The first time I drew a Hume Lake cabin, it was for my friend’s parents. Her mom commissioned a pencil drawing.
Wait, not true. The first time I drew a Hume Lake cabin, it was the boys staff cabin across the street from the girls staff cabin, in 1978. It was a present for my roommate, and I didn’t save a picture of the drawing.
Here is my friend’s cabin the first time I drew it (1995), and again after my friend allowed me to improve it (2017).
A few things have changed over the years, but none significantly alter the look. (Two trees in the foreground are history and now the room is metal.)
My friend’s cousins have become my friends too, and one year we were there for a birthday party for three of the cousins. I did three tiny paintings for birthday gifts.
My friend commissioned me to paint some ornaments for some of her cousins. They look awful here—wet, shiny, perhaps even incomplete.
One of the cousins sent me this photo the next year.
My most recent iteration of Hume Lake is in pencil, used in the 2026 calendar. This is the view from the footbridge over Ten Mile Creek, looking toward the Forest Service beach called Sandy Cove. (It doesn’t show—it’s behind the trees on the right.)
I have so many beautiful photos of the lake. . . I could paint it. Maybe I will someday. I know, “someday is not a day”, and “sometime is not on the schedule.”
Each summer starting in 2017, I’ve spent time with a dear friend at her Hume Lake cabin. Most years we gather in June, last year in July, and this year in August. It was HOT, REALLY HOT, so we didn’t rent any watercraft or walk around the lake. Mostly we just hung out in and around the cabin.
We strolled along the lake, hoping to find a place to wade in. However, the level was lower than usual, and wading meant mushing through mud, so we passed on that option.
The Rest of a Story
If you live in the Central Valley, you may have heard that a Hume Lake cabin burned in a storm last February. It was one of the boys dorm-like cabins, which caught fire when a tree fell on some wires. It has been temporarily replaced with a couple of huge tents, WITH A/C IN THEM!! Camp has certainly changed since I was a happy camper. (We only viewed the tents from a distance.)
I got up one morning and followed the road to the bridge over Ten-Mile Creek, the main feeder into the lake. The lake is so still in the morning.
There are Forest Service cabins along that stretch, and of course I speculated about knocking on doors and leaving notes with a business card and price list on each one. Maybe next year. . . but prolly not.
I was very heartened to see that the Forest Service is doing a lot of mechanical thinning. Forest management is the way to stop many of those devastating wildfires.
In case you were wondering where some of the things are, or how far away, this sign might be helpful. This is the way I usually leave Hume rather than driving through Grant Grove and past Wilsonia. Then I drive the Generals Highway through Sequoia, straight home without having to drop down into the valley.
This is looking up Ten Mile Creek from the driving bridge.
Ten Mile Creek, as viewed from the footbridge on the trail, which is downstream from the road.
This is the view I used in my 2026 calendar for June. It looks different this year.
Meanwhile, back at the cabin, my friends were fixing to take a walk later that morning, hopefully before it got too hot. Nothing too strenuous, just exploring a bit through the cabins. These things caught my attention.
We went to The Tree House, something I’ve heard about for years but never seen. WOW!! This is in Wagon Train, which is the little kids’ camp. The big groups are finished for the summer now that school starts so early for most students, so we were free to poke around.
It is made partially from old barrels, so the sides are convex and things are purposely curved. It is reached by a very slick suspension bridge and has many levels. It is utterly charming, kind of Disneyesque.
Then of course we meandered through the wagons, and I was astonished to see how many have been added since we last had the opportunity to go exploring. It was in 2020 when the camps weren’t operating.
We did a little bushwacking, a bit of crosscountry meandering and ended up at another suspension bridge, this one leading to a fort on an island in a very sluggish green muddy stream.
There was a lot of time just lollygagging around the cabin, catching up with one another, knitting, and talking talking talking talking talking…. I love these friends, the cabin owner’s cousins, a certain neighbor, the whole thing.
Let’s wrap it up with some lake shots, and then I’ll shut up about Hume Lake for another year.
On my last trip up the hill, my back hurt. I don’t know why. It just does sometimes, and after a week, it subsides. I never know if it is good for it to get taken for a walk or if I should just lie on the floor on ice.
I decided to ignore the thing and go hiking after taking an aspirin. With my friend K and Trail Guy, we headed up toward Eagle Meadow. I was anticipating some great flowers.
It was kind of hot, and steeper than it used to be. Each time I stopped, I got light-headed. Is this because I am 66? Fat? Pre-diabetic? Neuropathy in my feet? Whatever, I didn’t like it.
Trail Guy went on ahead while K and I stood there waiting for the blood to return to my head. I realized that I was seeing spots. They looked like purple flowers, but they were blurry and kept moving. Oh-oh.
I told K that I was going to listen to my body and head back to the cabin once the spots subsided. She said she’d come with me because she didn’t want to find me lying on the trail later. I said, “Don’t worry—someone else will get there first. Besides, you need to let Trail Guy know that I’m going back.”
She agreed, and we parted ways. I took a handful of crummy photos for you.
That’s Crystal Creek running down in an almost invisible ribbon across the canyon.
You can see Empire in the distance, and I think there were a few purple flowers in the foreground. Hmmm, maybe I was hallucinating.
SEE?? There WERE some purple flowers. So there.
These folks passed me. An umbrella on the trail? Yeppers. That’s the second one I’ve encountered this year.
Mr. Umbrella was a very interesting man. I caught up to them and we walked the last mile down together. He is a caver (probably not the correct title), someone who protects caves around the state (maybe even the country—I didn’t ask), gives tours, and does much more, including cave rescues. I learned that if a person wants to explore a cave, he should look up his “local grotto” (I don’t know if that is an organization called “Local Grotto” or if it is called “Grotto”) and find the local branch. Each cave has trustees, and a trustee will help you explore the cave, assuming you have the proper climbing gear and experience.
I was fine when I got home, and by the time you are reading this, my back is probably also fine. I don’t understand the extreme low blood pressure, or the spots, or why the trail is steeper this year.
Can someone please stop the clock and the calendar for me?
Here, let’s have a few not crummy photos from the next day when I walked down the road.
Then I saw this car. Not a Honda, but Toyota is fine too. Our two pick-‘em-up trucks are Toyotas. The car has no model on it. Look at the color! I peeked in the window and it is a stick shift. I almost put a card under the windshield saying “Please call me if you want to sell this car”. Of course I want to know the model, the year, the mileage, but oh my, it looked like my dream car, a younger Fernando in Toyota instead of Honda.
Momscar is a fine piece of transportation, but I NEED this car!
Oh grow up, Central California Artist, you are 66, not 16.
I photographed the Reimer’s drawing to send to the owner for his approval.
Nope, that photo was not good enough, so I raised the blind on the window over the drawing table and tried again.
I told Mr. Owner that this was the time to speak up if he wanted any adjustments.
Mr. Owner replied: “I love it. I just noticed the white curtain over the window in the middle. Do you think there’s something else that might go there that would be appropriate or that might look good other than just the white?”
I responded: “I’ll send you the scanned version so you can see it’s a pretty lace curtain. I don’t think that came through with my photograph.”
Scanning is a trick because it is drawn on paper that is ever so slightly too large for my new scanner. I tried it umpteen times, and finally decided it was as centered as possible. This is the scanned version after some photoshop magic.
A Few Thoughts About the Drawing
Bamboozlement and hoodwinkery are two of the necessary skills to produce a cohesive pencil drawing of a highly detailed building with many angles and parts, condensing about 40 photos into one believable view. Maybe I have earned a master’s degree in visual trickinology by now.
There is more to depicting an iconic business like Reimer’s than simply taking a few photos and copying them. First, it is impossible to get the whole thing into one photo and be able to see all the parts of this varied structural magic land of sugar.
The place is oozing with charm, which is evident in all the curly trim, multi-paned windows and different gables. Those gables show up best when looking at the place straight on, but as I continue to tell you, this isn’t possible with a camera.
The setting is idyllic, and I included a hill in the background to indicate that it is in a rural foothill setting. Besides, the hill IS actually there.
And the place is very welcoming. Hence, the main door is open.
Careful, Central California Artist. You don’t want to get a fat head or break your arm patting yourself on the back!
I was stuck due to a lack of visual information, considering resorting to some hoodwinkery and bamboozlement.
Instead, I stopped by one morning, climbed up some rocks and took several photos, this one being the most useful.
Alrighty, then, let’s git-‘er-dun!
There was a bit of trickonometry involved here, but remember, the goal is believability. People remember what they thought they saw, without thinking exactly about placements and proportions.
I sent this one to the owner because he likes seeing the progress. I also like to reassure customers that I am working on their project.
Getting there, but holy guacamole, these window panes are window pains.
To be continued. . . I’ll finish shading, figure out how to deal with the parking area, then take some time to make sure there are no outlines, no strokemarks that don’t belong, that there is enough contrast in the right places, that there is no smearing, and finally sign it. After that, I get to figure out how to scan the drawing on my new complicated scanner, probably in 2 parts and then put them together with Photoshop Junior.
I could use some chocolate about now after writing that list. Hmmm, wonder if anyone knows where to find some in Three Rivers. . .
…or perhaps a PhD. The topic? Trickinology. Visual trickinology.
I’m drawing Reimers Candies and Gifts from a straight-on view, something that isn’t really possible to see in real life. Well, maybe it is, but it would take a wide-angle lens, and the resultant drawing would be an entirely unwieldy shape for reproducing as cards.
Here is a progression of a day’s work (with many interruptions—lots of moving parts in my life during this project). I moved that giant oak tree to the right because it was blocking the gift shop and patio.
Instead of 4 chairs, the table only gets 2. Even this artist has her limits on microscopic furniture depictions.
Here’s a substandard photo for you to admire the distance I’ve covered in this monumental, underpriced, over-engineered pencil drawing. (Yeah, I know, I always say that.)
Those windows and the patio look mighty fine, if I do say so myself. And I do. Just tryna not break my arm patting myself on the back.
After admiring my progress, I was temporarily flummoxed. The section on the far right is the ice cream shop. It has many windows and doors, a sign, two stories, a porch overhang, and a very cantilevered second story roof with a severe angle, which doesn’t show in this photo.
See what I mean about the roofline?
All of it is hidden behind that giant sycamore tree when viewed from a straight on angle.
When my drawing students encounter difficulties (because no one listens to me when I tell them a particular subject is too hard), I advise them to put tissue paper over the top and then try to solve the problems that way. (Usually I end up scribbling a solution on the tissue paper while they sit there either frozen in fear or babbling about how they should have listened to me.)
The sycamore tree is barely coming forward from the far right edge.
That’s about all I can manage before I get frozen in fear or start babbling about how I should have listened to my own advice.
Wait, I didn’t give myself any advice except to make this the very very best depiction that I can possibly do of an iconic Three Rivers business.
This might put you to sleep. It almost did me, in combination with getting up at 5:30 AM, 103°, and the droning hum of the barely adequate AC.
Can you even tell the difference from the first photo to the second one?
Prolly not because my T-square was over the unfinished lower rocks of the sign.
The owner said he’d like to see it in progress, so I sent him the upper photo. His response: “That’s good” was encouraging. I have had a very small handful of customers through the years who kept making changes, and I was too stupid (or chicken) to say “That change order will cost extra”. Now I make sure that customers see a sketch and approve before diving into the final piece, and if they wish, I show them progression photos.
In case you are interested, this one is 14” x 17”.
In spite of my case of the yawns, it is fun, challenging, and really quite a privilege to have been chosen to draw this iconic Three Rivers business.
The Mineral King Road is a doozy. 26 miles (I think, but maybe it is 25), much of it a cliff-hanger, no fog lines, rails, center stripes, and in some places, no shoulder.
The lower 10 miles is under county jurisdiction, the upper part under the feds (national park). About 13 miles of the upper part is under construction and has been for a couple of summers (and one winter) now.
The temporary bridge has been in place since 2023. Sometimes I wonder how truly temporary it is—will it still be in place when I want to come back down the road??
This is what a temporary bridge looks like. The boards are weathered, and they bounce when you drive over them.
This bridge might also be temporary; it is supposed to remain in place as a pedestrian bridge while a stouter, sturdier one gets build upstream. I think this is a joint project between the county and the feds, but who knows? And who knows when it will begin or get completed? Rumor has it that the project will begin this fall, but I’ll believe it when I see it. The sign calls it the Kaweah River Bridge, but since there are 5 forks to the Kaweah River, locals call it the Oak Grove Bridge. Technically, it is the East Fork, but people don’t need to know directions any more because they have a talking lady in their phones to tell them where to go.
This is what most of the county part of the road surface is like. They have done a little bit of patching this spring, but it is probably a losing battle because of all the heavy trucks and construction equipment.
The Potholes, not to be confused with the potholes in the road, are still running strong for early August. Our theory is that the fires (2020, 2021, 2024 all run together as bad fire years so I don’t remember which one burned which areas) destroyed many of the trees above that used to suck up the water.
Yippee skippee, road work ahead for 13 miles.
This sign about ending the county maintained road used to get graffitied regularly, with the prefix “un” added to the word “maintained”. Now we feel a little bit sorry for the county road workers, and they did actually do some patching this summer.
Notice the suddenly smooth road surface.
Don’t get used to it; it only lasts about 6 miles. Look how it made the water trough at Trauger’s look short.
The paving gets all patchy —washboard to loosen your fillings or perhaps cause the stereo to fall out of your car or your CD to skip (shut up, some of us still have stereos that play CDs, so there), gravel, and occasional new asphalt, all the way to High Bridge, where the Really Outrageously Terrible road surface begins. Nope, I didn’t dare stop for photos.
Some of my long distance blog readers may be wondering why we drive this road every week in the summer. Here is your answer.
Any more questions?
P.S. Anticipate a car at every curve, and STAY ON YOUR SIDE (unless you can see clearly ahead and want to straighten some curves, which I recommend).
An old friend used to stop by my studio at my first public location in Exeter, just to spend time together chatting, and to offer encouragement. He often said (in admiration, I think), “How do you do that??”
I always answered, “One quarter inch at a time.”
Oooo-weee, this is S L O W. But considering that the last time I drew it was in 1995, this is a worthwhile investment of time. The previous drawing was useful to the Reimers and then to Owners #3 for 30+ years.
I’m glad I mentioned the idea of a new drawing to Owner #4.
Reimer’s Candies and Ice Cream HEY! I JUST LOOKED AT THEIR SITE AND MY PHOTO IS ON IT! Two years ago I went to the grand reopening of the store with my neighbor Robin, and there we are with our friends Benny and Rita!
Enough chit-chat. Back to the drawing board. Do you know anyone else who can say this and mean it literally? And by “literally”, I do NOT mean “figuratively”, which is often how people abuse the word. “That literally blew my mind!” Oh really? Your head looks intact to me, but your brain might be damaged.
Sorry.
Not really. Editors are guardians of the language.
But I digress. . . back to the drawing board, really!
Moving left to right, top to bottom, identifying words whited out, dark photo taken with phone at the end of a day of drawing as the light was getting low.
Still working top to bottom, left to right.
Almost finished, except what should be done about the lower sections of nothingness?
How about some lupine? Good idea!
Here it is scanned and photoshopped into how it looks if you see the drawing in real life.
“Fast or Good”? Not fast this time. This drawing took me over twice as long as a picture of this size normally takes. A combination of three factors really slowed me down:
There were many many many photos to sort through and organize and study in order to make a cohesive and accurate drawing. This doesn’t take nearly as long when I am the photographer because I take the photos in a methodical fashion and am familiar with them.
There were no photos that showed the cabin clear in its entirety.
Many details were missing because there was a ton of stuff on the deck and in front, blocking the much of the cabin.
I relied on old photos, figured out guessed how things might look from a straight-on view, kept asking questions, and relied on 40+ years of experience drawing cabins.
The customer is happy, so I am too. We are assuming the recipient of the drawing will also be happy.
