Hot air balloon crew takes hobby to new heights

Carolanne Walter grew up in Indianola, Iowa, home of the National Balloon Classic, a nine-day hot air balloon festival held every summer.

She's now the pilot of the "Happyanunoit," and, along with her crew, has found a new passion in competing in national hot air balloon events.

The team, known as the "Ballooney Tunes Crew," just took fifth place at the US Women’s National Hot Air Balloon Championship out of a field of 14 pilots.

That competition took place in conjunction with the National Balloon Classic in Indianola, where 115 balloons and their pilots took to the skies earlier this month.

Walter is a member of Rat City Roller Derby, where she's known as "Canna Whoop Sass," or "Canna" for short. And when the pandemic shut down full-contact sports, she needed something to do. Fortunately, Walter had an idea that didn't take long to catch on with her teammates.

"A small group of us kind of stayed connected to stay active," she explained. "We would meet online and do virtual workouts."

Those workouts expanded to hikes, skate park visits, even indoor rock climbing. Then, after four years away from ballooning, Walter decided it was time to take to the skies again.

"The first group that I went to was my roller derby friends, turned adventure buddies to crew for me," she said. "And of course they were all immediately on board."

Something unique about the crew of the Happyanunoit — they're all women and trans-non-binary. That isn't typical in the hot air ballooning community.

"I'm starting to see more diverse groups in the ballooning community than in the past," Walter said. "But the sport, especially the pilots, is still very male dominated."

She also says that the reception has been really good so far.

"Most people will comment on how unique it is that we're not a group of men," she explained. "We got a lot of compliments on our colorful jumpsuit choices that we wear."

Crewing a hot air balloon is a lot of work — there's the crew chief who supervises all of the activities on the ground. They drive the truck that chases the balloon, so they can pack it up wherever it lands. There's the navigator, who keeps track of the balloon's GPS position and keeps in radio contact with Walter as she's flying. Other members of the crew help cold inflate the envelope. (That's the name for the actual balloon part of the hot air balloon.) And there's the person who holds the "crown line," or the rope that connects the top of the balloon to the basket.

Another factor that they consider is who gets to go up in the basket with Walter. Unlike the big commercial balloons that can carry 10 to 15 people, Walter's is just a two-person basket.

"We work as a team to decide who gets to go for a ride," she explained. "Right now we are on a rotation system. So we keep track of who has gone on rides? Who has not? Everybody rotates through riding with me."

Walter is really impressed with how well their first-time crew did under such new conditions at the National Balloon Classic.

"Our expectations going in were just to have fun and be safe," she said. "And so the fact that we we did well during one of the first mornings of competition, and then that we were able to finalize in fifth place was pretty exciting."

Hot air balloon competitions involve a myriad of different tasks. The "Balloon Meister" and their team will create tasks for the balloon crews to accomplish, like using different wind directions at different altitudes to fly to a specific spot on the map and dropping a bean bag on a target, with more points scored the closer to the center you are.

The end of the flight, of course, always comes with a landing. And since hot air balloons are at the mercy of the winds during any given flight, sometimes that means landing in unconventional spots. Walter says that while their experience so far with home and landowners in the Pacific Northwest has been pretty positive, her crew is prepared.

"We've started carrying cold bottles of champagne in our cooler," Walter explained. "When we land on folks property, we give them a bottle of champagne, and that that seems to help help with the situation a little."

As for what's next, Walter says her crew is champing at the bit for more competition.

"This last event was our first competition together and was a chance for us to see as a crew if it was something that we were interested in," she said. "On our way home, they were already investigating the next competition that we'll be participating in. So I imagine our future is going to include a lot more of that."