THE ARIZONA HIGHWAYS HALL OF FAME

Gary Ladd
BORN 1947

People sometimes describe a moment of clarity descending like a bolt of lightning. Gary Ladd’s was more literal — and nearly hit him on the head.

An amateur photographer who had recently graduated with a degree in science, Ladd was working as a research assistant at Kitt Peak National Observatory when an early monsoon storm rolled in. It was his day off, so he grabbed a camera, went outside and started shooting. Before long, lightning engulfed him enough that he could photograph it in any direction.

“A bolt hit so close that I went inside,” he recalls, but he continued to shoot through the windows: “Because this is in 1972, before digital, you can’t tell what you’re recording on the film. So, I’m guessing at the exposure, I’m guessing at the f-stop, I’m guessing at the shutter speed, I’m guessing at what’s in the frame.”

When he got the images back from the lab, Ladd was astounded by one of them. He took it to show his boss, who projected it onto a big screen. The image drew a crowd, including someone from a photo lab.

“He said, ‘Gary, I’m going to be in New York in a few weeks, and I know so-and-so at Life magazine; if you give me a copy of that picture, I’ll put it on his desk,’ ” Ladd recalls. “So, that ended up in Life magazine in September. That was the first photograph I had published.”

Over the years, the image was reprinted hundreds of times, and it opened doors that led to a career in landscape photography. One of those doors was at Arizona Highways, which published a different lightning shot later that year. Ladd’s photos and stories have been running in the magazine ever since.

Growing up in the Midwest, Ladd first descended into the Grand Canyon at age 17, when he ventured a short way down the Bright Angel Trail during a visit with his family. It made an impression, and he returned to the Canyon in 1970, when a friend invited him on a 19-day Colorado River trip with Grand Canyon Dories founder Martin Litton.

So began a lifelong exploration of the Canyon that’s involved more than 40 river excursions and 80 backpacking trips, including a 179-mile hike from Lees Ferry to almost Lava Falls Rapid. One year, he completed a rim-to-rim-to-rim hike in just over 19 hours.

“It was like we were supermen,” he says. “We were having the time of our lives exploring. … And we loved the place. It was like a three-dimensional puzzle that was limited by air temperature and water and vertical cliffs.”

His new career launched, Ladd left astronomy behind and moved to Page in 1981. He’d become smitten with the Colorado Plateau, and Page was in the middle of everywhere he wanted to go. He feared he’d arrived too late — after the gates of Glen Canyon Dam had closed. But he soon realized he was wrong.

“There was so much more that lay above where the lake could ever get to,” he says — places such as Antelope Canyon and Horseshoe Bend, which he explored before the rest of the world caught on. And he’s photographed many of the same locations over and over.

“Gary is willing to investigate and re-investigate,” says Arizona Highways Photo Editor Jeff Kida. “He goes back to places time and time again, because he knows they’re always changing. I think that makes him fairly unique.”

It also turns out that a lifetime of photographing these places is not enough. Vermilion Cliffs National Monument is an area where Ladd says he’d like to have spent more time. “The Coyote Buttes area is almost too good,” he says. “There are so many photographs to be made there that it’s demoralizing. I almost hate to go, because it’s just overwhelming.”

And then, there’s the Canyon. “Along the river, it’s heartbreaking,” he says, “because there are so many places I would love to stop and work on photographically, but you have to keep moving in order to make it out in a specified amount of time.”

But one summer, a special agreement with the National Park Service allowed Ladd to hitchhike down the river. That freedom greatly improved the images he made, which were collected in the Arizona Highways book Grand Canyon: Time Below the Rim, a collaboration with writer Craig Childs.

Ladd says, “That may be the best thing I ever did with Arizona Highways.”

Charles Bowden
1945-2014

It was Arizona Highways that introduced writer Charles Bowden and photographer Jack Dykinga in 1981. The story, about Ramsey Canyon, which was published in November 1982, was the first Highways assignment for both of them.

“We circled each other like a couple of dogs peeing on a fireplug,” Dykinga wrote in a 2019 tribute. The two men discovered they were both from Chicago. They also had journalism in common — although Bowden was just beginning his newspaper career, while Dykinga was leaving his behind.

It was the beginning of a long and fruitful friendship that Dykinga calls “sweet and sour.” Over the next three decades, the two paired up on many magazine stories and books for
Arizona Highways and other publishers, developing, in Dykinga’s words, “a degree of trust that writers and photographers rarely have.”

A prolific writer, Bowden published 26 books, in addition to countless stories, essays and reviews. He once was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship that allowed him to follow a cantaloupe from farm to table to illustrate Arizona’s economy. And during his brief time as a reporter at the Tucson Citizen, he became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

But Bowden was just as well known for nature and environmental writing. His book Blue Desert became a classic. Stone Canyons of the Colorado Plateau, a collaboration with Dykinga, influenced the creation of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Edward Abbey was a friend and fan, and many expected Bowden to assume his mantle — even Abbey, who called Bowden the next Ed Abbey.

Bowden earned degrees in history and American intellectual history, then drifted until, at age 31, he landed at the Citizen. “I got hooked by the newsroom and the news business and have never recovered,” he wrote to a friend. He wrote obsessively, as if racing against time.

For Arizona Highways, Dykinga and Bowden hiked through Paria Canyon in winter, thawing frozen socks over a fire “like wienies at a roast”; drove across the state without touching pavement; and cycled across it, too. Their last collaboration was an Arizona Highways book, Grand Canyon: A Photographer’s Favorite Viewpoints.

Facing a double lung transplant and heart bypass in 2014, Dykinga asked Bowden to write his obituary. Dykinga pulled through — but a few months later, Bowden died unexpectedly at age 69. “I ended up eulogizing him,” Dykinga says.

He adds: “People should know that he cared deeply. Above all, he was honest. He delighted in telling people what they didn’t want to hear — and made you think, as did Ed Abbey. I think that’s a high honor.”