BalloonaVista

Hot air balloons! Each June near Buena Vista, Colorado, is "BalloonaVista." This is a weekend when balloonists gather, and fly.

Balloons can only fly when the air is nearly calm, so it's an early morning sport beginning not very long after daybreak and usually ending by, say, nine a.m.

When we arrived at six, no balloons were inflated yet. But it didn't take long! Soon there were eleven balloons preparing to fly, or flying.

And the movement of the air was fortunate! By ascending or descending just a little, the balloons were able to move one way and then back again. So most of them were able to lift off, drift to the southeast a little, and then fly higher and move back overhead to the northwest! This meant that the pilots were able fly back over the launch area, descend, and time a landing approach into the same field they'd just departed. What a rare thing for balloons to be able to do!

Anrahyah's son Damien and his friend Julien had to take a ride, of course, when a tethered balloon was set up for that purpose. Their photo is first among the above, with Damien on the right.

The early hour was fine, because after a breakfast, we were going to take my river raft over to the nearby Arkansas River and go down Brown's Canyon--which is what we did.