WILLCOX — With the orange dawn behind him and a full moon in front, Jack Dykinga leans into his 600 mm lens and waits for the cranes to lift off. It’s not quite 7 a.m. on a Thursday in mid-February, and the temperature is not quite above freezing. Dykinga stares out from behind his tripod near the edge of a pond at the Lake Cochise Wildlife Viewing Area, hoping to get a shot he’s been chasing for the past four years at least: wintering sandhill cranes lit by the first light of sunrise, as they fly across the bone-white disk of the setting moon.
Jack Dykinga rests his 200-600mm zoom lens on top of his 600mm lens as he takes photos of sandhill cranes at the Lake Cochise Wildlife Viewing Area in Willcox on Feb. 13, 2025. Dykinga won a Pulitzer Prize as a photojournalist at the Chicago Sun-Times and has now made a name for himself as a wildlife and landscape photographer. Some of his recent photos of burrowing owls are featured in the March edition of National Geographic. “Technically, it’s fraught. You’re dealing with the sun and moon and the birds,” the 82-year-old Oro Valley resident says over the endless trumpeting of a thousand cranes. “Ultimately, it’s just dumb luck. Or educated dumb luck, how’s that?” Of course, Jack Dykinga is no ordinary photographer. His newspaper work in Chicago earned him a Pulitzer Prize at the age of 28, and his nature photos have filled the pages of books and prestigious publications for decades. The latest edition of
National Geographic includes a 17-page spread of burrowing owls he photographed at the site of a conservation project in Marana.
A male burrowing owl carries a rodent to feed his mate as she nests below ground on farmland in Marana on March 31, 2022. The current issue of
Arizona Highways features a shot he took in December of sandhill cranes crossing in front of a full moon, this time at Whitewater Draw, 100 miles southeast of Tucson. The image is splashed across two pages of the magazine, alongside a story Dykinga wrote explaining how he got the picture and how it could be better. “In landscape photography, you’re never done,” he writes. “But it’s good to enjoy your successes when you can.”
Sandhill cranes fly from roosting ponds to forage, as the full moon sets at Whitewater Draw Wildlife Area in southeastern Arizona on Nov. 16, 2024. So many of Dykinga’s successes have been published in Arizona Highways over the past 40 years that everyone, including him, seems to have lost count of all his photo credits. Magazine editor Robert Stieve’s best guess: “more than 500,” which works out to an average of about one photograph in every issue since 1982. It’s hardly a surprise, then, that Dykinga is one of 15 photographers, artists and writers chosen for the inaugural class of the Arizona Highways Hall of Fame. Joining him there are fellow Tucsonans Ted DeGrazia, Esther Henderson, Ray Manley and Clara Lee Tanner. Stieve says the full list of inductees will be unveiled in their special April edition, dedicated to the magazine’s centennial. The issue is set to arrive on newsstands March 20, about a week after subscribers get it.
Stone Canyon
You’ve probably seen one of Dykinga’s photos before, even if you don’t frequent photography exhibits or subscribe to
Arizona Highways . Maybe it’s the shot of Edward Abbey in black and white, grinning in front of his battered 1973 Ford F100 pickup. Or the curved arm of a saguaro creating a frame for other stately cactuses in the background as it holds out its blossoms like a bouquet. His technical skill and artistic eye are easy enough to see in his work. What’s not so apparent is the amount of research, planning and effort involved. “Before I go anywhere, it always starts with really looking at things like climate, weather (and the) schedules of animals. All that is plugged into different programs, and I’ve got different areas that I want to hit simultaneously,” he says. “You want to make a living at it, so you’ve got to have four or five projects going at the same time.” In addition to the sandhill cranes, Dykinga is tracking wild swings in the weather, documenting rare aurora borealis events over Southern Arizona and searching for swaths of dying saguaros as part of another National Geographic pitch about prolonged drought in the desert. He also keeps a running list in his head of nest sites he has found — Harris hawks, great horned owls, crested caracaras — so he can go back to them with his cameras when the time is right. Here’s a good example of the preparations he regularly makes: After he shot the northern lights near Picacho Peak in May, he spent two days scouting for a better location in the unlikely event that the phenomenon happened again. So when the aurora returned even stronger in October, he already had the perfect spot picked out, with a distinctive saguaro cactus and a clean northeastern view free of light pollution.
The northern lights make a rare appearance above the desert near Picacho Peak on Oct. 10, 2024. “The worst thing you can do is be running around when it’s happening, especially when you’re out in rattlesnake-infested deserts,” he says. “So immediately after getting the first one, I was already thinking about the next one.” For arguably his most heralded photo, called “Stone Canyon,” Dykinga followed seasonal rainstorms through a wilderness of petrified dunes along the Arizona-Utah border to capture a curled length of sun-bleached root resting in an ephemeral sandstone reflecting pool.
A curled length of sun-bleached root rests in a sandstone reflecting pool left by the rain. This image from 1992 graced the cover of Jack Dykinga’s 1996 book “Stone Canyons of the Colorado Plateau” and contributed to the preservation of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and Vermilion Cliffs National Monument along the Arizona-Utah border. It took half a dozen separate trips — each of them six miles long, with a pack weighed down by his 4×5 large-format camera and accessories — to finally capture the scene on a windless morning in just the right light. The image wound up on the cover of Dykinga’s 1996 book, written with famed author Charles Bowden, called
“Stone Canyons of the Colorado Plateau.” It also got passed around Capitol Hill and the Clinton White House, where it eventually contributed to the creation of three new national monuments: Grand Canyon-Parashant and
Vermilion Cliffs in northern Arizona and Grand Staircase-Escalante in southern Utah. In 2010, the
International League of Conservation Photographers selected “Stone Canyon” as one of the 40 best nature photographs of all time.
Jack Dykinga, right, used a timer to take this photo with author Charles Bowden, his friend and frequent collaborator, during a reporting trip in Paria Canyon on the Arizona-Utah border in 1986. Burrowing owls
To shoot the sandhill cranes during the full moon, Dykinga slept overnight in his solar-powered, pop-up camper at the edge of Willcox so he wouldn’t miss the moment when it came. A good camper might just be the most important piece of equipment he owns, he says, because he practically has to live where he shoots. “You really have to go back over and over again, and you never know what the hell you’re going to get in terms of light or wind or conditions in general. I know what I’m after in terms of perfection, but you don’t always get it.” Dykinga tries to take pictures every day. “And if I’m not shooting for real, I’m practicing,” he says. He fought the transition from film to digital photography for years, refusing to make the switch until he was convinced the new technology could produce the same results he knew he could achieve with his older gear. When he finally did embrace the change, though, he immersed himself in it completely. Now any time he gets an upgraded camera body or new firmware that promises to improve performance, he tests it out by shooting pictures of his backyard bird feeder, the grapes on his kitchen table or whatever else he can find around the house. “I’m basically working out things ahead of time,” he says. “It’s sort of interesting, because the cameras are supposed to be making it easier for you, but they’ve also gotten more complicated. It’s like a computer; you have to set it up, and the learning curve is pretty steep, especially nowadays.”
In one of Jack Dykinga’s favorite images, Indian paintbrush plants lift their fiery red flowers above the bulrushes at Capitol Reef National Park, Utah, in July 1996. It’s not enough to just know your way around a camera, either. Wildlife photography also requires a working knowledge of an animal’s habitat and behavior. You have to know where your subjects are, when they are active and what they might be expected to do. For Dykinga, that means reading a lot of books and making repeat trips to observe the animals where they live and figure out where he needs to be to photograph them. It took him four years to collect the 11 photos that appear in the burrowing owl feature for National Geographic. He visited the birds’ artificial burrows in the morning and at night for hours at a time and days on end, parking as close as 10 feet from them and using his car as a blind. “I would just basically sit there and watch these guys,” he says. “After a while, they become your instructors. They teach you what their behavior is, but they have to habituate to you first.”
Hundreds of lesser sandhill cranes explode into the sky at once after a bald eagle swooped past them in the wetlands outside of Willcox on Feb. 12. He has no idea how many individual photos he took during that time. After all, cameras these days can shoot up to 20 frames a second. “When you’re shooting wildlife, the funniest expression is you spray and pray,” he says. “But it also requires a certain intensity of seeing — an awareness of color, design and composition.”
Medical miracle
Everything Dykinga has accomplished over the past 10 years has come on borrowed breath. “Basically, it’s like a chainsaw across here,” he says, motioning to his chest. “I’ve got a scar from armpit to armpit.” He was diagnosed with a degenerative lung disease called
idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis in 2010. The incurable condition landed him in an experimental drug trial at
the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, but his breathing grew progressively worse, even as he continued his backcountry photography expeditions.
Author Edward Abbey poses with his not-so-gently used 1973 Ford F100 pickup. When his lungs finally began to shut down for good in 2014, he was at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, leading a workshop and raft trip for amateur photographers. He says he managed to make it back to Flagstaff while he was still breathing, but he knew he was in trouble when it took him “an hour to get one sock on.” He was rushed to the emergency room at Mayo and then to an operating room at
St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix — home, as luck would have it, to one of the world’s most successful lung transplant programs. Roughly eight hours of surgery and six months of recovery time later, Dykinga says he was “born again.” He still gets choked up when he talks about all the doctors, nurses and other caregivers who worked to extend his life. “It’s really a miracle,” he says, “and it’s why I get very upset with politicians who kind of berate science. I just go into a blind rage. It’s like, if you’re at 30,000 feet, do you question avionics?” Dykinga never found out where his new lungs came from. The records were sealed by the donor’s loved ones. But the anonymous gift gave him back his wind, albeit with a few strings attached. Every day, for example, he has to swallow 13 different pills in the morning and 7 more at night, including the anti-rejection drugs he takes to keep his body from attacking his replacement lungs. And with his immune system pinned down by the medication, he’s left vulnerable to things like COVID or the common cold. Certain kinds of skin cancer also thrive in the absence of his natural defenses, so Dykinga endures frequent surgeries to have chunks of bad skin removed. Like others in his position, he is terrified about losing an ear to the cancer someday. “That’s the downside,” he says, “but compared to how I was (almost) dead 10 years ago, you know, it is what it is.”
Born to shoot
Dykinga was born and raised in Chicago, where magazine photos and the pictures his older brothers brought home from World War II and Korea sparked his interest in seeing the world through a camera. “In high school, all the guys were looking at National Geographic for the bare-chested women, and I was looking at the photographs,” he says. As he writes in
“A Photographer’s Life,” his 2017 memoir, life really snapped into focus for him during his senior year, when a picture he shot for his high school newspaper won a national contest. Soon he was spending so much time and money at his favorite local camera store that the owners recommended him to a news photographer specializing in snapshots of famous people arriving at the airport. The job gave the young Dykinga the chance to photograph the likes of Jimmy Durante, Richard Nixon and even the Beatles. It also got his foot in the door at the Chicago Tribune, which picked up a few of his pictures. He was hoping to land afterhours work in the newspaper’s photo lab while he attended college classes during the day, but the photo editor sent him out into the city to shoot pictures instead. There was a lot going on in Chicago in 1965. “I got to cover the House Un-American Activities stuff, street protests, got beat up by cops a few times, marched with (Martin Luther) King,” Dykinga says. After a couple of years at the Trib, he jumped to the Chicago Sun-Times, where he joined an investigative team that exposed the deplorable conditions inside two Illinois state institutions for the mentally disabled. The reporting project, anchored by Dykinga’s searing black-and-white photos, helped turn a proposed budget cut into a state funding increase for the institutions and won him the 1971 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography. He later returned to the Chicago Tribune to shoot features for the paper’s Sunday magazine, including a life-changing assignment that sent him first to mountaineering school and then to the summit of Mount Rainier in 1975. The following year, Dykinga moved to Tucson with his wife, Margaret, and their two children for what he calls a “quality of life” change. He would spend the next five years as photo editor of the Arizona Daily Star, before another lifestyle decision overtook him. “I quit to become a wilderness guide. Perfectly logical,” Dykinga says, chuckling. “I discovered a canyon, so therefore I wanted to lead people there. I was an expert — pure arrogance and too young to know what I didn’t know.” When that didn’t work out, he rescued himself with his camera, selling pictures to Time, Newsweek and other publications. “I would do (freelance) assignments wherever I could get them,” he says. That eventually led to a fateful 1982 pitch meeting at Arizona Highways, where Dykinga tried to convince the magazine to let him do a story about his work as a wilderness guide. The editor had a better idea: Why not go shoot pictures for the story that some up-and-coming writer was doing about the Nature Conservancy’s work in Ramsey Canyon, outside of Sierra Vista? “So I met Chuck Bowden, and we kind of circled each other like two dogs around a fireplug, each of us saying how much better we were,” Dykinga says. “I wasn’t short on ego and he wasn’t either, and so it became a fast friendship.” The two men would go on to collaborate on a series of books, articles and wild adventures. With cameras and notebooks in hand, they drove across Arizona using only dirt roads, rode bicycles from the Grand Canyon to the Mexican border and completed a death-defying, summertime hike from Yuma to Palm Springs, following a route blazed by modern-day migrants and 19th century Texans drawn to the California gold rush. And in 2014, when Dykinga was rushed to the hospital to be prepped for his lung transplant, he turned to his pal Chuck to write his obituary. “Not many people get to proofread their own obit, but it was pure Chuck,” he recalls with a laugh. “He made it more about him than me, so we spiked that one.” Bowden died unexpectedly less than two months later, leaving Dykinga, still recovering from his own fresh brush with death, to deliver the eulogy at his friend’s memorial service.
In the archive
That first Arizona Highways feature by the pair helped kick open the door for Dykinga, who threw himself into the kind of large-format landscape photography he knew the magazine wanted. Such work also came in handy as he began pitching stories to National Geographic, which eventually published two full features from him — one in 2007 on the wilderness along both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border around Big Bend National Park and the other in 2010 on conservation work by Native American tribes across the country. The burrowing owl piece is his third big project for the magazine he once marveled at as a kid. He credits his varied work experience for making him into the nature photographer he is today. Shooting for newspapers taught him to be fast and flexible and keenly aware of his surroundings. Working as a photo editor taught him to be ruthless about his own work and careful about choosing the most worthwhile assignments. And freelancing taught him to plan ahead, multitask and always keep moving. “I think that’s really crucial,” he says. “You’re just divvying out your time, and it gets even more intense when you know you’re going to die pretty quick.” The Arizona Highways Hall of Fame isn’t his only recent lifetime achievement award of sorts. Early last month, he learned that his entire film archive, including his Pulitzer-Prize-winning negatives, would be added to the collection at the University of Arizona’s prestigious
Center for Creative Photography . The honor means his work will be preserved forever alongside that of such legendary North American photographers as Ansel Adams, Lola Álvarez Bravo, David Hume Kennerly, W. Eugene Smith, Edward Weston and Garry Winogrand. But Dykinga shows no signs of slowing down. In the last few days alone, he made a solo trip to
Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge to photograph a rare cactus, then drove his camper north to Death Valley National Park in search of wildflowers and flood damage. Being a photographer isn’t something he does; it’s something he is. “I feel like I’m doing better than I ever did, and I think the reason is there’s an urgency to live and to produce,” he says. It’s a self-imposed pressure he can feel every time he draws a breath. “Part of the drive is you don’t want to disappoint the doctors. It’s like a million-dollar operation,” Dykinga says. “And it’s not just me; it’s somebody else’s lungs, too.”
One of Jack Dykinga's photos from a Chicago Sun-Times investigation that exposed conditions inside two Illinois state institutions for the mentally disabled. The work won him the 1971 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography.
