Larry Wieland, the author of the Grand Canyon Panorama Project, first hiked below the rim of the Grand Canyon in 1999, and has been a hopeless canyon addict ever since. He began exploring panoramic photography a few years before that, shooting some panoramas near his home near Austin, Texas, and on one hiking trip in Europe. But after that first hike in 1999, overwhelmed by the beauty of the Grand Canyon and the prospect of capturing and sharing some small portion of it, Larry dedicated himself to a goal of shooting panoramas on all of the commonly hiked trails within the Grand Canyon, and sharing those panoramas with the world.
Only a small percentage of the visitors to the Grand Canyon have the time and ability to venture below the rim, and only a very tiny portion of those ever hike throughout the canyon as Larry has done. And to his knowledge, he is the only canyon hiker / panoramic photographer to amass a collection of canyon panoramas as comprehensive as his.
Larry spent most of his working life as a software developer. In 2009 he retired from a secure job as a software developer at a major computer hardware manufacturer to dedicate himself full time to achieving his goal. He did not expect five years to pass until he could share his vision with the world, but there were scores of trails to hike and photograph, and thousands of lines of code to be written.
Larry continues to work on the project full time, still hiking and shooting new panoramas, whittling away at the backlog of hundreds of panoramas waiting to be assembled and posted on this site, and writing, assembling and posting an expanding collection of narrations for the panoramas already present on the site. Thus far a relatively small number of the panoramas on the site are narrated, but his goal is to create narratives for all of them. That task will continue to keep him busy for years. If you wish to contact Larry, you can use the project’s contact page to shoot him an email.
