I like to imagine the first balloon not as a machine but as a dare. Paper, silk, fire—the audacity of lifting yourself from the quarrels of the earth with nothing but heat and faith. Before Albuquerque claimed the sky each October, before dawn burners hissed like dragons over the Rio Grande, there was France, 1783, when people looked up and saw a new verb forming over their heads: to rise.
In June of that year, the Montgolfier brothers carried an ungainly sack of paper and cloth out onto a square in Annonay, set a fire beneath it, and watched it go—ten minutes of impossible, enough altitude to knock loose the old limits. By autumn, they carried their wonder to Versailles and sent a sheep, a duck, and a rooster into the royal air as if to ask: can life itself breathe up there? Two months later, in Paris, Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis d’Arlandes stepped into a wicker gondola and became the first to slip free of the rope, drifting twenty-five minutes over a city that suddenly looked small. Days after that, Jacques Charles and the Robert brothers gave the world a second path upward—hydrogen—launching from the Tuileries to show that there were many ways to translate fire into altitude. France was the cradle of ballooning; the first breath, the first animals, the first men, the first gas. The sky, once myth, grew technical.
What the French began as spectacle and science was, at root, a theology: a belief that we could climb. That theology made its way across oceans and centuries until it found a peculiar home in New Mexico, where dawn is a kind of religion and the horizon is an altar without walls. If France invented the act, Albuquerque invented the season.
The beginning here was humbler—parking-lot humble. In 1972, a local radio station (KOB) threw a birthday party and asked Sid Cutter—pilot, showman, the first New Mexican with his own hot-air balloon—to bring the new miracle. Twenty-one pilots were invited, weather whittled them down, and thirteen balloons finally lifted from the Coronado Center mall lot while 20,000 people craned their necks and forgot, for a morning, that asphalt was meant for cars. That was the seed from parking lot to fairgrounds to a dedicated park, from a dozen to hundreds, from local curiosity to international pilgrimage.
What made it stick wasn’t just romance; it was the map of the air. Albuquerque owns a wind pattern so local it has a name—the Box—layers of breeze moving in opposing directions, a morning inversion carrying you south at low altitude and north above it, a tidy loop that lets skilled pilots drift out and, with a climb, drift back toward where they began. In a world that scatters us, the Box offers the possibility of return. It is meteorology as mercy.
But a season doesn’t bloom without people to tend it. In 1978, three Albuquerque men—Ben Abruzzo, Maxie Anderson, Larry Newman—sailed a gas balloon called Double Eagle II from Presque Isle, Maine, to a barley field near Paris, the first to knit America and Europe together with fabric and helium. Six days, 137 hours, frostbite, fear, and then France—an answering echo to those first French ascents. Three years later, Abruzzo and crew wrote their signatures across the Pacific, too. Here, ballooning wasn’t just a pageant; it was an expedition, a frontier reopened.
Albuquerque enshrined that hunger in a museum whose very name reads like a dedication: the Anderson-Abruzzo Albuquerque International Balloon Museum. The doors opened on October 1, 2005, a house for artifacts and a hall for stories—Ed Yost’s modern ballooning breakthroughs, Joseph Kittinger’s high-altitude courage, the Double Eagle’s audacity, and a thousand quieter feats of navigation, patience, and nerve. It sits north of town near the field, a kind of reliquary where flight is preserved not as myth but as craft.
Still, museums and records are the scaffolding. Culture is the body that climbs it.
Each fall, chile roasters roll out in front of grocery stores and seal the air with smoke and memory. The Sandias blush watermelon at dusk. And then, before even the sun admits morning, we drive to a park carved into the valley floor and stand under fabric that billows like lungs. Dawn Patrol lamps the dark. Mass Ascension repaints the sky. The burners sound like giant animals breathing; a chorus of whoosh and hush. Children point at cows and bees and dragons peeled up from the earth. Tourists cry into morning newscasts about bucket lists and first times. Locals—some of whom claim to be tired of it—still pause in their driveways when a low flyer ghosts the rooftops, or when a chase truck idles at the curb, and a balloon folds itself into a duffel the size of a life packed up between strangers.
How did something invented in France become so beloved here? Because New Mexico has always been a country of ascents and survivals. Pueblo, Hispano, Black, Chicano, Diné—the genealogies here are layered as sediment, hard-earned as water. Ballooning fits our theology: small craft, large sky; simple tools, exacting attention; courage, and then surrender. The Box promises a kind of return, but the practice itself is drift, humility before the wind. It’s hard not to see yourself in that.
And there’s this: Albuquerque takes care of things that gather us. We might joke that we’re a city of two left turns and a long light, that we’re grit and pothole and stubborn ache. But every October, we become a city that wakes at 3:30 a.m., bundling blankets and burritos, teaching our children to be quiet in the presence of something bigger than us. The Fiesta has hosted gas races older than the century, welcomed pilots from dozens of nations, and stitched international myth to local ritual. Year after year, the numbers climb and the field fills and the sky blooms. But the math is the least of it. What matters is that for a week, every day is interrupted by awe, and awe becomes our everyday language.
I think of those French firsts—the sheep and duck and rooster blinking over Versailles, the two men in Paris seeing their city surgically reduced to streets and sparks, the hydrogen globe lifting to a second sun—and I think of how, centuries later, three men from this desert wrote a line back to that beginning with a long, cold arc across the Atlantic. The story is a loop: France to New Mexico, museum to field, dawn to dusk, out on the low wind and back on the high. A Box, but also a bond.
The roots of ballooning here are the same roots that hold so many New Mexico things in place: attention to weather, reverence for land, craft passed from hand to hand, and a willingness to meet the morning with both courage and caution. That’s why it’s no longer just an event. It’s an inheritance. It’s how a city remembers its capacity for wonder, not as escape but as evidence—that we can still rise, and that, if the winds are kind and we are careful, we might even find our way home again.
By Kyle J. Hayes
kylehayesblog.com
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