A DROP FROM THE BUCKET : Golden Trout Are Planted by Airplane in Sierra Lakes

MAMMOTH LAKES, Calif. —  “You’re down and armed,” co-pilot Kevin McBride tells pilot Ron VanBenthuysen, who banks the plane over a ridge and dives into his run.

The bomb-bay doors open, VanBenthuysen levels off, thumbs a button on his wheel and-- whoosh-- the plane drops its load.

Fish away!

Trout planting doesn’t get any more sophisticated than this. It’s a sharp contrast to the way the golden trout fingerlings started their cycle in the spring as tiny eggs packed part-way on mules from the remote Cottonwood Lakes down to the Hot Creek Hatchery for spawning.

The golden trout-- Salmo aguabonita-- are a special project of the California Department of Fish and Game, which uses its twin-engined, modified Beechcraft King Air to plant about 350,000 two-inch babies in High Sierra lakes each year. That once was done from muleback, too, until the operation became airborne after World War II, about the time the California legislature designated the golden trout as the state fish in 1947.

And the golden trout tale begins long before that--long before the turn of the century, when the DFG started transplanting goldens around the Sierra; long before 1876, when Col. Sherman Stevens put 13 goldens in a coffee pot to take them from Mulkey Creek on the Kern Plateau to Cottonwood Creek so he would have some fishing near his sawmill.

The eastern slope of the Sierras had no native trout, but the goldens of the Kern have been traced back to the Pleistocene Epoch of more than 20,000 years ago, perhaps the region’s only native fish to survive the Ice Age. Zoologist David Starr Jordan described the golden--its sides either brassy or truly golden--as “the most beautiful of our Western trout.”

Today they live in about 300 cool, high-country lakes and some 700 miles of streams along the Sierra crest and John Muir Trail, their purity of strain protected by edict of the State Fish and Game Commission.

Goldens don’t compete well with other fish. Brown trout eat them. Brook trout eat their food. Rainbows crossbreed with them. But left alone in a closed lake without inlets or outlets for spawning, they won’t breed at all--nor will they breed in a hatchery without Alpine conditions.

So since 1918 the DFG has maintained a spawning program at the Cottonwood Lakes near the southern end of the Sierra. During the spring, there are always two biologists living there in a small, 1930s sheet-metal cabin, without running water. They remove the eggs from the brooders and pack them down to the hatchery. In late summer, the fingerlings are returned to the lakes, including the Cottonwoods.

Phil Pister, a DFG fishery biologist based in Bishop for 36 years, may know more than anyone about High Sierra trout in general and goldens in particular, and he doesn’t like what he knows.

“The golden trout is kind of a glamour fish,” Pister says. “People love to catch ‘em.”

A golden will fight like a rainbow, but some anglers may be disappointed in its size. Many are not only short but skinny.

“A big golden trout would be 12 inches.” Pister said. “In a stream, six or seven inches.”

In the early years of the program, California was generous in allowing the goldens to be transplanted to other Western states, and New York, England and Brazil, among other places. The largest ever caught in California was 9 pounds 8 ounces, taken from Virginia Lake in Fresno County in 1952. But the world-record golden, 11 pounds, was caught in ’48 on Cooks Lake--in Wyoming.

If the legislature hadn’t banned further exportation of goldens in 1939, they probably would have then.

“This was upsetting to many of our politicians,” Pister said.

And because goldens are the state fish, one must wonder if the program hasn’t been shaded by politics. Pister has long believed--as he said in a talk in 1976--that they were victims of a “lack of rhyme or reason in the early distribution of fish throughout the High Sierra.”

Chris Boone, manager of the Hot Creek Hatchery, said: “You’re talking about some expensive fish. The golden trout program is a real expensive operation.”

But flying low over several dozen back-country lakes during the air plant, an observer didn’t see one angler fishing--not even a hiker.

Asked if the project was worth it, Pister said: “That’s a good question. In retrospect, I wonder if we really did the right thing.”

Moving them into the High Sierra didn’t really save them, he said. “They would have stayed pure in the Upper Kern (River).”

And they haven’t exactly thrived in their 20th-Century habitat. Pister said that the DFG tagged and planted 1,750 brook trout in one such lake in 1951, then found some in the ‘70s that had grown very little.

“A lot of those high-mountain lakes are so pure they aren’t really adaptable to trout,” he said. “There are no nutrients. You’re dealing with water that’s more pure than steam iron water. They eat up all the food and just sit there in near starvation for the next quarter-century.

“This is not to say that what we’re doing has not been a good thing, but that you should never be satisfied with the status quo. We may have a whole new line of thinking to do.”

The hatchery crew has been up since 4 a.m., loading five-gallon milk cans with water and fingerlings and placing them in the back of a pickup truck to take to the airstrip along U.S. 395, two miles away. Oxygen tanks feed air into the cans through plastic tubes. The water is iced down to 40 degrees to slow the fingerlings’ metabolism.

The plane was purchased primarily for aerial trout planting, but since the DFG uses it only eight weeks a year for that purpose, dumping goldens and other species around the state, it also is used to ferry DFG commissioners and department officials and is occasionally chartered to the governor--sort of an “Air Fish One” of California.

The passenger seats have been removed and replaced by an elaborate array of stainless steel tanks designed by DFG Chief Pilot-Warden Bob Cole. The cans are poured into corresponding numbered tanks in the plane. This flight will plant 28,000 fingerlings in 18 lakes. The fish are squeezed in like sardines.

McBride and VanBenthuysen alternate in the pilot’s seat on their flights, the other operating the lap-top panel of switches and yellow lights that control which tanks will be dropped into the hopper to be released through the bomb bays by the pilot. The co-pilot tells the pilot when the designated fish have been dropped into the hopper and the bomb bay has been activated: “You’re down and armed.”

During an hour’s flight, they constantly consult charts and old black-and-white aerial photos to be sure they are hitting the right lakes, lest they mix the goldens with other species.

“Some of these pictures were shot in the late ‘30s from a P-38,” McBride said. “But they’re still good. The lakes haven’t changed.”

The DFG has seven pilot-wardens, who live all year for the trout plants.

“It gives us a chance to play bombardier,” McBride said.

Unless there is a full load, they will take a passenger.

Boone said: “We have a tough time keeping enough people in the hatchery when it’s planting time. Everybody wants to fly.”

It’s an exciting trip, swooping from 10,000 to 14,000 feet among the peaks and ridges at 160 knots, diving at 50-degree angles to drop into a tiny lake as low as 200 feet--a lake that may be really no more than a pond.

VanBenthuysen banks the plane sharply to check his drop--dead center, the tiny fish sprinkle the surface, sparkling in the sun.

“How big was that lake?” he is asked.

“About that big,” he says, smiling and holding his thumb and forefinger two inches apart.

The pilots flying air plants have never had an accident. They are cautious not to fly on windy days that could throw even the big Beech into a mountainside.

And, McBride said: “We always approach a lake downhill so we have a place to bail out.”

He didn’t mean literally “bail out”--just that they would rather drop over a ridge and fly toward the open end of a canyon. It’s tricky, because to prevent the water in the tanks from rising to the top, the pilot must bank the plane into a dive to maintain positive gravity.

Hardly any of the fish are lost in the drops. They are so small that they just flutter into the water.

Sometimes they surprise anglers.

McBride said: “We have ‘planted’ a few boats over the years.”

Back in the ‘60s, before Cole devised the bomb-bay system, Boone rode in the back and dumped the cans out the door when the pilot yelled, “Now!”

It’s more fun the way they do it now.

“I don’t know what’s a good ride at Disneyland,” Boone said, “but this tops it all.”