Dope Lake July Aug 16

THE LEGEND
of
It seemed too good to be true:
a smuggler’s plane stuck in one of
Yosemite’s remote frozen lakes,
with three tons of primo Mexican
weed there just for the taking. Every
climber, park ranger, and treehugging dropout in the park the
winter of ’77 has a tall tale. Here’s
what really happened.
by
illustration by
GREG
NICHOLS
JONATHAN
BA RTLET T
71
JON GLISKY BELIEVED SOMEONE was trying
to kill him. The thought was festering when
he called his wife from a hotel in Las Vegas.
Pam Glisky had just had surgery on nerves in
both feet and was slow getting to the phone.
“What took you so long?” he ribbed,
cracking a smile over his John Wayne jaw.
Glisky was in that still purgatory between
runs, with too much time alone with his
thoughts. After the call, he mailed a package
to his wife — a toy tea set for their six-year-old
daughter. Later that evening he went to dinner at a steakhouse, where he bumped into an
old Army buddy. They stayed up late drinking expensive scotch and reminiscing about
Vietnam — the purloined jeep they airlifted
to their hangar in Quang Tri, their close
calls f lying helicopters under fire. Glisky
laughed and put away several glasses of
flew into Baja California, where he landed on
a marginal airstrip. Later that night, under
cover of darkness, a crew loaded his plane
with 6,000 pounds of Mexican red-hair
marijuana. The pot was a strain of potent
sinsemilla cultivated by an American syndicate known as Mota Magic. The Washington-based crew Glisky f lew for bought the
premium weed in tightly packed 40-pound
burlap bales. Some of the bales were marked
FRIJOL, the Spanish word for “bean.”
Glisky and Nelson took off before dawn
on December 9, 1976. After crossing back
into U.S. airspace, they f lew just off the
coast of California, where anyone tracking
the plane would assume it was an executive
aircraft ferrying hotshots to San Francisco
or Seattle. Halfway up the state, Glisky
killed his running lights and turned sharply
inland, hitting the deck to drop off radar.
Cutting across the sparsely populated farmland of the Central Valley basin, the plane
reached the foothills of the Sierra Nevada
in minutes. Under the luminous orb of a
gibbous moon, the Howard 500 hugged the
rocky alpine slopes like a ghostly manta ray
gliding up the continental rise.
“I knew they
were dead!.!.!.
but I just had
this romantic
notion that
someone
should smoke
that beautiful
weed.”
Greg nichols is a senior editor at Good
magazine and author of Striking Gridiron.
This is his first piece for Men’s Journal.
Before he became
a drug smuggler,
Jon Glisky, right,
flew helicopters in
the Vietnam War.
R
finished
their shifts at Yosemite’s famed Ahwahnee
Hotel and loaded the car for a couple of days
off. The plan was to meet up with another
two friends on the trail and snowshoe out
into Yosemite’s backcountry. Winter was slow
after the holidays, nothing like the human
crush of spring and summer. There was no
traffic in January, and the granite-carved
1,169-square-mile park felt imbued with a
sunny, snow-kissed solitude. In 1977, California was in the second winter of its worst
drought in a hundred years, so snowfall had
been light. The roads leading to the high-elevation passes were mostly open, and the backcountry was covered in less snow than usual.
RO N LY K I N S A N D A CO -WO R K E R
MEN’S JOURNAL
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J U LY/A U G U S T 2 0 1 6
mark the trail. Out front, Lykins came into a
gently sloping bowl. At its center lay Lower
Merced Pass Lake, a six-acre blip of water
that didn’t show up on many maps. As Lykins
scanned the trees for some sign of direction,
he spotted something incongruous. From
way off it looked like a bridge suspended
between two snow-draped conifers. He was
almost underneath it before he realized it was
an airplane wing. Hydraulic oil was still dripping from frayed lines and soiling the snow
below. There was no other debris or any sign
of wreckage in sight, as though the plane had
dropped its wing and somehow continued
on. They thought about hiking to the lake,
but it was getting dark so they decided to set
PHOTOGR APHS COURTESY OF RICK SCHLOSS (3)
whiskey, but beneath the easygoing exterior
he was on edge. He’d discovered a damaged
oil fitting on the left engine of his plane. He
didn’t think it was routine wear and tear.
The next morning Glisky taxied down
the runway at McCarran airport with his
colleague and sole passenger, Jeff Nelson.
They were in a twin-engine beast called a
Howard 500. The Howard carried 1,500 gallons of aviation fuel for long hauls at high
speed. After wheels-up, Glisky turned south,
toward Mexico. He crossed the border and
The crew at the Ahwahnee was tight, a
hive of young, turned-on souls drawn to that
wild, rock-shattered valley where God seems
to have lost all sense of proportion. Most of
the year, waiters lived in 12-by-12 canvas
tents with other low-level park employees.
The tents were reasonably plush — oil heaters
and plank flooring — and employees enjoyed
free showers and cheap hot meals in the cafeteria, courtesies they sometimes extended
to the hippies and climbers who came by the
busload from San Francisco and Berkeley or
up from Los Angeles to get weird and enjoy
nature’s splendor. There was the postcard
version of Yosemite — station wagons and
happy families — then there was the far-out
reality of California in the 1970s. Waiters at
the Ahwahnee, one of the finest lodges in
North America, bounced between the two.
Lykins and his friend parked where the
plows had given up clearing the road and
donned their snowshoes. Setting out, they
laid down a straight stitch through the
meandering trail, taking the quickest possible route up the mountainside. They were
about eight miles out when they lost track of
the diamond blazes branded into the trees to
up camp. In the morning two friends who
had followed their tracks came snowshoeing
along, already high on acid, and together they
headed to higher elevations.
W
WINTER WAS ALWAYS QUIETER, but Yosemite’s rangers kept busy year-round. There
was always someone who needed rescuing,
always a group of “nontraditional visitors,”
the Park Service term for hippies and rock
climbers, smoking dope or camping out
of bounds. One afternoon that January, a
waiter from the Ahwahnee strolled into the
ranger station to report a downed plane.
“Do these guys know where they were?”
Tim Setnicka asked a fellow ranger as he
dragged a f inger across a map of known
crash sites on his office door. Setnicka, who
ran Yosemite Search and Rescue, wasn’t
much older than the kid who reported the
crash. He was part of a new generation of
rangers who mixed rock climbing, backcountry camping, and scuba with advanced
law-enforcement techniques. The Danger
Rangers, as they were called, had been
trained in everything from reconnaissance
and undercover work to traditional coro-
Customs sent a Vietnam-era Huey from San
Diego to shuttle agents and rangers to the
crash site. The sound of the aging chopper
thundered against the walls of the mile-wide
valley as it landed in El Capitan Meadow and
departed for the backcountry. Everyone in
Yosemite knew something big was up.
From the air, the debris trail of the
downed Howard 500 stretched threequarters of a mile and pointed like an arrow
toward Lower Merced Pass Lake. Covered
in ice and a modest dusting of snow, the lake
was a bald patch in an undulating white
landscape. Stripped of one wing and most
of its tail, which came off in the trees, the
plane’s fuselage had cartwheeled through
the ice. More than a month had passed since
the December crash, and the lake had frozen over, entombing the plane — and anyone who was onboard. Several burlap sacks
lay strewn along the shoreline. Some of the
sacks had ripped open on impact, leaving a
chunky vegetal trail in the snow.
Since the plane was on Park Service land,
Yosemite’s Office of Law Enforcement coordinated the investigation. A well-coiffed
regimental ranger named Lee Shackelton
Then the rangers used the chainsaws to
open a hole for Yosemite’s dive team. Highelevation diving is taxing under normal
circumstances, but these were the worst
conditions that the Park Service’s lead diver,
Butch Farabee, had ever seen.
“The water was murky because of the aviation and hydraulic fluids,” Farabee recalls.
“Visibility was pretty minimal. When the
plane went into the water, all these bits and
pieces of aluminum broke off and floated to
the surface. They got frozen in place, so now
you had a couple feet of metal hanging down,
and you had stuff on the bottom as well.”
It was darker than the inside of a cow, one
diver told Setnicka. Twisted metal and wire
hung like booby traps in the shallow lake.
The divers recovered several bales of marijuana bobbing under the ice, which they
passed back through the oil-slicked hole.
A commercial diver was brought in from
Fresno to try to recover the bodies, but even
he couldn’t penetrate the gnarled underwater wreckage around the cockpit.
Back in the valley, rangers off-loaded
the bales and cataloged them as evidence.
Yosemite’s jail took up a portion of the second
When it crashed,
Glisky’s Howard 500
contained 6,000
pounds of dope.
A friend of Ron
Lykins’ the day
they discovered
the plane, in 1977
ner’s duties. They were the law in Yosemite,
which operated as a city-state in the middle
of California’s rugged wilderness.
Setnicka dialed the Air Force Rescue
Coordination Center to ask if anyone had
reported the plane missing. He gave the
dispatcher the number off the wing, which
the waiter had written down. That set off
a chain reaction. Before the Park Service
could get a team of rangers together, four
other federal agencies were vying for access
to the crash site. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and the Federal
Aviation Administration were interested in
the downed aircraft; the DEA and Customs
wanted the cargo they thought was onboard.
took the lead, ordering his rangers to fan
out alongside gun-toting Customs agents
to gather marijuana and pile it near the
chopper landing site on the frozen lake. A
few bales stuck out of the ice like decaying
stumps. The total haul was close to 2,000
pounds. Representatives from Customs and
the DEA helped catalog the evidence.
“It became a recovery of drudgery because
we used chainsaws to cut out these bales of
marijuana, which were frozen,” remembers
Setnicka. “They’re heavy, they’re broken apart,
they’re wet. The chainsaws were cutting ice,
you know, so the chainsaw blades don’t last
long. The most obvious ones we cut out, and
then we had to fly this marijuana back.”
J U LY/A U G U S T 2 0 1 6
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MEN’S JOURNAL
floor of a battleship-gray building that also
served as the firehouse. “We closed down
one side of the jail and put these bags of marijuana in a cell,” remembers Kim Tucker, who
worked in the Office of Law Enforcement.
“They came in like giant ice cubes, with all
that vegetable material and green leafy substance frozen. Over time the bales started to
thaw and became runny, just like if you take a
package of spinach out of the freezer.”
With melting bales stacked halfway to
the ceiling, the cell soon filled with runoff. A
drain became choked with stems and plant
matter. Yosemite’s fire brigade occupied the
office below. A few days into the recovery,
fire chief Don Cross stormed up the stairs.
“You gotta do something with this stuff!”
he bellowed.
Pot-tinged water was dripping onto his
dispatcher’s desk. Exhausted rangers began
the arduous process of moving dozens of
bales from the second-story jail to a walkin storage freezer in a nearby Park Service
warehouse, where it would stay for weeks.
Up at the lake, Shackelton got word
that a massive storm front was rolling in.
The five investigating agencies had spent
nearly a week scouring the area, cataloging
the wreck and collecting all the marijuana
they could find. A full-blown winter salvage
operation to recover the fuselage and the
bodies presumed to be inside was out of the
question. It would be too costly to bring in
heavy equipment to manage the ice and
too dangerous to keep working in the finicky weather. Everyone expected that the
approaching storm would cut off the backcountry, so Shackelton opted not to leave
any of his rangers posted at the lake. The
crime scene would stay put until spring. In
the first week of February, the Huey carried
the last load of rangers back down to the valley before the storm rolled in.
Her daughter was sick — a chronic ailment
had threatened the little girl’s life since
she was a baby. Despite her intuition, her
dream, Pam believed there was a chance her
husband was still alive.
The DEA had been after Jon Glisky for
years. He was a phantom in their surveillance reports. One minute he was in sight of
their planes, the next he was gone, vanished
into thin air. Despite her cooperation, the
DEA gave Pam no information for days. In
a desperate bid to locate her husband, she
chartered a plane and went looking for him.
She told the hired pilot to stay low as they
f lew into Baja California along Jon’s route.
She landed at every airstrip on the way and
hobbled up to the shadiest-looking characters
she could find. No one remembered seeing an
American pilot who looked like John Wayne.
Finally, after weeks of silence, an agent
phoned to say a plane had been found in
Yosemite. Pam then called the only person
in her husband’s world she trusted, Jon’s
lawyer, Jeffrey Steinborn. She needed to
know what was happening, whether Jon was
dead for certain. Steinborn had no love for
his client Jon Glisky, whom he regarded as a
revealing who he was, he told them a fantastic story about an airplane full of dope.
“I knew Jon Glisky and Jeff Nelson were
dead,” Steinborn remembers. “I just had this
romantic notion that someone should smoke
that beautiful weed those guys were bringing back from Mexico.”
R
R U M O R S S P R E A D L I K E E M B E R S from the
fire: The plane was Colombian, owned by
the Mafia, part of a secret government program. It was filled with weed, cocaine, cash.
It was a trap, it was a myth, it was the score
of a lifetime. As soon as the lawyer pulled
out, Yosemite’s scruffiest residents began
planning their assaults on the backcountry.
There were only about 20 climbers living
in Camp 4 over the winter. The Stonemasters held special status in the campground.
They were the legends of big-wall climbing:
John Bachar, a brilliant soloist; Jim Bridwell,
who had bagged more than 100 first ascents
in Yosemite Valley. Stonemasters were the
best big-wall climbers in the world. Rangers
sometimes asked for their help with technically difficult search-and-rescue operations, and magazines wrote about their first
Lykins, shirtless,
and friends with
bales of dope
they hauled up
from the lake
Rangers would
eventually storm
the area on what
became known as
Big Wednesday.
PHOTOGR APHS COURTESY OF RICK SCHLOSS (3)
MEN’S JOURNAL
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J U LY/A U G U S T 2 0 1 6
denly you’re going, ‘It could be worth some
money, and I don’t have any money.’
“Everyone was going up. Everyone. Some
people went more than once. Those people
did really well.” A couple of Stonemasters
were among the early visitors; the veteran
climbers’ conditioning and knowledge of the
backcountry had prepared them well for this
once-in-a-lifetime score. They jogged up the
treacherous trail with huge backpacks and
mischievous grins, returning to the valley
to dump load after illicit load in tents and
secret stash spots near Camp 4.
It was early April when Strader decided
to go to Lower Merced Pass Lake. His
parents were visiting Yosemite for Easter.
Strader told them he was going for a climb.
Strader and two friends got a ride up
Glacier Point Road, which slaloms around
Yosemite’s granite monuments toward the
backcountry. There had been only a few
snowstorms during the drought winter,
and the road opened early. The threesome
got out at the trailhead for Mono Meadow.
Their backpacks were mostly empty: “I had
a sleeping bag and a jacket. I was wearing
tennis shoes.” The plan was to be in and out,
thick ice. “I remember chopping the ice,” he
says. “We dug one hole, didn’t find anything.
It was, like, three feet thick, and when you’re
chopping the ice, it splashes back at you.”
Their hands stung from the cold. When they
broke through, Strader went back to the shore
and found some fuel line among the scattered
debris the rangers had left behind. He bent
it into an L shape and stuck his arm into the
frigid water. With his face lowered into the
three-foot-deep hole, he smelled the fuel in
the lake. He probed until he struck something
solid and buoyant eight or nine feet from the
hole. The bobbing gunnysack was almost too
heavy to lift out. The friends yanked until it
slid onto the ice like a wet seal. The burlap
was sewn at the top. A marijuana leaf was
stenciled on the side. “It was wrapped with,
like, three layers of plastic, but the buds were
soaking wet. Some parts were more exposed
to the airplane fuel than others.”
Grinning, nervous, they sized up their
haul and divided it up quickly. Marijuana
was a Schedule I drug, and the quantity they
were hiking out with — measured in pounds,
not ounces — would mean a certain felony. “It
was trippy,” he says. “We were pretty scared.
The salvage crew
found Glisky’s
body submerged
in the cockpit.
“We didn’t have a headlamp, so I was feeling
the trail with my feet.” With no ride back,
they hiked all the way down to Camp 4.
Strader’s parents were staying at the Upper
Pines campground, just on the other side of
Yosemite Village. “I stashed the wet weed
in my tent and then went to see my parents.”
In lean times, when pot was a prized commodity, it might have been possible to get rid
of a large quantity of the stuff in the park. But
by April of 1977, Yosemite was awash with
weed. People called the new stuff “airplane”
and “crash buds.” Laced with traces of aviation fuel, it occasionally sparked and crackled
when smoked, and the hit was harsh.
Strader knew they had to get out of the
park, so he made an excuse to ditch his family and borrowed a VW Bug from one of the
Stonemasters. The friends filled the Bug’s
front trunk with pot. When it didn’t all fit,
they put the remaining weed in the backseat
and set out for Los Angeles, where one of the
climbers knew a dealer.
They didn’t get far.
“We were just past Yosemite West on
our way down toward Oakhurst and we got
a f lat tire. We were like, ‘Son of a bitch!’ ”
The biggest
windfalls
from the pot
exceeded
$20,000 —
a tremendous
amount
of money
in 1977.
(continued on page 88)
J U LY/A U G U S T 2 0 1 6
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THE LEGEND OF DOPE LAKE continued from page 75
down at him. They had slept on the edge of a
school playground.
The trio spent the rest of the day trying to locate the dealer, but the weed in
the trunk was getting musty. They pooled
their money and rented adjoining suites in
a motel. After a trip to a hardware store, they
spread the soggy buds on a tarp and turned
on heat lamps. On the third day, someone
knocked on their door. Without removing
the chain, Strader opened it a crack. It was
only housekeeping, and Strader shooed her
away. When he turned he saw one of his
companions clutching a pistol. “It turned
out he was AWOL from the Army. Right
then I was just like, ‘I don’t want anything
to do with this.’ But I had no money left, so I
was kind of stuck with these guys.”
Strader convinced his companions to get
out of L.A. They drove to the desert near
Palm Springs and found some rocks off a
lonely road on which to dry their weed. Then
they drove to the Bay Area, where he found
someone to buy a portion of the stash. He
used the cash to buy a Greyhound ticket to his
hometown, near Sacramento, where he gave
his share of the pot to a high school friend.
“I just said to him, ‘Get what you can for
it, make some money, and give me whatever,’” Strader says. “I’m not a drug dealer. It
was such a scary, eye-opening experience.”
word had spread
outside the park and people were coming by
the VW busload from Fresno, San Jose, and
Berkeley. Ron Lykins, the Ahwahnee waiter
who first found the wing, knew something
was up when the climbers started leaving
huge tips. He kicked himself for being so
close to the score of a lifetime, only to walk
right by it.
“When spring came you started hearing
all these stories. Being the guy who found
the wing, I said, ‘I got to go up there.’ So
after work one day, I took a backpack with
nothing but a sleeping bag and a little food
in it, an ice ax, and some plastic bags. We
hiked up there in the middle of the night.”
At the height of this so-called gold rush,
20 or more people were mining the lake at
the same time. Vern Clevenger, who had
spent the winter in nearby Mammoth,
returned to the park and went up with a
group of five. “We had heard there wasn’t
a lot of dope sitting on top of the lake anymore,” he says. “My girlfriend’s father was
head of the road crew, so we stole his chainsaw and carried it up there. We took turns
sawing through the ice. That’s how we got a
lot of marijuana from the lake.”
But with so many outsiders, the mood
was tense. “By then there were a lot of shitty
people up there,” Clevenger says. “Drug dealers, low-life types from the Central Valley.
Some guy came over and started to take our
stuff, and one of my friends who was a real
BY EASTE R WE E KE N D
hard-ass held this saw out about three inches
from the guy’s neck. He was saying, ‘I’m
gonna fuck with you, don’t come any closer.’
So that was the end of that. Honestly, by then
we had too much to carry out anyway.”
The rangers weren’t oblivious. As head of
search and rescue, Tim Setnicka began to
hear insinuating comments from the climbers he worked with and with whom he had
developed a mutual respect. The road crews
started reporting an unusual amount of
traffic near Mono Lake Trail. And the commercial diver who helped the rangers excavate the lake in February called dive officer
Butch Farabee from his shop in Fresno with
an odd report. There had been a sudden
rush on rental equipment. All these young
kids who had never gone diving suddenly
seemed intent on learning in Yosemite.
It was obvious to anyone living in the
small community of Yosemite Valley that
something had changed. In addition to
throwing money around in the Village, a few
climbers — the same ones who dived dumpsters for food — bought used cars and new
packs. All of a sudden there was plenty of
nice climbing equipment in Camp 4. Strader
got his rack, which he would use to climb El
Capitan four times in 1977.
Some of the climbers squirreled away their
earnings. John Bachar, the Stonemaster and
famous solo climber, was rumored to have
used cash from his haul to help fund a successful climbing gear company. (Bachar died
in a climbing accident in 2009, so it’s impossible to confirm.) Lykins, the waiter who first
discovered the wing, traded his windfall for a
couple of years of college tuition. Vern Clevenger bought his first Nikon with the Lower
Merced weed money — Clevenger has since
become an acclaimed nature photographer.
There were climbing trips to France and Asia
and blowouts that are still the stuff of legend. It’s likely the biggest windfalls exceeded
$20,000, a tremendous amount of money in
1977. But the climbers tended to live fast, and
in most cases the money didn’t last long. The
story has fared better. The crash grew mythic
in barroom retellings and has been conveyed
in fragments in books and newspapers, as
well as in the 2014 documentary about
Yosemite’s climbing scene,Valley Uprising.
ON APRIL 13, WHICH WOULD later be known
as Big Wednesday, six armed rangers boarded
a Huey and stormed Lower Merced Pass
like death from above. “By all reports it was
like ants scattering,” recalls Setnicka, who
was on the radio at the time of the April offensive. “The people up there had created this
infrastructure kind of like the Vietcong put
in some areas of Vietnam — makeshift housing and tents, fire pits, all sorts of tarps. They
picked up digging equipment wherever they
could. It was really caveman technology.”
The Park Service was embarrassed that
the crash site had been discovered. “We
underestimated the entrepreneurial spirit
of certain members of the community,” says
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Setnicka. Rangers were posted along the
trails leading away from the lake in order
to catch people f leeing. For all the melee,
Clevenger and a companion were the only
two arrested. They were told to report to the
park’s federal magistrate the next day, but
the arrest was later nullified, thanks to a due
process violation. No one was ever convicted
for their involvement in Dope Lake.
After the siege, two rangers who had
served in the military were given rations and
equipment and sent to guard the lake. The
pair lived in a tent for 17 days. They rigged
trip wires to ration cans and kept their pugnosed .38 pistols at the ready.
“We caught about six parties going up to
the lake,” recalls Jim Tucker, one of the two
rangers. “We separated them and interrogated them. Most were not climbers. Word
had leaked out by then.” For two months
rangers rotated in to keep watch over the
lake. Hopeful late arrivals kept showing up
with visions of a lake full of pot. Some were
woefully ill-prepared for spring hiking at
high elevation. One group was lost for a
week without adequate food before finally
stumbling across a trail crew.
It wasn’t until mid-June that the lake
thawed suitably for a salvage operation.
On June 16, a local salvage company began
pulling the fuselage out of the water. During the operation, the body of Jeff Nelson
floated to the surface. Jon Glisky’s body was
strapped inside the cockpit, as Pam Glisky
had seen in her dream.
After cooperating with the DEA, Pam
laid low for years. Following her mother’s
advice, she chose not to identify Jon’s body
after it was recovered. Her mother thought
it would be too traumatic, and in a small way
Pam wanted to keep hope alive.
“When you love someone like that, you
aren’t thinking in any kind of practical way.
I had people we knew, people who knew
Jon, telling me he was still alive and living
in Cancún. That’s what I chose to believe.”
It wasn’t until nearly 30 years later, when a
high school friend named Rick Schloss began
investigating the crash for a book, that Pam
finally got closure. Schloss said he had a picture to show her, but only if she wanted to see
it. It was an evidentiary photo taken during
the salvage operation. When Pam saw her
husband’s body, she broke down. To this day
her feeling is that the cause of her husband’s
crash has never been adequately investigated.
It was deemed an accident in a brief report
by the NTSB, but the odd circumstances of
the wreck, along with Jon Glisky’s suspicions
immediately before his final flight, have kept
the question alive for her.
She is happy that something good came of
it all. When Schloss began to tell her about
what went on in Yosemite in the months following the crash, she couldn’t help but laugh.
It was her husband’s kind of scene.
“The climbers got a chance to push the
limits of their sport. Jon would have loved
that.” MJ