Sept. 2023 | Vol. 23 Iss. 09
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Saturday, Sept. 16 • 9AM -2PM Restoring Vitality | Prolonging Youth
By Heather Lawrence | h.lawrence@mycityjournals.com
T
Ordinarily this field at Storm Mountain Park would be filled with about 15 hot air balloons, but the unstable weather meant no flights this year. (Heather Lawrence/City Journals)
housands of people gathered in the predawn hours for Sandy’s annual hot air balloon festival on Aug. 11 and 12, but the weather didn’t cooperate. Though things on the ground were calm and dry on Saturday, the seasoned balloon pilots were concerned about a storm cell visible above Little Cottonwood Canyon. The balloons were scheduled to lift off at 6:30 a.m. at Storm Mountain Park. Hopeful people set up their chairs and blankets on the grass and waited. “One of the best things to watch is those helium balloons that the kids have,” said balloon-meister Mike Bauwens of Kubicek Balloons. Bauwens has decades of balloon pilot experience and led a briefing at 6:45 a.m. with the 14 other pilots there. They’d been watching the weather forecast all night hoping the bad air would move out quickly. Bauwens and the other pilots had already spent hours checking forecast and radar systems. They were tracking a storm higher up in the atmosphere and watched as every balloon the kids let go of was pulled erratically up into the air. “Even on a clear day like today where it
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See our ad inside! feels nice on the ground, we watch those little balloons in the air for an aberration. We watch how fast they travel and if they go in a straight line or get pulled in a zig-zag. As you go higher the air is unstable and unsafe,” Bauwens said. Another pilot, Lyle Bingham of Payson, was watching for the same thing. Bingham got interested in hot air balloons when his daughter, then 4 years old, saw one at a city event near their house. She made him promise to let her ride in one. Now she’s 36, and Bingham is the one giving rides to kids in his own hot air balloon. Continued page 14
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