Gold Canyon is about six hours from San Diego plus in the winter we have a one hour timezone change. Gold Canyon is east of Phoenix, so that allowed me to bypass most of the Phoenix traffic. We have had some good rains this winter and the desert was putting on a pretty good show with the wild flowers. The first few days of the workshop were hot for this time of year and normalized a bit at the end.

We started the workshop with silhouettes on the ridge line at sunrise. We had saguaro cactus and cowboys as the subject. This shoot was held on a local riding stable and we had the local cowboys that worked the ranch to work with as well as several came down from Montana from the alternate location this workshop is held. This ranch is located along the Superstition Mountains which appears in the back ground of some of the images.

We had several activities that included, roping and moving the long horn steers, roping horses, shooting groups of cowboys throwing up dust in the sunset and some standard portraits using available light, bounced light and studio lighting. We had lunch on the ranch every day along with some entertainment like a cowboy poet and a cowboy singer/musician. The final lunch was a chuck wagon meal cooked by a professional chuck wagon chef.

After the workshop, I stayed in Mesa for a few extra days. One of those days I drove the length of the Apache Trail based upon the musicians recommendation that it was one of the best drives in Arizona. He forgot to mention that of the forty miles only about half was paved and two miles of the unpaved was a single lane. It was a great drive, but there weren't many places to pull out and shoot. At the end of the drive is the Theodore Roosevelt Dam and a cool arch bridge. From the dam I took a quick side trip to the Tonto National Monument. There are two different pueblos here, one you can get to whenever the visitor center is open and the other has limited access and is ranger lead. The walk up to the pueblo is straight up via a series of paved switchbacks. I got there about 3:00pm and it was to close in an hour, plus it was too hot, so I skipped it.

From Tonto I returned to Mesa via the quick route. Back near Apache Junction (start of the Apache Trail) is an area that is populated with wold horses. I decided to check out some of the parks along the Salt River that horses are typically seen. I didn't see any horses, but shooting around the river was still fun.