I can remember in ’61 and ’62, going to Aspen and Pinocchio’s, some of the other places. It was just before the Beatles and all that.
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“Then I taught myself how to play the banjo and the guitar and about that time, the Beach Boys got popular. “My parents made me learn the piano,” Heckendorf said. It was at Colorado Academy that his interest in rock ’n’ roll led him to form a garage band with a few classmates.
Heckendorf bounced between public schools and Colorado Academy, a military prep school, as a young man. In the fourth grade, the Heckendorfs sold the Blanca Trinchera and moved to Littleton. It’s a wonderful, wonderful lifestyle, but it’s hard work, and I used to always watch the planes going over, thinking, I really, really, really want to do that.” She’d let me go up with the instructor after her lesson was finished.
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“Then my mom got her pilot’s license in Monte Vista. “My dad would hire planes a lot because we wintered sheep out in western Kansas and with the different ranches and stuff and I couldn’t get enough of it,” Heckendorf said.
He grew up on ranches in the ’50s and ’60s, including the 87,000-acre Blanca Trinchera Ranch near Trinchera Peak in rural Costilla County, the Sheephorn Ranch in Eagle and Routt counties, and the Georgia Pass Ranch in Park County.
Heckendorf said he wanted to learn how to fly as far back as he can remember. He still keeps their corporate aircraft in the hangar at the Vail Valley Jet Center and still flies on the regular, continuing as a “Gold Seal” FAA instructor for his 52nd year in the cockpit. In his golden years, he has retired to Gypsum, where he lives with his beautiful wife, Carleen, and spends as much time as possible with his 13 grandchildren from the couple’s six children while also managing the couple’s small oil and gas business. His is a remarkable story, but Heckendorf, a fourth-generation Coloradan who grew up on big ranches, isn’t boastful as he tells it, plainly explaining how he went from punching cattle in rural Colorado to opening for Jefferson Airplane in the ’60s as a keyboardist in the psychedelic group The Rainy Daze to training military pilots in Hawaii before embarking on a highly successful career in corporate aviation. The award, which is the FAA’s highest civilian honor in the country, has only been handed out 33 times in its existence. When asked about the recent award he was nominated for and received from the Federal Aviation Administration, the Wright Brothers “Master Pilot” honor, Heckendorf mentioned that it might make for a nice story in the paper. And, yet, he’s as modest as a pair of worn jeans. He has been more places than you could even name, rubbed elbows with rock legends and the uber-wealthy, survived prostate cancer and an attempted hijacking where he took a bullet that missed his heart by the “thickness of a nickel” and set two sanctioned world speed records in the air. Life, singular, doesn’t do Heckendorf justice. Nate Peterson | - Do you like great stories? Well, you’ll like Robert Heckendorf, who’s got so many rich tales to tell, you’ll wonder how one man actually accomplished so much in one life. Robert Heckendorf, who has been flying since the late '60s, was instrumental in structuring an air show act that traveled internationally and featured seven Vietnam-era aircraft which he owned.
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