by Jeff Olsen

Recently, Mike Carisch, a bearded gent who a century ago would have been a barnstorming pilot during the Roaring Twenties, was practicing a nifty maneuver lowering a 100-pound bucket through tall trees into a narrow opening to scoop water out of a little pond.

Call it threading the needle.

Mike made it look easy as he then ascended high above the tree line with a bucket attached to a 125-foot synthetic rope before heading east for a practice drop over a large orange target and saturating an imaginary blaze.

"It's not too difficult because I do a lot of that," he said later, ad...