For 42 years, Al Hendricks lived and worked where most Americans can only visit.
And for those 42 years, he made sure they could always visit.
Hendricks, who died last month in Montana, worked at 10 different national parks and monuments, including two of Utah’s mighty five and one — Great Basin — just outside the state.
“Al was not somebody who wanted his legacy to be a new visitor center or some new structure,” said Dave Worthington, chief of science and resource management at Grand Canyon National Park. He worked with Hendricks at Capitol Reef. “His legacy was what wasn’t built, what wasn’t paved during his tenure at the park.”
After graduating from the University of Wyoming, Hendricks joined the park service in 1970 at Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. Two years later, he moved to Utah to become the first backcountry ranger in Canyonlands National Park’s Maze district, the rugged section west of the Green River that is accessible only by four-wheel drive.
The story goes that the park’s chief ranger, Chuck Budge, gave him a map, a canteen and keys to a pickup truck with instructions to “go learn the district.
(National Park Service) Al Hendricks worked at 10 different national parks and monuments, including two of Utah’s five.
That was followed by stints in St. Croix National Scenic Riverway in Wisconsin and Minnesota and Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area in Pennsylvania. Then there was Yellowstone, where he spent winters commuting to work by cross-country skiing across the Old Faithful geyser basin.
After that came two more caves. First was Jewel Cave in South Dakota before he returned west for his first superintendent job at Lehman Caves National Monument in Nevada just over the state line from Utah.
It was a fortuitous time, as plans were in the works to create a new Great Basin National Park that included the caves. Hendricks worked with Nevada Sen. Harry Reid and his staff to identify the lands to include in the park, and he became its first superintendent in 1986.
Al Hendricks speaks at dedication ceremony for Great Basin National Park in 1986 in this uncredited photo.
While working at Great Basin, Hendricks took up a side job teaching geology at the high school in nearby Eskdale, Utah, which is home to a religious sect, the House of Aaron, a communal-living group.
There he met a 10-year-old student named Daniel Sturlin, and they built a lifelong relationship. While there was never any legal adoption, Sturlin is listed as Hendricks’ son in his obituary. Hendricks was never married, but “he kind of morphed into a dad and a grandpa for my kids,” said Sturlin, who now lives outside Boise.
The House of Aaron has a long history with music, and in a place with only a few hundred people, there is a community orchestra.. “It was a place that believed that music was a very important part of its religious history,” Sturlin said.
As it happens, Hendricks also played the bassoon, and was recruited to join the orchestra.
Hendricks also organized outdoor trips for young people in the community, including ski trips, Sturlin said. “Al loved to travel and go places with people.”
Next came the superintendent position at Crater Lake National Park in Oregon, where the long and heavy winters brought more than 500 inches of snow. “It was his least favorite assignment,” Sturlin said.
Then in 1998 he took his last job as superintendent of Capitol Reef.
“He cared deeply and passionately about Capitol Reef National Park,” said Nan Anderson, who lives outside Capitol Reef in Torrey and worked with Hendricks when she was executive director of the Utah Tourism Industry Association.
Anderson called Hendricks an “unsung hero” of the park for spearheading the Capitol Reef Field Station near the old Sleeping Rainbow Ranch on Pleasant Creek. Now operated by Utah Valley University, the station offers students and scientists a chance to live and work inside the park. “Al really took that whole initiative under his wing.”
Hendricks sought to preserve the primitive nature of Capitol Reef, including successfully fighting to keep the Burr Trail from being paved inside the park.
Worthington said Hendricks was passionate about protecting park resources in the face of pressure from surrounding landowners. “I learned about standing up for doing what’s right from Al to assure that our neighbors — private individuals, county commissioners and the Bureau of Land Management — also adhered to the law.”
“Al was probably the most knowledgeable person in the park service on matters of rights of way,” said Cordell Roy, a former park superintendent who was the park service’s Utah state coordinator from 2003 to 2011. Roy said he and Hendricks became experts on RS 2477, the federal rule that governed roads across federal lands for more than a century. The rule has been litigated for decades in a battle between county governments claiming the roads and federal land managers who wanted maintain ecosystems. Roy said even the park service’s own attorneys couldn’t keep up with Hendricks’ knowledge of case law.
Hendricks was the best administrator Roy ever saw among park service superintendents because he could handle the details of procurement, legal matters and other administrative roles. “He was highly intelligent, well educated and well read.”
Hendricks also faced local blowback when he transferred ownership of three 500-year-old Native American shields to the Navajo Nation. The shields, which were found in the Capitol Reef area before it became a park, had been on display in the park’s visitor center,
“Being superintendent of a park in a rural area like that is really difficult,” Anderson said.
Hendricks retired from Capitol Reef and the park service in 2012, and he fulfilled his dream of a Montana retirement on ranch property near Ennis. He died of cancer in Ennis on July 16 at age 73.
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