Reporter conquers fear of heights, rides Albany air balloon

Dec 15, 2023

Pilot Robb Green, assisted by a crew of volunteers, tests the burner module of the hot air balloon set up prior to attaching the balloon to the basket.

Reporter Shayla Escudero stands inside the balloon, named Little Wing, preparing to face her fear of heights during a sunrise flight.

A successful landing for one of the other pilots and crew across the field from our landing spot in Tangent, approximately 11 miles south of where our journey began.

When you are in a hot air balloon, it feels like you are standing still and the earth is pulling away from you. That’s what Northwest Art & Air Festival crew member Elaine Murphy told me as she helped affix the crown of a rainbow nylon balloon named “Little Wing” and readied it for flight.

The early morning sky on Thursday, Aug.24 was lit in shades of soft pink, and the sun had not yet made its way over the horizon. Large flames quickly inflated the roughly 50-feet-wide, striped and zig-zagged patterned balloons. Slowly, each rose off the field of Timber Linn Memorial Park in Albany.

“It doesn’t feel like anything else,” Murphy said. Thirty years ago she received a balloon ride as a birthday present. Off and on for the last 20 years she has helped balloons take off and come down as a crew member for the Northwest Art & Air Festival.

For Murphy, it’s a feeling you chase after.

I was about to find out for myself.

I had to interview an air balloon pilot from 1,200 feet off the ground in what technologically wasn’t much more complex than a paper lantern.

Did I mention I had a fear of heights? In fact, photographer Jess Hume-Pantuso does too.

Riding a hot air balloon isn’t like riding an airplane. There aren't seat belts — or even seats. Passengers stand in a 4-foot-wide triangular wicker basket with a flame over their heads.

A peek inside the basket of Little Wing, a balloon piloted by Robb Green. The basket is made of wicker and carries the fuel tanks as well as the passengers.

The rail was about the height of my hips and it felt that if I leaned back I could fall. Between Jess and me, we were doing a lot of leaning to take photos. Slowly, we drifted up and our crew became little tiny waving ants below.

There was no particular route. We were going wherever the wind took us.

Neighboring balloons came into closer view as we drifted southeast over farmland. Once expansive fields soon resembled green and yellow squares, like a pattern on a gameboard.

In between moments of silence, the flame roared above us, taking our basket ever higher.

I gripped Jess’ arm as the balloon climbed. I felt like at any moment I would awake with a jolt, like those nightmares about falling.

Looking directly down sent my heart rate racing and my head a little dizzy, so I tried to keep up the conversation. I was here to do journalism, after all.

“You always want to be looking at the horizon,” our pilot, Robb Green, said.

That’s how you can tell if you are truly going up or down, he said. Looking at other balloons can be misleading because they are also moving.

Sporting a pair of sunglasses and a blond mustache, Green maneuvered from corner to corner, letting out propane to fill our balloon. He kept his hand raised, working the lever that released the gas onto the flame.

The wicker basket was tight quarters. The three of us — the pilot, the photographer and the reporter — shifted from one of the three corners as the pilot flitted from corner to corner. The basket seemed to move slightly under the shifting of our weight, which made Jess and me uneasy.

But our pilot was perfectly comfortable.

During our flight Green sat upon the ledge of the basket with as much ease as someone would sit on a kitchen countertop rather than 1,000 feet above the ground.

Green has been a pilot for 48 years, and that gave me some comfort. After a friend took him on a hot air balloon ride he decided to learn how to fly himself. He grew up in Oregon and even watched the eruption of Mount St. Helens from an air balloon he said.

Clearly, Green was also chasing the feeling Murphy had described.

“I feel at peace. I feel oneness with everything,” he said.

Green named his balloon “Little Wing” after a Jimi Hendrix song, and even though he lives in California now, he still loves flying in Oregon the most.

It’s because of the wide open spaces, the fields, he said.

Two hot air balloons rise on Aug. 24, 2023, for media day of Northwest Art & Air Festival.

The first sunbeams of morning had slipped over the farm fields and settled at the edges of our faces and the ends of our hair. There was stillness and the earth felt far away. Buildings turned two dimensional, and landscapes were rudimentary geometric shapes. I looked upon the earth and then the sky, feeling as if they were conjured up just for us.

Wide open space is the perfect terrain for ballooning and makes landing easier, Murphy said.

Sometimes there were disputes with landowners. In a previous excursion Green had accidentally landed in a carrot patch and caused several hundred dollars worth of damage. He paid and apologized and set things right though, he added.

We gently landed in a field in Tangent approximately 7 miles from our point of departure. Our crew had been watching us, following in cars below, catching up to us where we landed.

The group pulled down the basket with their combined weight and after folding the balloon into a bag, we popped a bottle of champagne.

It’s a tradition that goes way back to the first balloon rides in the 1700s, he said. A colorful aberration descending from the heavens seemed inhuman, an extraterrestrial threat.

“It was given to farmers, so that we could explain we were of this earth, and we continue to carry it to this day,” he said.

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With two feet firmly planted on the ground I can't tell you that going up in a hot air balloon cured my fear of heights. But I would absolutely do it again.

The 22nd annual Northwest Art and Air Festival will take place Friday, Aug. 25 through Sunday, Aug. 27.

A head shot of Shayla Escudero

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