Continuing my series of images from the abandoned dog track in Black Canyon City, Arizona:

We arrived at the dog track around 2:30PM last Saturday while there was still a lot of daylight left, so we got a lot of natural light in the main building where the grandstands are located. However, it wasn’t until a couple of hours later when the sun moved lower in the western sky that we got the really nice late afternoon sunlight shining directly onto those brightly colored red, yellow and orange plastic grandstand seats.

Even though the site is an abandoned wreck, those colored seats provide a sort of fun carnival effect, the perfect foil to the dark black and grey area behind them.

The seats, of course, face what used to be the dog track, but now they simply face the beautiful mountain range and the daily sunsets, with only a few shards of glass still clinging to the window frames to obstruct the view.

HDR created from five bracketed photos processed in Photomatix v4. Post-processing in Paintshop Photo Pro X3, using Topaz Adjust / DeNoise.

After I posted yesterday’s photo, I did a little more research and found out a little more history of the place. I found the following information on a fellow photographer’s website:

The Black Canyon Dog Track was opened in 1967 by the Funk family. With the newly built I-17, Phoenicians had easy access to the greyhound races in the nearby town of Black Canyon, located 40 miles north of present day Phoenix. Working with Western Racing Inc. from Delaware, the Funk family continued to run the track until it was closed in 1982. A few years later the track would play host to a variety of Swap Meet events, and eventually became abandoned in the late 1980s. Today the demolition of the buildings remains in question, due to possible interest in making the property an RV Park.

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