A day in the life of a Wyoming Balloon Pilot
"Or one truly blessed individual"
Author: Colin M. Graham Copyright July 10, 2007

Today started out quite normally. My five fifteen wake up is pretty much routine after twenty three flights in a row here in Jackson, Wyoming. I've had the privilege of coming here this season to fly for the Wyoming Balloon Company, one of the counties largest commercial operators. We operate one of the largest balloons in the country, the Cameron A-315 which is rated for a pilot and 20 passengers at sea level!

Anyway, back to today, the 10th of July two thousand and seven. I arrived at the launch field about an hour after waking up. I was to fly my normal balloon, a Cameron A-250 with triple ultra burners. We had to first inflate and launch the 315 though, which took us over a half hour, as the surface winds came up and prohibited us from a quick launch.

I watched our senior pilot, Bill Hutchings navigate the different wind layers as the crew began inflating my balloon. An uneventful launch with 10 happy passengers onboard followed.

We flew south for quite a ways, much farther than usual and as Bill did, we had to climb very high, 10,400' MSL (4,500 AGL) before we worked our way into the northerly wind that brought us back over our 3,000 acre cattle ranch. We stayed high for roughly 25 minutes until doing a terminal descent to the ground, which is a normal flight op here due to the many changing layers of wind that can blow you off course quite quickly.

I ended up landing next to the ranch hands' house, about 3/4 mile from where we'd taken off one hour and twenty minutes earlier.

Shortly after getting everything packed up one of my crew, named Tigger asked if I wanted to go rafting on the nearby Snake River. Naturally I accepted! We both went home and got on our swimming stuff and then headed down the road toward the famed Snake River Canyon, a class 3 river on this stretch. Tig's friend Carson is a river guide and happened to have the day off, so he decided to take his buddies out for a fun float down the crik.

We started down the river at West Table "put in" and made a mostly leisurely float down until the rapids started piling on some good action! Some of the rapids are "lunch table", "big cahuna" and "taco". Carson decided he wanted to do a lot of "surfing" since he had a relatively experienced 6 people on board. Surfing is the a"ility to float the raft on top of a rapid by essentially hydroplaning it.

We did several of these with great success, multiple times each until we came around the bend and faced the Big Cahuna rapid! This thing is about a 10' swell of water! Carson asked us all if we wanted to try and surf it, which we all said yes to, not knowing the particulars of this hydraulic.

He then turned us 180 degrees upriver so we could be in position to try to surf this unsurfable rapid. We went down and into the swell and then floated on top for maybe a second before getting spit out. Everyone hooped and hollered, "lets do it again!".

So we beached the raft and then began walking it over the rocks and such to get back above the rapid. After 10 minutes or so we were back in position, floating backwards toward the "BC" but this time, she won and she won big time!

We entered the swell and immediately flipped the entire raft right over, dumping all of our gear and people overboard into the churning hydraulic. I didn't even have time to grab a breath or "get scared".. it happened within milliseconds, I ended up under the raft for what seemed like way too long and eventually got up only to get a mouthful of river water. I was able to ascertain everyone was in okay shape and accounted for though.

We all floated downstream a ways before collecting what we could of our belongings. I ended up with only one shoe on my foot, and surprisingly enough the other had stayed on the boat, jammed in to a cell of the raft. Tig lost a two hundred dollar pair of prescription sun glasses and everyone else lost their beer, so they were more disappointed then he was!

After a few minutes of reflection we started down again, but nothing could top the flip. We spent about three hours on the water and had a blast, we're certainly blessed no one got hurt with all the silly stuff we tried but I'd do it again . . .

Colin Graham
Senior Pilot: Endeavor Ballooning & Endeavor Ballooning West
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