A recent Labor Day tradition has been to ride one of my favorite roller coasters of all time. It’s also my birthday weekend.
This is not a steel coaster with high speeds, loops, and corkscrews. This is a 100 year old wooden roller coaster at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk.
The big dip of the Giant Dipper.
This is the Giant Dipper and is the oldest roller coaster in California.
I have ridden the Dipper many times since I was tall enough to ride it and like my father before me I ride it every summer. And the ride remains as thrilling now as when I was young!
Partly because I’m not sure how this elderly ride still remains safe and standing. This is a testament to the care and maintenance that keeps the dipper rolling.
The ride starts off dropping into a pitch black tunnel and when it rounds a curve you see the lift incline to take the train to the top of a 65 foot drop. There is a slight pause as the coaster drops, reaching speeds of 55 miles an hour before accelerating up a banked curve and the the coaster takes some rises and dips that nearly lifts you out of your seat. The coaster returns to the boarding station one minute and 52 seconds after leaving it, leaving most riders out of breath and with a hoarse voice from screaming!
Since 1924, more than 66 million riders have ridden the crazy train that is the Giant Dipper.
The Boardwalk and Giant Dipper have been featured in some films including: The Sting II, Harold and Maude, Sudden Impact, The Lost Boys, Us, and Dangerous Minds.
The classic sign was featured in the finale of the fourth Dirty Harry film Sudden Impact.
Over the Labor Day weekend, I sketched the Giant Dipper three times. Two were in a small “point and shoot” journal (a gift from my students). One sketch was from the perspective of one of my favorite movies featuring the Dipper, Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude.
There is a scene filmed on the Santa Cruz Wharf with the lights of the Giant Dipper in the background. This is the scene where Harold gives Maude a token that says, “Harold Loves Maude” and Maude proceeds to chuck it into the ocean saying, “Now I’ll always know where it is.”
I returned on Sunday morning with Grasshopper and sketched the Dipper from the empty parking lot off Beach Street (featured sketch).
In the last post I was reexploring the Old Ways, hikes and routes that I had travelled years ago, a pathway of the mind as well as the soil.
On the Saturday of the Memorial Day weekend, I decided to do the Big Loop, a route I had hiked with my friend Erik, at least 30 years ago when we were both much younger, full of confidence, and much closer to birth than death. Now I would do the Big Loop solo.
The start of the loop was heading up Shrine Way and then hiking up Powder Mill Creek. I had done this hike the week before but I had stopped at the falls, pausing to sketch and then turned back. But not today. Today I was going to scale the waterfall.
I’m sure in my 20s, climbing this three-tiered waterfall didn’t cross my mind as something that could be dangerous. I thought no more about the challenge than breathing. But now, the night before the hike, I knew that this was going to be the most challenging and technical part of the journey.
The three pitches required some unaided technical climbing. I had confidence in my climbing ability having spent hours in the climbing gym (a few years ago) but climbing outdoors certainly provides other challenges. The challenge on this route was that the rocks were wet and in some places I would be climbing in the waterfall. Here I was not roped in. A fall from one of the waterfall pitches probably wouldn’t kill me but it could introduce a bit of maim into my life. And I would have no one around to help me out to safety in the event of a fall, midway between the cascade.
These thoughts went through my mind as I headed up Powder Mill Creek. I reached the bottom of the falls at 8:15 AM. While the sky was clear, in the cold shade of the canyon, it was cold.
I folded up and stowed my trekking poles, bowed to the creekside alter, and started up the first pitch of the climb on the right side of the lower falls. Just to get to rock, I had to struggle through a fallen branch tangle to get a hand and then foothold on rock.
I methodically completed the first pitch, no need for speed climbing here. I was rewarded by the beautiful middle falls, which fell into a pool, surrounded in luscious greens.
The middle cascade of Powder Creek Falls. I paused here to catch my breath and did a brush pen sketch. On this pitch I climbed up the wet and mossy rock on the left side of the falls. The height of the middle falls was abut 15 to 20 feet.
Once up the middle falls I came to the final upper falls. This was the last technical part of the journey and once this was behind me, I could really get hiking. With each pitch I was gaining confidence as I understood the rock more and more.
It is all about keeping three points of contact with the rock. I read the rock, looking for the best hand and footholds. Often times, young trees where perfect handholds as I looked to place a foot in a position to raise me upward towards the point where the watershed flattened out.
I had made it, the toughest part of the journey was now behind me! Now the creek canyon flatten out and the only challenge now was climbing over or under fallen redwoods and not fully immersing my feet in creek.
Since I was a boy, I can never get close to water without getting wet. On the Big Loop I grabbed a fallen log that proved not be as secure as I thought and before I knew it, I was up the creek and in the creek! I know myself and my attraction to water well, so I came prepared. I had packed an extra pair of socks.
The whole hike, from the base of the lower falls to Pipeline Road, was perhaps just under a mile. I covered the distance in 25 minutes. The romance of the wild Power Mills Creek is dashed when you come to the point where Pipeline Road in Henry Cowell State Park, crosses over the creek. The creek is routed under the road in a pipe and falls out the other side into a pool.
I scrambled up and out of the creek on to Pipeline Road. I was now in Henry Cowell State Park. Pipeline is a paved road, a much different substrate than what I had just traversed. I not headed northwest up the road.
Twenty-five minutes later I was at the Overlook Bench. At this viewpoint you look out to south with wooded ridges overlapping wooded ridges giving way to the flats of Santa Cruz with the Giant Dipper roller coaster silhouetted against Monterey Bay.
I pulled out my Stillman & Birn Beta Series spiral sketchbook and sketched in the view with my sepia brush pen (featured sketch). This finished sketch has a Japanese feel to it, reminiscent of the sumi ink paintings of Japanese-Californian artist Chiura Obata.
To complete the loop, I continued northwest along Pipeline Road, off on a hiking trail to Cable Car Beach (where I swapped socks) and then along the River Trail to the 1909 Railroad Trestle which I used to cross the San Lorenzo River and then back south along the railroad. I passed over Coon Gulch with the osprey nest on my left. At this point I was about 40 minutes from my cabin.
I completed the Big Loop in three hours and 40 minutes. This included a few snack stops and sketches and a chinwag with a ranger who was guarding the entrance to Garden of Eden Beach from the hordes of three-day weekenders.
Corvid Sketcher 