We always start with the balloons. It’s hard not to; those floating colors command the horizon, pulling the eye upward until you forget your neck is sore. We discuss the chase trucks, their history, and the roots of flight in France and its rebirth in the soil of New Mexico. We speak of mass ascensions and Dawn Patrol, of Darth Vader and cows and hearts suspended against the dawn. But beneath all of it—the fabric, the burners, the photographs—is something more ordinary, and maybe more sacred: the people.
Not just the pilots, not just the crews. The others.
The volunteers, for instance, who rise earlier than even the birds, long before the sun thinks of climbing over the Sandias. They are there in the half-dark, directing traffic, holding ropes, keeping the rhythm of a ritual that looks effortless only because someone else made it so. They do this not for glory or paychecks, but because something within them decided that one week in October was worth sacrificing their sleep and time to help thousands of strangers feel wonder. They are the kind of people who disappear into the background, allowing the balloons to dominate the frame. And yet without them, there is no frame at all.
Then there are the vendors. Their labor is not spectacle—it is fuel. They stand in lines of steam and scent, ladling out hot coffee, burritos, and sweet pastries to crews, balloonists, and wide-eyed tourists who arrive before dawn. They are there in the cold, their hands working the heat of the griddle while we marvel at the heat of the burners. They remind us that even awe requires calories. That memory is easier to hold when your fingers are warm against a paper cup.
But the Fiesta isn’t confined to the field. For nine days, Albuquerque becomes a host. Visitors don’t only look up; they wander sideways. They move through Old Town’s adobe walls, tracing steps along Route 66, ducking into shops where turquoise glints under fluorescent light. They pause to listen to a drumbeat in a plaza, to hear the echoes of Native voices that remind them this land has been witness to centuries before balloons ever grazed its skies. They sit in diners and brewpubs, ask about “red or green,” and learn the shorthand of a state where chile is not just food but language, not just spice but identity.
That’s what we forget when we reduce the Fiesta to balloons alone: it is not just a celebration of flight. It is a celebration of place. A city, a state, a culture flinging its doors wide and saying Come see us, come taste us, come know us. For nine days, New Mexico is not an afterthought on a map but the center of the world’s gaze. People arrive from Japan, Brazil, Wisconsin, Bristol, China, and Kenya. They stand shoulder to shoulder with locals, their accents colliding over green chile stew. And when they return home, they carry with them more than pictures of balloons—they carry New Mexico itself: the food, the hospitality, the community that rose as surely as the balloons did.
I think about this often: balloons drift. They rise, they scatter, they vanish into the horizon. Their beauty is in their impermanence. But the people—the ones who cook, who sell, who welcome—are the tether. They keep the Fiesta from being only about what escapes into the sky. They anchor it in the soil, in red earth and chile smoke, in the hands that hand you coffee at dawn.
Nine days in October. That’s what it is. Nine days when the world’s compass needle swings toward New Mexico, and all those who live here become part of something larger than themselves. Not by flying, but by feeding, guiding, welcoming, and reminding. The sky may belong to the balloons. But the heart of the Fiesta—always, inevitably—belongs to the people.
By Kyle J. Hayes
kylehayesblog.com
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