Keith and I awoke at 4 this morning, pulled on clothes and then roused the kids, who got dressed in the dark and quietly piled into the van. We snuck out of the KOA with the headlights off, so we wouldn’t wake any of the other kampers, then turned onto the freeway and drove about 15 minutes to an Albertson’s grocery store parking lot, where we were met by a woman named Jeanne.
We all climbed into her black Excursion, and Jeanne pointed her vehicle north and drove about an hour on the deserted highway. A beautiful caricature of a woman, Jeanne looked like she could be the offspring of Emmy Lou Harris and a Muppet, with long, wavy, streaked-gray hair topped with a cowboy hat; lanky limbs; a sweet, bubbly Texas twang; a friendly, natural way about her; and a knack for telling stories. While she drove, she finished her breakfast (oatmeal in a plastic cup), chatted easily with us, gestured often (usually with both hands off the wheel) and changed lanes freely, clearly not burdened by the conventions of turn signals.
It was still dark when we pulled into a McDonald’s parking lot in Española, north of Santa Fe, and met up with the rest of our group: a mom and her daughter from Dallas, and a husband and wife from somewhere else in Texas, along with Sol Lothe and Johnny Lewis, who would be our pilots this morning. Today we went hot-air ballooning.
After a quick bathroom break at the McDonald’s, we got back in our vehicles and drove a few minutes to Johnny’s “hangar,” actually a storage unit directly across the road from a BLM area known as Las Barrancas (The Ravines), wedged between the Carson and Santa Fe national forests. There, we retrieved everything we needed for our flight with Johnny — the wicker gondola, propane tanks and 400 pounds of polyester balloon with a capacity of 180,000 cubic feet — along with a slightly smaller balloon and equipment for Sol’s flight, too.
This is Johnny’s outfit; Jeanne, Sol, and a handful of other guys who showed up to load the gear are all part of his muscle. While he presided over the action, Johnny didn’t have to do much of the heavy lifting. Instead, he was our gracious host, answering questions and explaining what was going to happen over the next 30 or 40 minutes, before we lifted off.
With long white hair cascading out from under his cowboy hat and a tidy half-beard covering his cheeks, Johnny spoke with a brisk yet mumbly drawl, like Boomhauer from “King of the Hill.” Sol, the pilot of a second balloon, wore his mustache waxed into two perfect curls and a bowler hat. Together, Jeanne, Johnny and Sol looked like they had stepped off the pages of a steampunk comic book.
The crew attached trailers to the SUVs, and we hauled the gear across the street, to a clearing in the scruffy BLM wilderness across the highway, unfolding ourselves from the vehicles just as the sun was peeking up over the Sangre de Christo mountains and bathing the peaks of Valle Caldera to our west in sumptuous shades of pink and orange. Johnny called three different local airports to try to pinpoint the weather conditions at our site, and then he released two black party-size balloons into the air to track the wind speed and direction.
When he was satisfied with what he saw, he gave the a-okay, and the crew acted fast first to unfurl the balloons, then to expand them with high-powered fans and finally to inflate them with hot air from giant propane burners that measure their output in millions of BTUs. Johnny explained that our window of opportunity was small. As soon as the sun rises and starts to heat the air, the winds pick up. Conditions are favorable only when the breeze is less than 7 or 8 miles per hour.
When the balloons were inflated and ready for flight, we jumped into the baskets — the five of us plus the mom and daughter from Dallas and Johnny in the big one, Sol and the other couple in the smaller one — and took off.
I’ve been told that the experience of balloon flight is perfectly peaceful as the balloon floats along on the breeze; there are no engines, no propellers, no jets. To an extent this is true, but no one told me about the deafening blasts from the propane burner, which was jarring. In fact, just before lift-off, the crew handed out earplugs to block out the roar. They also offered a spare hat to Natalie to protect her scalp from the intense heat. I didn’t have a hood or a hat, and I don’t know if Keith had it better or worse than me. While he has no hair to help insulate his head, he also has nothing to lose up there. I was worried that I’d finish the flight with a giant scorched bald spot.
Once in the air, we rode the currents up and down, skimming the surface of the earth and dipping into canyons and valleys, then, a minute later, soaring a few hundred feet above them. Johnny called this “contouring.” He kept noting proudly that we were able to do this because there are no power lines in the BLM wilderness where he flies; father south in Albuquerque, where there is an annual balloon festival, pilots can’t do much more than go straight up and come straight back down, hemmed in by roads and power lines in much more congested areas.
On the ride up from Santa Fe this morning, Jeanne told us all about Johnny’s long career in ballooning. He’s been fascinated with flight since he was a kid growing up in Texas, the son of a baptist preacher; when he was in elementary school, he fashioned an airplane with a 20-foot wingspan in his family’s barn, and attempted to fly it. He got interested in flying a hot-air balloon in college and is considered a pioneer of modern hot-air ballooning. He even assisted the FAA as they drafted rules and regulations for balloon flight. One time, he tried to set the world record for altitude in a hot air balloon. He made it only to 30,000 feet before high winds forced him back down. According to Johnny, that was the first and last time he’ll ever attempt that.
When Johnny found out that I had my pilot’s license, he talked at me enthusiastically about principles of flight that I can barely remember. Flying a hot air balloon, he said, is like riding across the top of a rolling beach ball; sometimes you’re at the back end coming up over the top, and sometimes you’re sliding down the front side. The pilot needs to plan ahead to keep up with the the rise and fall, lest he roll too far beyond that imaginary crest and find himself getting stuck at the bottom, with the ball rolling on top of him. I tried to get a feel for what he was talking about, but mostly I just nodded along.
The flight lasted about an hour. The entire time, Johnny was in contact with his chase crew on the ground, who followed the balloon in the SUV and were there to secure the gondola and fold up the balloon as soon as it touched down. The crew members then set up a table, laid out a spread of crackers and cheese, prepared mimosas and offered a toast to our first balloon flight.
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| Johnny, in his basket |
When we were done, Jeanne drove us back to our van parked at the Albertson’s in Santa Fe. It was only 9:30 a.m. by the time we got back to the KOA, though it felt like we had been gone all day. We packed up our things, hooked up the trailer, and set off back through Santa Fe along the same route Jeanne had taken us on earlier in the morning.
We drove right past Johnny’s storage unit, past the BLM access road he had taken us on and kept going, up into the the mountains, to Taos.
I had been looking forward to finding a quiet coffee shop in Taos, with good sandwiches and great WIFI, for once, so I could spend a little time posting to the blog. But it was not to be. It happens that this weekend is the Fiestas de Taos, when the whole community celebrates the patron saints of Taos, Santa Ana and Santiago, and the tiny town was a freaking zoo, with a mess of traffic tangling up its narrow streets, slim parking options, and absolutely nowhere to stash a van pulling a Teardrop trailer.
We finally found a coffee house in a quiet-ish neighborhood. Keith and the kids left me inside and, with the begrudging permission of the staff there, ditched the trailer in the parking lot, before they ventured back into town with the van. I spent the afternoon in the sweltering heat of this bizarre open-air coffee shop (read: no a/c) trying to upload posts to the blog while the rest of the family grabbed some lunch, walked around the Taos plaza and took in the festivities.
They came back to get me later in the afternoon, and we considered swinging by the Taos Pueblo, one of the oldest continually inhabited communities in the United States and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, but we were so hot and exhausted that we decided to skip it. We’ve been up since 4 a.m., after all. I’m sure I’ll regret that decision later.
We drove about 15 miles north of Taos to the village of Arroyo Seco, where we’re staying tonight. I made reservations at a hostel called the SnowMansion, which offers camping sites and teepees in addition to private rooms and dorm beds, and which looked all cute and hipstery online — they tout organic gardens and orchards, an extensive game library, and funky galleries and restaurants nearby— but which actually is pretty much a dump.
The “campground” is an overgrown backyard pitted with half-dug drainage holes and strewn with discarded patio furniture. The outdoor "patio" area is a set of garage-sale living room furniture covered in bedsheets and set out under a tarp. The heavily tattooed and pierced “guests” — it’s not clear if they’re staying here for a night, or if they’re permanently crashed here — lurk in the corners, seemingly strung out.
The young, crunchy front-desk hostess greeted me and immediately gushed that Taos reminds her so much of Tibet.
Okay, I thought. I’ll bite: “You’ve been to Tibet?” I asked.
"Well, of course,” she replied. She spends half of every year there. Because she has a background in anthropology, duh.
I just stared at her. If you’re pushing your mid-20s, are you old enough to have a “background” in anything?
Then I noticed the barking coming from the upper level. Like, constant barking. Yapping, really. The young, crunchy front-desk hostess proudly and un-ironically announced that one of the guests is keeping two dogs and their newborn litter in one of the upstairs showers, and that she’s considering taking a puppy home with her (although one would think it would be difficult to keep a dog if she spends half the year in Tibet).
I repeat: There is a litter of puppies in one of the showers upstairs. Unbelievable.
The kids retreated to their teepee while Keith and I dumped all of our gear into the middle of the yard to sort through it and repack for our two-night backpacking adventure. We leave tomorrow from a trailhead near the Taos Ski Valley up the road.
By “backpacking adventure,” I really mean “llama trek.” For the next three days we will be hiking into the Sangre de Christo mountains, the southernmost sub-range of the Rocky Mountains, with Wild Earth Llama Adventures. While we will carry daypacks with just a few essentials, a team of llamas will carry the rest of our gear. Each kid, I’m told, will get to lead a llama on the hike. We’ve kept this outing a secret from the kids, but I think they’re on to us, since they keep telling us that they're having dreams about hanging out with llamas.
We ate dinner at a quirky little farm-to-table restaurant right next door to the SnowMansion. We were served thoughtfully prepared food, but the restaurant itself is a strange, almost unfinished space with exposed electrical boxes and not much in the way of decor.
That describes the village of Arroyo Seco, too. It’s supposed to be an upscale, artsy town — Julia Roberts has a ranch nearby, after all — but it seems to be populated by a few grubby locals and a couple of scroungy pot-heads. I was expecting a bustling tourist town with shops and galleries, but the place is eerily quiet. It’s so rustic that it seems unfinished and haphazard.
Shortly after we got to town, I went looking for an ATM, and someone pointed me to Abe’s Cantina down the dusty, deserted main street, but warned that I should go sooner than later, because they close whenever they want. So I strolled over to the bar, wondering if it had already closed for the day. I tried the door — it was unlocked — and stepped into …
… a room packed full of boisterous people drinking and laughing. And when I stepped in off the street, it was as if someone had yanked the needle off the record player. Everything in the room came to a screeching halt, and every head at the bar swiveled around to stare at me making my way toward the ATM in the back, trying keep my head up and my shoulders back as if I knew exactly where I was going.
I actually had to hunt for the ATM, and ended up sheepishly asking a server, who directed me to a dark room behind the beer cooler. After I got my cash, I walked purposefully back to the front door, grabbed the handle and congratulated myself on looking calm and confident. Except the door wouldn’t open. I kept turning the handle and pushing the door, but it wouldn’t budge. Finally, a group of men at the bar called out that I should PULL the door open, rather than push it, then they erupted in guffaws as I let myself back out onto the sidewalk, completely chagrined.
Looking forward to getting the heck out of town tomorrow.
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