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 first 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 and his canyon.
 
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.

So it was Gann photographed the last 20 years of
Bickel's life and has written several
newspaper and magazine articles on Bickel and the area miners.
 
 Much of that documentation is
shown on these pages.
 
Gann is now a teacher in Long Beach,
California. He lives in Orange, CA with his two children,
Daniel and Analissa. These children, now in high
school, he adopted as babies in Brazil.

Gann is shown at the right visiting Bickel
when he was at the V.A. Hospital in Los
Angeles in the circa 1988.