamline Moderne style but I have not found information on when the renovation took place.
I have always loved the Stagnero’s logo. That orange fish breaching the waves with a smile on its fish lips always puts a smile on my lips especially when I pass one of their delivery trucks in the Bay Area. The California sea-lions still love the wharf, even though it’s shorter.
With the recent February 17, 2026 avalanche at Castle Peak that took the lives of nine skiers, it reminds me of another tragic avalanche that gripped the nation in 1982.
I was 11 years old at the time and an avid skier. I remember the news coverage of this event, it was a story of tragedy, strength, and hope.
This was the avalanche at the ski resort at Alpine Meadows on March 31, 1982.
I wouldn’t call this natural occurrence a “natural disaster”, it just becomes a disaster when human lives are caught up in it because avalanches are perfectly natural and are often created by human activity.
An early spring storm brought loads of snow to the Lake Tahoe region; seven to eight feet.
The ski patrol at Alpine Meadow were in charge of avalanche control (as if there is such a thing) and the mountain had an extensive program that used hand thrown dynamite charges, a 75 mm recoilless rifle, and a howitzer cannon to prompt the build up of snow to reach its angle of repose.
The steep slopes at Alpine Meadows, from the peaks down to the base area, is an avalanche machine. The resort is graded a Class A, the highest hazard designation for avalanches and Alpine Meadows is one of the most avalanche prone ski resorts in the country.
The mountain manager knew of the potential dangers and closed the mountain to skiers on Wednesday the 31 and told employees not to show up for work that day.
The only people on site were the mountain manager, Bernie Kingery and assisting him with monitoring the avalanche control was Beth Morrow. A few others were around the resort helping in the effort to clear snow and avalanche control.
In the afternoon of the 31st lift operator Anna Conrad and her boyfriend returned to the Summit Terminal building from Conrad’s cabin. She wanted to pick up her snow pants in the locker room on the second floor.
The Summit Terminal was a three story modified A-frame that housed the ski school, lift operations, trail crew, and the ski patrol office. It was also the nerve center when monitoring avalanche control. As the name implies, the Summit Chairlift (the resorts longest lift) departed from the building and rose up to the top of Ward Peak.
At 3:45 PM, the tons of snow on the ridges that had been building up began to move downhill. Seconds later the avalanche, traveling at almost 200 miles per hour, took out the Summit Terminal and crashed through the lodge and filled the parking lot with 12 feet of snow.
In a blink of an eye the avalanche created a path of destruction that claimed seven lives. This disaster remains the most devastating avalanche at a ski resort in North America.
The news coverage of the event remains in my mind’s eye as the search for survivors in the wreckage of the Summit Terminal building and underneath the snow continued.
As the days after the 31st passed it seemed less and less likely there would be any survivors. Rescue was turning into recovery.
Rescue and recovery effort were hampered by the continued snowstorm and the fears that the snow build up would cause another avalanche.
Miraculously on the fifth day they found a survivor trapped in an air space created by a fallen locker and a bench. This was lift operator Anna Conrad.
In the weeks after the avalanche I remember the interviews shown on the local newscasts that Conrad gave from her hospital bed at Tahoe Forest Hospital in Truckee.
Sketch Notes and References
While researching the events of March 31, 1982, I created a spread with a map of Alpine Meadows and the path of the avalanche. I also sketched the ruins of the Summit Terminal building after the avalanche.
I used two main references in my research of the Alpine Meadows avalanche: the gripping book, A Wall of White by Jennifer Woodlief (2009) and the award winning documentary Buried: The 1982 Alpine Meadows Avalanche (2022) directed by Stephan Siig and Jared Drake.
One of our most popular field trips in fourth grade is to Pacifica’s Sanchez Adobe and its infamous mud pit.
The adobe building was built by Francisco Sanchez in 1842-43 and is the oldest building in San Mateo County.
As the former Alcade of San Francisco and Commandante of the Militia he was gifted 8,926 acres of land by the government of Mexico, which is now the city of Pacifica.
Since Don Sanchez, the building has changed hands and has assumed many guises including a hotel, a speakeasy, an artichoke storage warehouse, and now California Historic Landmark No. 391.
Try explaining a Speakeasy to a fourth grader!
When I take fourth graders to Sanchez Adobe we first learn about the layers of history at the site: Native California, Spanish Missions, the Mexican and then the American eras. After our truncated tour of history the real fun begins.
One of the reasons this is such a popular trip for my nine and ten year olds is because it is the best kind of social studies: hands-on history.
My students rotate between three activities: roping a steer and grinding cornmeal, candle making, and forming adobe bricks.
The activity that long remains in the memory is making bricks in the mud pit.
The mud pit at Sanchez Adobe has been the setting of many memories over the years.
Students take off their shoes and socks and then gather around the pit. They raise their right hand (no your other right hand) and take an oath to promise not to get mud on any other person but themselves.
Now it’s time to enter the pit, students walk in a clockwise circle to mush up the mud for brick making. At first they are tentative and a bit scared of the cold mud. Was that a worm I just stepped on? And then they acclimate and it becomes hard to get students to leave the mud pit and wash up!
Now they use their hands to scoop up mud and put it in a rectangular wooden mold to form the “bricks”.
In some years I become one in the minority: a teacher that enters the mud pit.
Wearing my Sanchez Adobe brown boots.
Sketching Notes
I returned to Sanchez Abode on a February Saturday morning and I had the place entirely to myself. We had already had our field trip in January.
It was odd to be here without the sounds of students having fun while learning. The local black phoebes entertained me as I sat on my sketching stump near the mud pit.
For my panoramic sketch the mud pit was my anchor with wooden cart and adobe building in the background.
This was a true plein air sketch that would make urban sketchers proud. I used my small travel palette with half pans of watercolor and my Escoda travel brushes.
In my class one morning we came across the idiom, “faster than a speeding bullet” during our Daily Language Review warm up.
This phrase reminded me of the opening titles of the black and white television show I saw in reruns when I was a child: Adventures of Superman (1952-58).
I certainly had seen the Richard Donner movie Superman that came out in 1978 featuring Christopher Reeve, but originally the story had been told on the small screen featuring the slightly chubby George Reeves as Superman.
The opening of each episode reads:
Narrator: Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.
Man 1: Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird.
Woman: It’s a plane.
Man 2: It’s Superman!
Narrator: Yes, it’s Superman, strange visitor from another planet who came to earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men. Superman, who can change the course of mighty rivers, bend steel in his bare hands. And who, disguised as Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper, fights a never ending battle for truth, justice and the American way. And now another exciting episode in the adventures of Superman.
When the narrator announces “More powerful than a locomotive” a Southern Pacific Coast Daylight races towards the camera.
On point is No. 4418, a GS-3 locomotive built at Lima Locomotive Works in 1937.
In 1937, this was Southern Pacific’s most powerful passenger locomotive. It was an improvement on the GS-2, with 80 inch driver wheels and increased boiler pressure of 280 pounds per square inch. These improvements meant the GS-3 was capable of delivering 5,000 horsepower at 60 miles an hour.
The GS-3 could reach speeds of 106 miles per hour, well above the 75 mph speed limit of the railroad. Maybe the narration should have read: faster than a speeding Daylight!
Sketching Notes
I created a spread featuring a still from the opening from Adventures of Superman(1952) of the Southern Pacific Coast Daylight GS-3 speeding towards the camera.
The clip was filmed in Simi Valley in the great Los Angeles area at 4702 E. Los Angeles Avenue. It was originally filmed for the movie “The Beginning or the End” (1947).
On the left side I sketch another still from the opening, George Reeves standing with hands on hip and his cape blowing behind him.
In honor of the recent passing of Bob Weir, I decided to sketch an early bit of Grateful Dead history.
This history is not to be found in the Haight-Ashbury but in the county where the members of the Dead spent much of the time when not touring incessantly: Marin County. Most of band lived in Marin, Bobby in Mill Valley, Mickey in Novato, and Jerry Garcia died at a rehab center in Forest Knolls.
The Dead house at 710 Ashbury. Home to the band in 1966 to 1968.
Just north of the town of Novato is Olompali State Historic Park. They are many layers of California history at Olompali: Miwok, Mexican, the Bear Flag Republic, Californios, and the estate of a wealthy San Franciscan dentist.
In 1911, James Burdell, built a 26-room mansion for the then hefty sum of $15,000.
The land and the house on it was eventually sold to the University of San Francisco. In the 1960s the university attempted to sell the property but the buyers always defaulted, leaving Olompoli unsold.
The properties’s most famous tenet was the band the Grateful Dead. The band moved here for a two month stay (May and June) in 1966 to take a vacation away from the Haight-Ashbury.
Stairway to . . . The buildings at Olompali have seen better days.
Their two month stay was a “happening”, a nonstop party that included the likes of Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Moby Grape, Janis Joplin, David Crosby, Santana, the Merry Pranksters, Ken Kesey, Neil Cassady, and Timothy Leary.
Jerry Garcia referred to his time at Olompali as “idyllic”. It was also the setting for his last acid trip (it was a bad one). He returned here over the next three years.
Sketching the remains of the Burdell Mansion. Bands would set up in front of the mansion to jam as people danced on the lawn or cooled down in the swimming pool. The pool was off to the right.
After the Dead left, Don McCoy, a wealthy businessman, turned to the hippie life and started a commune, called the Chosen Family at Olompali in 1967.
Field sketch of the mansion, which is boarded up.
26 people moved to the mansion where they home schooled their kids and baked bread for charity, amongst other things.
Things soured after about a year with the influx of new members and more drugs and alcohol. Two children drowned in the mansion’s swimming pool. Much of the mansion burned down in a fire in 1969 and the commune was soon evicted.
The land was purchased by the state of California in 1977 and it became Olompali State Historic Park.
Corvid Sketcher 