Portfolio: Grand Canyon Guides at Work

The bottom of the Grand Canyon was a lousy place for a professional photographer’s camera to die, especially when he’d finally had a vision of the type of photos he wanted to create there.

David Zickl was an established editorial photographer when he relocated from New York City to Phoenix in 1995. Arizona Highways magazine, which is approaching its hundred-year anniversary, quickly put him to work, and he soon built a network of adventurous friends, many of them Colorado River guides. The cooking chops he’d learned only a few years earlier, at age forty-five while attending culinary school, were happily embraced by the guides, and soon he found himself invited to run the canyon regularly with his new friends.

His camera came along, of course, and he made photos of his friends along the river or in the side canyons and waterfalls that abound there. But his images felt flat, not so different from what other photographers had created. “The guides are all