by Cassie Maas

It Began With Lunch

Back in the late 1970s I was living in a condo on Jade Street in Capitola. I was selling advertising space for California Homes Magazine at the time and one of my calls took me to Red Carpet Realtors, which was right there in Capitola at the end of 41st Avenue and Portola Drive. I had a meeting with a realtor named Ralph and while I was there he introduced me to a man who happened to be in his office that day. His name was Gary Dresden but everyone called him Toro. He took me to lunch and that was the start of everything.

Toro had quite a family history. He and his brother Avery Gregory Dresden were the sons of Avery Brundage, who was the fifth president of the International Olympic Committee and the only American to ever hold that position. After Brundage passed away in Germany in May 1975, Toro and his brother spent years in a legal battle across three counties and two states to get their share of his $19 million California estate. They each ended up settling for $162,500 in 1980. Toro had spent most of his life on the Peninsula and was living in Woodside when we met.

The Commute was Tough

Years went by and we lost touch. Then in the mid-1990s we reconnected and before long we were both living in Seascape. I was commuting to Palo Alto for work every day, which meant I was driving Highway 17 over the Santa Cruz Mountains regularly. If you have ever driven that road you know it can be a lot to deal with. Narrow lanes, sharp curves, fog that rolls in out of nowhere at the summit, trucks and commuters all mixed together on a road people have called Killer 17 for a reason. In 1995, the weather was so bad, that mudslides closed Highway 17. Traffic had to be routed in the commute direction only as only one side of the highway was passable in a couple of places. Every morning I was making a decision about getting on that road with almost no information about what it was actually like up there. Toro and I decided to do something about that.

The web was still so new back then. Nobody had ever thought about checking live traffic conditions on a website. We saw the opening and we went for it.

Finding a Camera Site

Toro went out and scouted the highway until he found the right spot. It was a property in Redwood Estates, a small unincorporated community right along Highway 17 about eight miles south of Los Gatos, with a good clear view of the section of road people called Satellite Curve. I went to the property owners and asked if we could put our equipment there. They said yes.

Toro built a structure on the property to hold everything and I went out and bought everything we needed. I paid for all of it myself: a computer, a video camera, and a video capture card. We set the system up to take a still photo of the highway every five minutes and automatically upload it to the site. I owned the domain name and all the equipment the whole time. It sounds simple now but in 1996 there was no Google Maps, no smartphones, none of the traffic apps people use today. People who drove Highway 17 every day could now pull up our site before they left home and actually see what the road looked like. Nobody else was doing that.

Hiway17.com officially launched on Thursday, August 29, 1996.

Recognition Comes In

Once the site was up and running Toro took over the day to day. I was paying the phone bill that kept the camera connected and I was still the owner of everything, but Toro was the one running things.

Within the first six months after we launched, the San Jose Mercury News wrote an article about Hiway17.com. The article focused on Toro and a man named Michael Norton, who had been investing in the site with Toro. Michael ran Santa Cruz Investment Management out of Aptos. Since Toro was the one operating the site day to day I was not mentioned in the article. The Mercury News was really the center of Silicon Valley journalism and they had been one of the first newspapers in the country to launch a website back in January 1995. Getting coverage there put Hiway17.com in front of a huge Bay Area audience and people started taking it seriously.

Then on June 2, 1997, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a piece about a man named Bob Glass who lived in the Santa Cruz Mountains and used our site every morning to check the highway before his commute. That was exactly who we had built it for. Someone up in the mountains, looking out at the fog, deciding whether or not to get on that road. Seeing that in the Chronicle meant a lot.

We also received an Award of Merit for Exemplary Web Site from the Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission. For a website that two people built and ran out of Seascape, that kind of recognition was really something.

Things Start to Fall Apart

Toro decided he wanted to try to make money from the site through donations. I wanted to support that so I handed the phone bill over to him so he could have full control of the costs while he tried to make it work. It never did. The donations just were not coming in and once it became clear the site was not going to be a source of income, Toro lost interest in keeping it going.

Around that same time we both ended up moving to the Peninsula. Toro moved to Redwood City to be close to his mother. I moved to San Carlos with my daughter. Back in Redwood Estates the people who had been hosting our camera on their property moved away and the camera came down with them. That was the end of the original setup.

By July 3, 1998 Toro was posting on the site asking for donations and saying he was having financial problems. Then on December 6, 1998 he posted a RIP image and that was it. The site was gone.

Taking It Back

I still owned the domain name and the equipment so in February 1999, while I was living in San Carlos, I took the site back and started using it as a personal blog. That was just the beginning though. On April 18, 1999 I relaunched it as a community site, which was really what it was always meant to be.

In 1999, I started spending time in the Santa Cruz Mountains and then moved up there full time. Finally, I was part of the community I had been writing about. 

The site really came alive whenever something was happening up in the mountains. Wildfires, bad winter storms, highway closures, the kinds of things that can really cut communities off. People would come to Hiway17.com to find out what their neighbors knew, share what they had seen, and figure out what to do. I kept working on it and changing it over the years, always trying to make it useful for the people who actually lived up there.

The AXIS Camera at the Summit

As things improved on the technology side I decided to do a major upgrade. I bought a $3,000 AXIS pan, tilt, and zoom camera in an all weather housing. It was professional grade equipment that could be controlled remotely so you could point it in different directions and zoom in on different parts of the highway. It was a huge step up from that original fixed camera and gave people so much more to work with.

I installed it on a pole up at the summit, at the spot where there is a restaurant and a real estate office along Santa Cruz Highway. I worked it out with the man who was leasing the property and he was fine with hosting it. Surf Net provided the high speed internet connection that made it possible to stream images live. From up there you had a great view of the highway going both directions. It was the best the site had ever been.

Something unexpected came out of having that camera up at the summit. I gave the log in information to the Medevac helicopter crews and they started using the Hiway17.com feed to check conditions before flying in to airlift accident victims off the highway. Fog and wind at the summit can make a landing really dangerous and being able to pull up the live camera gave those crews an actual look at what they were flying into before they committed to it. I was really proud of that.

Sabotage

Then Joseph, the man leasing the restaurant at the summit, climbed the pole, opened up the camera housing, taped off the wires inside, and put it all back together so it looked like nothing had happened.

I spent a long time in the rain trying to figure out what was wrong. I went through every connection, tried every technical explanation I could think of, and just could not get the camera working again. It never even occurred to me that someone had done it on purpose. I was looking for a malfunction, not sabotage. It was a handyman who did work around the restaurant property, and whose name I have since forgotten, who eventually told me what Joseph had done. Once I knew, I took the camera down. I have never put one back up there since.

There is a lot more to this part of the story but it is too much to write here. Perhaps one day, I’ll write a book about it.

Stepping Away

My real estate career eventually took over. I work with buyers and sellers in the Santa Cruz Mountains and that kind of work takes everything you’ve got. The local knowledge alone takes years to build. Little by little I let Hiway17.com go quiet and it sat idle for a number of years.

But I never really stopped thinking about it. In February 2026 I brought it back, rebuilt it, and gave it the tagline “Your Community, Your Voice.” The people who live in these mountains still need a place to talk to each other, share information, and stay connected. 

What This Has Always Been About

When I look back at everything this site has been through, a traffic camera that Bob Glass checked every morning, a Mercury News article, a Chronicle mention, awards from the county transportation commission, medevac crews using the feed, a blog, a RIP page, years of quiet, and now a comeback, what I keep coming back to is that it has always been about the same thing. Neighbors helping neighbors.

It started with lunch in Capitola. It turned into something that made a real difference to real people living in these mountains. It got sabotaged and abandoned and went quiet for years. And now it is back, because the community that made it worth building in the first place is still here. And so am I.

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Note: The San Jose Mercury News article from early 1997 and the San Francisco Chronicle article of June 2, 1997 have not yet been retrieved from paid archives. The Mercury News archive (1985 to present) is available at mercurynews.newsbank.com and through San Jose Public Library’s free NewsBank access. The Chronicle archive is available at newspapers.com and through many public library systems. Feel free to read the articles. The dates for the most part have been retrieved from the Wayback Time Machine.