Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk

Lost Trees of Scotts Valley

The Santa Cruz County town of Scotts Valley is bisected by Highway 17. The highway sees a lot traffic as travelers from the Bay Area head to the seaside town of Santa Cruz.

The Santa Cruz area already has it’s attractions, the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk and the Mystery Spot being some of the most visited. Scotts Valley needed to capture some of those tourist dollars.

Two attractions were build on either side of the highway. Both attractions are now gone and there is little evidence that they ever existed. But I was going to sketch the only trees left in Scotts Valley that were part of the attraction called The Tree Circus.

The genesis of the Tree Circus was a Swedish-American named Axel Erlandson. In the early 1900s Erlandson’s family moved from Minnesota to California’s Central Valley.

While there, Erlandson began grafting and shaping trees in various shapes. He primarily used sycamores and box elder for his arboreal sculptures.

A plaque featuring some of Erlandson’s trees.

Erlandson was looking for a location for his wooden oddities and he opened The Tree Circus in 1947 in Scotts Valley on the western side of Highway 17. The advertising slogan he used was, “See the World’s Strangest Trees Here.” At the time admission was just 25-cents. The attraction was featured many times in Ripley’s “Believe it or Not!” and other publications such as Life magazine.

Some murals shows Scotts Valley’s roadside attractions of the past.

In 1940, Highway 17 opened, bypassing the old stage road, Scotts Valley Drive, where the Tree Circus was located.

In 1963 Erlandson sold the property to Larry and Peggy Thompson. Erlandson died a year later.

Erlandson’s final resting place at Oakwood Cemetery in Santa Cruz.

The Thompsons added 30 fiberglass dinosaurs, created a stream through the property, and renamed the grove of Erlandson’s tree “The Enchanted Forest”.

The new attraction was named “Lost World”. I remember visiting the park as a kid during this time. From Highway 17 you could see the large T. Rex and triceratops.

The attendance slowed and Lost World was eventually closed and sold in 1977.

The trees were saved and bought by Michael Bonfante, owner of a local supermarket chain, who replanted them in his new amusement park in Gilroy called Bonfante Gardens (now called Gilroy Gardens).

On Saturday I arrived at the Tree Circus Center, sounds like a perfect place to find remnants of Erlandson’s art. The only business open at this hour was a hair salon.

I did know I owned a sporting goods store in Scotts Valley!

Before me was two sycamores leaning towards each other in an unnatural way. This is all that remains in Scotts Valley of the Erlandson’s Tree Circus.

Two lone sycamores.

Evidence of Santa’s Village is even harder to find. There is nothing left of the former Christmas themed amusement park (yes it was open all year long), which I also attended as a child.

It open in 1957 and remained in business until 1979. There is now a row of houses on the property. But the exit from Highway 17 homeowners take to get to their houses is telling;

Small Shacks: Beach Cottage

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.
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The Giant Dipper at 100 (My 700th Post)

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).

A point and shoot sketch from Beach Street.
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The Big Loop

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.

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The Osprey’s Nest

One of my neighbors knew I was struck with the affliction of birding and told me about the osprey’s nest on top of a Douglas-fir along the railroad about a 30 minute hike up river from my cabin.

After work on Friday, I hiked out of Paradise Park via the fire road and scrambled up a deer trail to the even grade of the railroad. This railroad is now operated by the Santa Cruz, Big Trees and Pacific Railway and takes tourists from Felton to Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. At one time the railroad went over the Santa Cruz Mountains to Los Gatos but now does not go very far beyond Felton. I have hiked this railroad since my youth and it had been a few years since I played hopscotch on railway ties up the San Lorenzo Valley.

Walking along this rustic railroad always feels like I’m participating in a scene from Stand By Me on a quest to find a dead body. But in this case I was in search of a big bunch of sticks on top of a fir, high above the San Lorenzo River.

I kept one eye on the rails and one on the trees off to my right. My neighbor had given me good directions to the nest and when I was 30 minutes out of Paradise, I thought that maybe I had passed the nest. But how could I miss it? So I continued hiking upstream.

Ten minutes later the osprey nest appeared across the river between a break in the redwoods and firs. I put bins on the nest and could not detect any occupants. But osprey nests are deep and the osprey could be laying low. The only sign of life were the acorn woodpeckers that looked to have used the fir as their granary tree, their acorn larder, for years.

I was at a point in the line where the railroad curves gracefully over a curved viaduct. The concrete arched bridge was build by the Southern Pacific Railroad in March of 1905 and spans Coon Gulch. At this point the San Lorenzo River takes a turn and you can get an amazing view upstream. This point in the line is known as Inspiration Point.

It didn’t take long to see signs of life. An osprey flew in and briefly alighted on the nest. Bingo! The nest is occupied after all. The unseen osprey, presumedly sitting on eggs, sat up in the nest and became visable.

The osprey that flew in could have been the male who is responsible for bringing fish to the nest while the female does most of the incubating of the two to three eggs. The male perched near the nest on a Doug-fir and preened.

First sign of life at the osprey’s nest. Perhaps the male dropping off fish.

I stood by the railside and sketched the nest. On the left side of the spread is my field sketch (first in pencil then in dark sepia pen) of the Douglas-fir crowned by the osprey nest. The osprey perched on the right was drawn from a field photo I took of the presumed male. The title and text were added back at the cabin. In the end, I decided to create a spread that is almost monochromatic. I resisted the urge to paint in the sky because I didn’t want anything to distract from the form of the Doug-fir and nest.

The osprey doing a little housekeeping at the nest. This is presumedly the female who does most of the incubation of the eggs. Both sexes build the nest. A hiker who stopped to look at the nest told me that the nest had been there for past two or three years.
Ospreys reuse their nests each breeding season. A lot of work has gone into this nest over the past two or three seasons.
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Where the River Ends, a Gull Bath

I headed to the bluff on the east side of the San Lorenzo River. This is where the river ends into Monterey Bay.

On my left was the Monterey Bay and beyond was the Municipal Wharf (sight of great fork-tailed storm-petrel sightings last year) and to my right was Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, now in winter dormancy. I knew that any time a large river entered the ocean, where fresh water meets salt, there would be bathing gulls. Lots of gulls.

Down below, there were hundreds of gulls. This multi age and many specied gathering contained mainly California, herring, mew, and western. I scanned the gathering and found no rarities. But it did give me an opportunity to observe the dynamics of gull bathing and preening.

The mighty San Lorenzo River is a major winter gull bathing and resting location on Monterey Bay. The Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk is on the west side. The Logger’s Revenge to the right and my favorite roller coaster, the Big Dipper, is on the left.

Using my not-so-secret powers of observation I noted two areas that the gulls used: river and sand. The river is used for washing and the sand for preening, resting and playing.

The gulls used the river right in front of the railway trestle which was featured in the 80’s vampire flick Lost Boys. The birds were doing their indelible flappy wing dance followed by a head plunge and a wiggle. Yes very scientific I know.

The gulls on the sand spit where resting or preening. I noticed a few juvenile gulls playing with slicks on the spit point. They would carry a stick around and then drop it and pick it up. Repeat. I can only guess that they are practicing their eye-beak coordination.

The spread I sketched was a not-to-scale gull’s eye view of the river mouth. I love to make my own maps, using my own names for the land. This map contains my own: Seaweed Island, the “Wash”, Stick-Grab-Point, Gull’s Rest Spit, North Spit, and the “Stump”. Most of these land and watermarks are ephemeral, changing and disappearing with the tides and the winter rain, washing down from the Santa Cruz Mountains.