A young camper, wiping the sleep from her eyes, stepped from a tent just in time to see a Cessna Skywagon buzz to within 50 feet of the water and dump 2,300 brook trout.

Just as quickly as it appeared, the small single-engine plane was gone. Seconds later, the woodpeckers sounded again and the girl returned to her tent. Every summer and fall for nearly 50 years, the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources (DWR) has stocked the state's highest and most remote fisheries this way.

Planes have replaced milk cans and horses as the means of planting backcountry lakes. What once took fisheries officials months can now be done in a week or two with a higher survival rate for the fish.

"We wondered how the fish got here," said Iowa resident Tom Abbitt after witnessing a drop at Crystal Lake. "We thought they were spraying for mosquitoes."

Because the fish average 2 1/2 to 3 inches, it's hard to tell that it's trout actually dropping from the plane, but careful observers will see individual fish hit the water.

"We keep them under 3 inches so we can stock more fish and not have to haul so many pounds," said Ted Hallows, director of the DWR's Kamas Fish Hatchery and organizer of aerial stocking across Utah. "The fact they are smaller also allows them to kind of flutter down to the water instead of hitting it hard and popping their air sacs."

DWR pilots don't remember ever missing the water during a drop, but on some small lakes, the fish will hit from "shore to shore" and a few may drift into the trees.

According to Hallows, about 150 Uinta lakes and an additional 100 fisheries across the state get an aerial drop every year to sustain fishable populations. Lakes on the Wasatch, Manti, Boulder, La Sal and Cedar mountains and some around the Fish Lake area are included in the annual stocking.

Brook and cutthroat trout are the primary fish planted in high mountain lakes. Arctic grayling, rainbow trout and two hybrid trout - splake and tiger - are also on the delivery schedule. The brook trout are planted as soon as the backcountry is free of snow and ice. Cutthroat trout are planted in the fall.

Chief DWR pilot Clair Shaffer has been making fish bombing runs for more than a decade. He says the job is exhilarating, but not nearly as dangerous as the general public might perceive it to be.

"You need to have a good feel for the plane. You need to know what the gauges say without looking at them. If you start looking inside [the plane] too much, you become part of the granite wall," he said.

Pilots Shaffer and Craig Hunt do aerial drops for the DWR and help with waterfowl counts, some big-game counts and radio telemetry surveys. They occasionally get help from Highway Patrol pilot Steve Biggs.

Shaffer reports no harrowing experiences during his years behind the controls, which he attributes to pre-emptive planning.

"If the weather is bad, we don't go. If the wind picks up, we call it quits. If something seems odd with the plane or if one of us doesn't quite feel up to par, we scrap the flight," he said. "It is either a safe day to stock fish or it isn't, and we don't mess with that."

(While there have been no incidents involving planes flown by DWR pilots, the federal Wildlife Services program has lost planes and several employees in the past decade while shooting coyotes. And a DWR employee was killed in a hired helicopter accident in 2001 during a moose transplant operation at Mountain Dell Reservoir.)

For a fish drop, the back seats in the Cessna are removed, leaving room for seven compartments. The pilots have triggers that allow them to open the compartments - one at a time or all at once - and dump fish when the time is right. During a recent Uinta Mountain flight to stock lakes in the Duchesne and Rock Creek drainages, the plane carried 12,200 fish weighing a total of 91 pounds.

Biologists ride with the pilots to help locate the lakes. Global Positioning System coordinates are also used, but Shaffer says even those are misleading at times. While stocking waters on the north slope of the Uintas last week, Shaffer and a biologist followed the GPS numbers to a lake, but it didn't seem like the right one. Going by memory and map, they found the right lakes without the aid of technology.

Shaffer has stocked fish in lakes with moose frolicking in the water and with people floating on rafts, canoes or tubes. When people are occupying the only spot on the lake for a drop, pilots will do a fly-over as a warning and then make the drop on a second attempt.

Shaffer doesn't remember the story, but Hallows tells of a guy in a float tube having a few fish land on him during a drop at Silver Lake in Big Cottonwood Canyon. "They are just little fish. They don't hurt," Hallows said.

Shaffer has never seen an aerial drop from the ground, but he sometimes catches a glimpse from the plane in the right situation.

"With the sun just right and if I bank in just right way I can see the fish. . . . They just glisten. It really is a beautiful sight," he said.

brettp@sltrib.com

Aerial stocking by the numbers

Average size of fish: 2 1/2 -3 inches

Average altitude of plane when fish are dropped: 70-80 feet

Year the Division of Wildlife Resources began aerial stocking: 1956

Number of lakes that can be stocked on each flight: 7

Number of Utah high-mountain lakes stocked with a plane: 250

Calls made to Homeland Security by citizen who mistook stocking for water poisoning: 1