A couple of weekends ago we went up to Truckee, in the snowy Sierra Nevada mountains a couple of hours’ drive from Davis. We don’t get snow down here in the valley, but with all the weather at this time of year there was a good dumping up the in the Sierras, and we wanted a change of scenery. It’s colder, but it’s beautiful up there. We headed to the Jax by the Tracks Diner, which I drew when we were last up here at the end of 2020, when you couldn’t go inside because we were still in that Covid era. We went inside this time for lunch, and had delicious milkshakes. My ‘sexy chicken sandwich’ was nice, but I wish I’d got something else. I didn’t sketch inside, but we had a nice view from our table through a window of the lovely old building across the street, the River Street Inn, so I started a sketch of that. I knew I wouldn’t finish it, what with trying to get through my ‘sexy chicken sandwich’ (honestly I kept hearing Ruud Gullit’s voice in my head talking about the ‘sexy football’ his Newcastle team would play, only for it to be not very good and he dropped Alan Shearer) (I think it could have done with a bit more sauce, the fried chicken was a bit dry) (in the sandwich, not the Newcastle team) (but that too). My wife and sun’s lunches were delicious though, and I couldn’t get enough of that milkshake, that was worth the trip. I drew as much of the building as I could, but decided not to finish off once we got outside, so I did the rest from the photo I took from our table. I liked how tall the hydrant was, I think the snow can get suddenly really deep up there. The very first time I ever went there, back in the start of 2006, I was gobsmacked at the depth of the snow. I took a picture of a snowdrift outside a house, and it was only when I saw a long thin aerial poking out that I realised there was a car buried underneath. I was told it’s the snowiest part of the contiguous United States, just a couple of hours up the road from our snowless town.

We went and explored the main street of Truckee, all the little shops, trying not to slip up on any bits of ice, and I drew a slightly shorter fire hydrant with the snow around it. Afterwards we drove over to the Donner State Park, to walk around in the snow for a bit, and along the lake. the snow was quite deep up there, and we had our snow boots, but it wasn’t too cold. We weren’t up there too long, I did no snow-sketching, and it was a long drive back downhill to Davis, but at least we saw some Sierra snow in 2024.