OK, it’s 6:30, we’re dressed in warm clothes: jeans, gloves, down jackets, hoodies, wool socks & desert shoes (not the white ones). It’s 42 degrees now. Let’s go check out this balloon flight. There is a large (football sized) field next to the campground between two long fingers of beautiful sandstone cliffs. At the base of these two cliffs, where they join, is Church Rock, a landmark in this area. At 7:00, the sun hits it just right.
But, it is a wide-open area and two balloons crews are not too hard to find. There were two balloons going up today and everyone is a crew member for the others. Balloons need big crews with all the paraphernalia that they have: the envelope (the actual balloon) the heavy duty fan, the basket and its parts, the ropes, the tanks of propane, the firing mechanism (what ever that’s called) and Jeff Haliczer of
offthewallballoon.com, one of the pilots, had a huge tarp that he laid down so the balloon wouldn’t touch the desert with all its problems like goats heads (prickly sticky things that hurt when they get into your socks and your fingers when you try to pull them off. Believe me, I know. these little suckers don’t give up easily.)
Check out this cool map in Jeff’s trailer: he travels all over with his balloons to enter contests and to be in Balloon Fiestas like the one in Albuquerque which just ended. I think that the balloons are in the states where he has flown his balloon and the paw prints are the states where his dog, Bandit, has traveled with him.
He takes his ‘shape’ balloons because they are the most popular with the crowds. Often those running balloon rallies put the names of the shapes into their program, like the one Jeff had today, ‘Off the Wall.’ This attracts more to the rally who want to see the particular shapes.
So, we became the helpers to get all the equipment lined up correctly, to get the lines straight and to hold them up so that the air can get into the balloon. I helped Jeff’s crew while Gary helped Mike Nelson of
indyballoonrides.com. Believe me, these lines were heavy and I was trying to hold them up for about 15 minutes. I kept changing arms, at one point I rested them on my head, then my shoulder - just to keep them up.
Meanwhile Gary’s helping with the other balloon and it slowly filled and rose up.
When it got high enough, they shot a flame into it to heat the air inside and make it rise faster. (Duh, I guess that’s why they call it a hot air balloon.) Then I look over and Gary is in Mike’s basket.
Holy crap, Gary’s taking off into the deep beyond and he’s got the car keys. Wow - get some good pictures, I yelled over to him. He waved.
They took off slowly into the sky.
Meawhile, we’re working on Jeff’s balloon which is a bit more elaborate. It’s called ‘Off the Wall’ and has 2 arms and 2 legs that have to fill with air also.
Finally, it’s filled, erect and Jeff tells me to hop in. Oh, wow. So, it’s Jeff, me and Bandit his dog flying high over Red Rock Canyon.
Wait a minute though. Something’s wrong. I’m above the canyon depending upon some hot air inside a nylon envelope to hold me up, I’m standing in an oversized picnic basket with no seat belts, no parachutes, no rescue harnesses and no life jackets. There’s no well-groomed, well-trained flight attendant to show me how to get off this thing (or to offer me an adult beverage to make the voyage ‘smoother.’) And, look, there’s fire up here. Big fires.
Egads, where’s the emergency exit? Not only that, I’m with some guy I just met an hour ago who’s in shorts, t-shirt and baseball cap. Holy cow, what am I doing here? Me, who likes to have both feet planted on terra firma.
Oh, yeah, I’ve taken absolute leave of my senses and have hopped willingly into the basket of a hot air balloon for the ride of my life. What a thrill. An absolute surprise and a thrill. Funny, it’s so quiet up here except when Jeff wants to rise and blows the flames into the balloon. and, since we’re moving at the speed of the wind, we don’t feel the wind in our hair. This was perfect for my first balloon ride: only me, Jeff and Bandit. I’ve seen those crowded balloon baskets with everyone packed in like sardines.
Here’s Gary and Mike tooling along the canyon floor with Church Rock in the background.
Not only do we not feel the wind movement but we can’t feel that we’re ascending. Jeff fires the afterburners, and 8 seconds later, slowly we’re way above where we were, looking down on the whorls in the rocks, the dry wash meandering up the canyon, the cliffs and the scrub brush covering the hills.
We can even see the train rumbling by. The trains out here are incredibly long. A friend of mine once counted the cars on a train and stopped at 100. There are 58 here in the picture but the train is still coming in to my sight.
Well, Jeff’s obviously not flying by the seat of his pants, he does have some controls. They tell how much propane we have left and, how hot the air inside the balloon is along with how high we are. It’s all in the physics. Hot air rises in cooler air because it has less mass. A cubic foot of air weighs about 28 grams, about an ounce. If you heat it by 100 degrees F, it weighs about 7 grams less, which is not much but enough to rise. So hot air balloons need to be huge - to lift 1000 lbs, you need about 65,000 cubic feet of hot air. (Don’t you just love it when I talk physics? Wait til you hear me talk geology.)
To rise, he hits those after burners which shoot a flame up into the balloon. To sink, he opens the flaps at the top of the balloon and lets the hot air out. It sounds easy peasy but Jeff is a licensed balloon pilot and has taken all the tests. So has Mike who is with Gary.
We flew over the hills that we had hiked several years ago. We could see the geological contours of the hills, we saw a hiker heading up to Pyramid Mt, we could see over to the contours of the earth. we could see Gallup in the background, we could see the myriad of canyons along the cliffs.
Hey, we could also see Mike and Gary in the other balloon, silhouetted against the sky.
Gary got some pictures of Jeff’s balloon with me in it rolling across the mezquite bushed in the canyon floor, when we were about to land.
Tricky think, landings, since Jeff could not control where the balloon went. Balloons go where the wind goes. What a surprise. Hey. look below, power lines. Don’t want to land on those, nor the shed below, nor the fence with the barbed wire. How about over there? Jeff blew those afterburners and we rose a bit. Slowly, slowly, we crawled over the mezquite bushes below and moved towards a large flat area. Perfect. Except that it was set up for campers and had electric poles and water spigots regularly spaced through it. But, land we did. I jumped out and joined the three others in the chase crew to move the balloon over to where it could be deflated, folded up and put back into the truck.
By the time we got there, I was huffing and puffing. In fact, with all the activity, I was really concerned that something was wrong with me. I was so out of beath and had no energy. A few steps hauling that basket and I was all in. That’s not like me. Usually my energy level is sky high.
Finally we got the balloon, the tarp and all the other paraphernalia folded and tucked into the trailer and headed back to the campground to chat about the day’s flights. There, they had a ceremony for Gary and me who have never been up in a balloon before. We all had a swig of champagne, Mike quoted the balloonist’s prayer:
May the winds welcome you with softness.
May the sun bless you with its warm hands.
May you fly so high and so well that God
joins you in laughter and sets you gently
back into the loving arms of Mother Earth
We clicked glasses, sipped and had a hearty laugh. What unexpected fun. And, we were going to sit in the RV and relax today. Ha, Ha.
Here are Mike, I and Jeff.
Gary and I then walked back to our RV. I told him that I was feeling a bit out of breath and that I might have a problem. Gary told me that he was out of breath too. Well, surpirse, we were at 7000’ or more, we hadn’t had any food today and it was 11:30, we weren’t in shape and thus both of us were a bit tired and out of breath. AND - we just had a swig of champagne. No wonder we’re a bit worn. Gotta work on that. But, obviously no big problem. Whew. I was actually a bit worried.
What serendipity (which is the name of one of Jeff’s balloons - he actually has 3). Luckily we were in this campground last night. Luckily we were walking in the evening and saw Mike getting his basket and balloon equipment ready. Luckily we stopped to ask what he was doing. Luckily, we got up at 6:30 and went out to check out the action. Luckily, we said we could help. And, there we were, flying around Red Rock Canyon. Serendipity. Gotta be open to all adventures that present themselves.
This was the perfect balloon experience for the first time. We had the perfect day, sunny, bright with just the right amount of wind. We both had marvelous pilots who were knowledgeable and oh, so generous. We were alone with the pilot in the balloon, with no large crowds. The setting - well, could we have picked a more perfect spot for color, scenery, and light? Absolutely perfect and we hadn’t expected this at all. I gotta say we’ve been spoiled.
If you want to see some more pictures of our flights, I’ve got some on the next blog. I didn’t want to put them all in this one.
And, if you think our day is done you’ve got another think coming. Come on, if it’s the Desert Southwest, it’s time for a hike. And, that was our afternoon activity - a story for the next blog.
‘Time spent ballooning is not subtracted from one’s lifetime.’
Jeff Haliczer
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