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Bill Gann first met Walt Bickel when taken as a boy with the Herring Family on a weekend camping trip into the Mojave Desert. Alika Herring, the noted telescope maker, astronomer, and archeologist, was working Native American sites in the area and used Bickel Camp as a staging area. Young Bill Gann and his childhood friend Jack Herring were most impressed with the old gold miner and the rugged wilderness where he made his home.
While Gann never forgot his visit to meet Bickel, he didn't return to the canyon until he was a grown man and had returned from the Vietnam War. He started making regular visits to Last Chance Canyon from 1970 to the present day. Gann was a photography teacher in Fullerton, California for 14 years and often took student groups to visit and photograph the old miner. In 1989 Gann moved to Sao Paulo, Brazil to teach photography at an American international school. He still continued to visit Bickel twice a year when he would come back to California for Christmas and summer vacation. In all, Gann spent six years in Brazil and returned to California in 1995. Gann photographed the last 20 years of Bickel's life and had written several newspaper and magazine articles on Walt Bickel. Much of that documentation is shown on these pages. Gann is now a teacher in Long Beach, California. He lives with his wife Elisabeth and their two Children Daniel and Analissa in Orange, CA

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