Teaching fish to fly

Up here, finding a safe place to land would be more than a little inconvenient.

It’s a stunning Colorado morning in the high country—cloudless azure skies, almost no wind or turbulence, glassy lakes reflecting the deep blue canopy overhead and dusky gray rocks. The IMAX view of this daunting scenery through my Cessna 185 Skywagon’s open doorway is epic. A short distance ahead and to the right of us is another Skywagon, painted hi-vis orange and white, one of four owned by Colorado Parks and Wildlife.

Colorado photographer Mitch Bowers and I are up in this beautiful but airplane-unfriendly land to document something that at first seems rather frivolous—unless you’re an avid fisherman. The mission: delivering thousands of cutthroat trout fingerlings to alpine lakes.

At the controls of the lead Cessna is one of Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s veteran pilots, Denise Joi, the agency’s first female pilot, who has been with the department for more than seven years. She is no stranger to flying around mountains, having started her professional flying career in Boulder, Colorado, towing gliders with a Piper Super Cub and Pawnee, flying skydivers in a Cessna 206 and 180, followed by a couple of seasons in Alaska, mostly in a 206, but also getting some stick time in a Piper Super Cub, American Champion Scout, Helio Courier, and a Maule.

As we fly loosely alongside, Joi slows her Skywagon, pulls 20 degrees of flaps, and studies the terrain, visualizing the probable airflow around the confined lake. She plans her approach, visualizing her outs (there always has to be more than one), then dips into the rocky cirque, going in with her awareness at full extension, expecting things—and her plan—to change, which they often do. As she drops to about a hundred feet above the glassy lake, a burst of water vapor appears below and behind the tail of her aircraft, delivering a carefully measured pod of young fish to the first lake of the morning.

Welcome to your new home, little ones. Y’all be careful out there…be especially wary of humans waving sticks in the air above the water.

CPW learned that flying the Skywagon between 100 and 150 feet above the water at around 90 miles per hour gives the “flying fish” a fighting chance at survival when they smack the cold water below.

As she crosses the shoreline of this small lake, Joi pulls up, banks, raises the flaps, and flies directly to the next lake for another drop. Joi says she thinks of these deliveries like a complex instrument approach with precise airspeed and altitude control, step-down altitudes, and missed approach points.

Every time she descends into a new drainage, even if it’s just a short distance from where she dropped her previous load, she does a wind turn—a constant angle-of-bank three-sixty—to update the always-variable winds around the next lake. Assuming the next lake is like the last lake will get you killed in this rarified world; the highest lakes she drops fish into are at 13,000 feet msl.

Circuitous journey

Growing up in New Hampshire, the solitude of the woods was Joi’s refuge, her happy place, and she saw flying as an escape from her difficult home life. Without any aviation role models in her family, however, she had to forge her own unique path to the cockpit, one of twists and turns. After many false starts and several moves, she landed in Colorado because she wanted to fly in the mountains, and she found a home and a mentor at the Boulder Municipal Airport. She was 26 years old.

She says her circuitous path taught her much more about herself than flying. “I’m more proud of the things I’ve learned about myself than anything I’ve ever flown.” Hers is a lifelong drive to live the experience she chooses, not to build time toward the “next.” When asked, “What makes a good pilot?” she’s quick to answer: “It’s the one who is always willing to be a student.” A word she often uses to describe these best pilots is humility. When flying in high-risk places like she does, that humility comes from self-awareness and self-management, which she feels are just as important as task management or “stick and rudder skills.”

Joi had almost 2,000 hours of flying experience with 500 in tailwheel aircraft when she got the job with CPW, yet she went through a rigorous screening, which included three hours of flying with each of the other three CPW pilots in real, day-long work missions. The other pilots closely scrutinized her decision-making skills, what she did when presented with novel challenges, and how she performed when tired. “At the end of the day,” she says, “they want to know if you are teachable.” There’s that need for humility again.

Still, she didn’t get to fly these fish-dropping missions solo until her third summer with the department. “I don’t pinch myself because I now have this amazing j-o-b, I pinch myself because of the self-growth that I’ve really worked hard at, and cultivated.”

Flying about 500 hours a year, she now has more than 3,000 hours in “her” Skywagon—the CPW’s four Skywagons are each assigned to an individual pilot and are based around the state: Colorado Springs, Fort Collins, Rifle, and Montrose. Joi’s 185 is a standard 1979 model, with vortex generators but no autopilot, and the factory-installed, normally aspirated 300-horsepower Continental engine. That gives her the possibility of a (somewhat) enthusiastic climb response at high altitudes when she pushes the little black knob forward and needs to climb away from sinking air or rising terrain.

Preflight planning

Wildlife pilots like Joi start early in the day, before air masses begin mixing, convection starts, or thunderstorms develop, all of which increase the risk of operating a heavily laden Skywagon in the high country. If winds in the mountains are above 20 knots, they stay on the ground, or call it off if airborne. These pilots don’t fly unless the conditions are right—like they are on this morning. The department gives them full authority to go or not, with no questions asked.

Her small fry passengers, raised at a nearby hatchery in Rifle Falls, arrived at the Rifle Airport by truck this morning. A master list from the nursery shows the number of fish needed to go to each lake. Joi and her crew from CPW carefully weigh and load the fish into nine separate tubes in a large aluminum tank installed just behind the Skywagon’s two front seats. Each lake has a unique code, corresponding to a GPS waypoint in the Skywagon’s avionics. From that GPS waypoint list, Joi creates a “flight plan,” plotting a route that will efficiently cover each lake.

On the first trip of the morning, with a tube full of fingerlings in water for each lake, the Skywagon is about 250 pounds below its maximum gross weight, and the center of gravity is slightly aft because of the hopper tank. The tank carries 2,000 to 3,000 fish, and their exit is controlled by the discharge of each tube separately with a button on the control wheel.

Most of the lakes Joi seeds with fish are above timberline, roughly 11,000 to 11,500 feet in craggy, steep-sided cirques at the bottom of a bowl. There are no roads up here; this is the only way to supply these areas with fish.

The CPW pilots are done for the day by 11 a.m., after delivering up to six loads—anywhere between 6,000 and 26,000 fish. Being finished with your flying before lunch is a great rule of thumb for safely flying any kind of mission in the mountains.

There are two main reasons for fish seeding: One is to provide more fish for anglers to catch, of course, but another important reason is to help boost populations of threatened and endangered native species. Contrary to popular notion, there are no tax dollars funding this operation; rather, income from angler and hunter license fees, and from sales of the state’s Heritage Stamps finance it.

CPW stocks 90 million fish annually, although not all get to fly to their new homes in the orange and white 185s; most are delivered by truck. Joi and the other three pilots on the team will drop 250,000 to 275,000 fish into 200 to 300 non-road accessible lakes each year.

Happy anglers who make the trek up to these high lakes often wave as Joi flies by, and she often sees campers or hikers enjoying the quiet solitude in Colorado’s high country.

Other Skywagon missions

Although at one time, CPW flew the Skywagons off-airport and into unimproved backcountry landing areas, they no longer have a need for that. The utility Cessna’s high-wing configuration, robust power, and, interestingly, the manual flaps which allow immediate configuration changes on approach and departures, are perfect for this mission.

In addition to “teaching fish to fly,” the CPW 185s are used for animal population surveys; tracking GPS-collared animals including deer, elk, and mountain lions; waterfowl counts; eagle nesting surveys; and flying cover to monitor operations when doing helicopter animal captures. Sometimes they even patrol for poaching. But for Joi, fish stocking is her favorite mission at CPW. It’s certainly the most challenging, and she gets to fly in the stunning high country of Colorado. Joi is passionate about her work: “It gives me purpose. I make a difference in the world—just a small piece, but part of the equation. It’s very gratifying.”

Over the horizon

Will drones someday replace the department’s Skywagons? Possibly. Like many organizations, Joi says there are ongoing conversations about that subject. The department has tried using drones to do some of the work of the Skywagons, but the solution hasn’t proven workable—yet. As cameras and unmanned aircraft systems improve, though, surveys by drone at least will undoubtedly be more frequent.

“The biggest issue,” she says, “is the transfer of tribal knowledge from the pilots who have learned how to perform this challenging work over decades.” That unique knowledge, as in many areas of our world, is fading with each retirement. One pilot retired last year, and another has been considering it. She wonders if she’s witnessing the end of an era, when pilots did these amazing jobs with these amazing airplanes, yet she is grateful that she got the chance to do this flying, and she’s proud to have made her dream of flying in the mountains come true.

At some point, the department will probably contract some of the work to helicopters or drones, but until then, she’s living a life of meaning in an airplane that is designed just for this kind of dream.

Michael Maya Charles is a mentor, speaker, consultant, flight instructor, and author of Artful Flying. artfulpublishing.com