Don was born on April 17, 1933 in North Dakota to John Engdahl and Bertha Gierke Engdahl (John and Bertha were born of immigrants). He is survived by his wife, Cyndy; daughter and sons Lee David Engdahl, Eric Max Engdahl, Chris Niels Engdahl, Jane Marissa Engdahl, Garth Russell Engdahl and granddaughters Robin and Haley Stephan Engdahl.
Don’s passion for life was driven by his deep desire to learn about everything. His
curiosity took him in many directions. In the late 1950s he stitched a hot air balloon from war surplus parachutes and was the first balloon pilot licensed by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). In the 1960s he designed and built with his own hands a house with a thin-shell concrete roof. In 1970 he became the first man to hike the entire coast of California. This first-hand inspection of the coast and articles in the San Francisco Chronicle fueled the movement that led to the passage of the 1972 Coastal Initiative and to the 1976 California Coastal Act. That landmark legislation embodied the vision of an environmentally sound coast open to public enjoyment. It included provisions for a state-long Coastal Trail.First a newspaperman, principally in Sonoma County, California for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, Don had a second career with the State of California Department of Water Resources. There he drew on his physics background, designing and building a salt-gradient solar pond systems with applications of generating heat, electricity, water desalination and thermal energy storage -- the Los Banos Demonstration Desalting Facility.
Don left the workaday world in 1989 for perpetual motion in the mountains of Northern New Mexico: exploration with steam propulsion and ornithopters, sculpture with metal and found objects, and restoration of automobiles (he had an unfathomable passion for small French cars of the early 1960s).
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