A Love Note to My Father, who Opened my Eyes to the Beauty of Public Lands
Garrett VeneKlasen lives in Taos, New Mexico and is the northern conservation director at NM Wild. He previously served as the executive director of the NM Wildlife Federation.
On February 5, 1998, the single engine plane my father was piloting went down in the mountains east of Taos, NM. I remember that day like it was yesterday. Dad was flying from Santa Fe to Angel Fire to pick me up for a quail hunting trip we planned in the Texas panhandle.
It was a huge snow year and it took three days of intensive searching to find him. There were so many wonderful people — friends, family, volunteers and state & local officials — involved in the frantic search. A state police helicopter finally found the plane on a high ridgeline overlooking El Rito Quién Sabe, a tributary of Rito de la Olla in the Carson National Forest.
The NTSB never did figure out why the plane crashed, but there was a strong storm front passing through that day and there was speculation that the crash was caused by extreme turbulence in a climatic event called a mountain wave.
It was later determined that dad was killed upon impact. His two trusty Labradors, Jake and Duke, were also on board the plane that day. Duke was killed, but Jake somehow survived the crash and stayed by my dad’s side for three days in freezing temperatures faithfully guarding his body. The search and rescue team had to physically drag the dog away from my father when they removed his body from the plane. Jake lived for six years after the crash and helped ease my mother’s grief. Jake was also my charismatic ‘co-host’ on the Fly Fishing America television show I had back in the early 90s.
Dad and I were very close. He was an avid outdoorsman and we spent countless days together in the field and on the water. He was an Aldo Leopold kind of guy in every sense of the word. He opened my eyes to the wonders of nature and public lands. He made me fall in love with all things wild, untamed and untrammeled.
He taught me many things and gave me many gifts, but this was the one that had the most impact in my life.
Every Father’s Day I drive over to Rito de la Olla and spend the morning fly fishing on that beautiful little river. It is something he and I did together countless times. I fondly remember watching him fish — completely lost in the embrace of that beautiful, wild high mountain stream. A Cheshire cat grin on his face, the trout didn’t stand a chance. The river and the wild was his place of healing. They beat back his demons that followed him home from the Battle of the Bulge and the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau he helped liberate during WWII.
And every year, after I catch a couple trout, I climb up the steep hillside through the groves of aspen, Douglas fir and spruce towards dad’s crash site. I know the names of all the wildflowers, plants, wild mushrooms, songbirds and geology of the mountain, because he taught me all these of these things and so much more.
His plane is still there today resting in a place that affords a most remarkable view: looking down into Quién Sabe, the town of Taos, Taos Plateau, the Taos Gorge and the mountains around Tres Piedras. These are public lands we both knew so well, because he took me there so often.
Each year I bring dad a Snicker bar, an Arturo Fuentes cigar, and a tiny bottle of Knob Creek. These were his guilty pleasures in life. I sit by the plane, take in the stunning view and tell dad how proud I am to be his son and thank him for teaching me about the things in life that truly matter. The things in life that will truly endure.
Thanks dad. Missing you terribly today and every day.
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So many of our country’s parks and public lands written about in these love notes would not exist but for the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF), including the Manistee National Forest. This important conservation program was permanently funded when Congress passed the Great American Outdoors Act last year. You can learn more about the Land and Water Conservation Fund here.
Would you like to write about public lands that you cherish? Please email Mary Jo Brooks at brooksm@nwf.org for guidelines. You’ll get this cool sticker as a thank you.
