Community gathers at Eszlinger WPA to honor Christopher Hendricks

Family members and community members returned to the Eszlinger Waterfowl Production Area on June 27 to honor Christopher Hendricks, turning the McIntosh County site where he died into a place of remembrance.

Hendricks was 30 and from Champlin, Minnesota. An obituary listed his birth date as Dec. 13, 1994 and his death date as Nov. 12, 2025. The McIntosh County Sheriff’s Department said he was waterfowl hunting with a friend when he swam out to help a dog that was struggling in the water. Another account said he died after trying to save a dog stuck on ice during a North Dakota hunting trip.

The memorial brought the family back to the same public landscape tied to that loss. The Eszlinger Waterfowl Production Area is part of the federal waterfowl production area system, which preserves wetlands and grasslands for waterfowl breeding and nesting habitat and allows public use under U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service rules. In practical terms, that means the gathering took place on land meant for both conservation and access, a setting that gave the remembrance a stronger connection to the outdoors and to the hunting traditions familiar across the region.

The Eszlinger name also carries a conservation history of its own. Ducks Unlimited identified Delbert and Donna Eszlinger in a 2016 piece about conservation easements in North Dakota, linking the site’s name to wetland and grassland preservation. That background matters because the memorial was not held at an abstract location. It was held at a tract of protected land whose identity already reflected stewardship, habitat protection and local use.

For families in McIntosh County and nearby communities, the June 27 gathering showed how memory is often preserved in the open, on places people know by name and by use. The return to Eszlinger WPA tied Hendricks’s life to the landscape itself, keeping his story connected to a public place that neighbors, hunters and conservation-minded residents recognize. It was a private remembrance, but it also became part of the public record of how communities in this part of North Dakota honor loss and preserve shared history.