The True Story of What Happened When A Plane Loaded with 6,000 Pounds of Pot Crashed in Yosemite

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 flying helicopters under fire. Glisky laughed and put away several glasses of 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.

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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 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 flew 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 flew 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.

Before becoming a drug smuggler, John Glisky, right, flew helicopters in the Vietnam War.
Courtesy Rick Schloss
Ron Lykins and a co-worker 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.

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.
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