Adirondack Balloon Flights Blog

As per usual this winter, the latest snow misses us to the south and we only get a dusting. Oh well, it’s a beautiful late winter day, too nice not to be out doing something, like skiing. Even with a snow drought this winter, and the rain and thaw of a couple of weeks ago, the ski areas have been able to make a ton of snow to play on. Conditions today were great! Lots of sun and moderate temps, the birds were chirping. You can tell that spring is not long in the future. Our local hill, West Mountain, is just 5 minutes from my door and provides easy access to some fun at a kind of throw-back type of ski hill – as you can see by the old fashioned chair lift in my pics.

Great Conditions!

From the top of West Mt looking East across the valley with a frozen Hudson River down below.

My ski buddy Mike

It’s a gorgeous morning so I went to the local hill for some quality time outdoors and some skiing. The local hill is pretty much as it was when it opened back in the 60′s. It still has it’s original 3 chair lifts – 2 doubles and 1 triple. Nope, there are no high speed quads here, just some throw-back skiing that Warren Miller always used to like to show in his ski movies (back when Warren Miller movies were actually produced and voiced-over by Warren Miller) . I remembered my camera so I’ll upload some pics for your viewing pleasure. Unfortunately we are expecting rain late Sunday and Monday which will set the ski conditions back. It has not been a snowy winter and the ski slopes in the North East have had to rely mainly on the man-made stuff. Hopefully the weather will recover to provide us with some quality ski conditions for the next couple of months, or what’s the point of being up in the North Country during the Winter. Otherwise, should just move south like my older bro did. Later I’ll post up some pics from a quick visit I did last week to Vero Beach, Florida for a visit w/bro Richard for some quality brother-time.

The Double Chair

The Base Area of West Mt.

About half way up

At the top of the lift. There were only 2 os us on the mountain this morning for first tracks:-)

About half way down, looking East.

At the half-way point looking North toward Lake George.

I hope you enjoyed your morning today, I did!

I want to wish all readers of this blog a belated Happy Holidays and a very Happy New Year! I intend to periodically post during the winter, some pics and stories of ballooning adventures from my past. This will be my 37th year in ballooning, and there are a few interesting experiences from the early days that would be difficult to duplicate today. I may even post some opinions on the state of hot air ballooning as I see it today. So, if you have been following this blog and you have an interest in hot air balloons, periodically check back to see what I post. I probably will also post some personal stuff on what’s currently going on for me. I will again post pictures from our flights when our balloon ride season gets going in the spring, some time in April or May. So, all the best to us all as we head into this new decade.

Took a drive over to our favorite lunch place in Washington County over in Salem, Steininger’s, on Saturday. The drive goes through our balloon flying area. There are beautiful country views of the upper Hudson River Valley, the Adirondack’s of New York and the Green Mountains of Vermont.

The flying area, looking north toward the southern Adirondack's. The Hudson River is off to the left in the tree line.

An old farm house over by West Mountain in Queensbury NY near where I live.

One of Washington County's oldest homes on the way to Steininger's near the Hebron's.

Since we wrapped our flying season at the end of October, I’ve been having fun painting the house. With the mild weather we had early in November, I’ve gotten more done than I had expected before winter sets-in. I took the small balloon over to Stumpf Balloons in Weston VT for it’s annual inspection on Friday the 6th. Hot air balloons are considered an aircraft by the FAA and that designation requires us to have our balloons inspected every year by an FAA certified repairman. The inspections are very detailed and documented according to FAA and the balloon manufacturer’s requirements. It’s too bad that I didn’t bring my camera to document the annual inspection work that Paul does to post on the blog. It would have been interesting to show. Oh well, next time. We took a family trip to Golden CO to visit w/#2 son Grant and his family the 2nd week of the month. I’ll post up some pics of Golden in a later blog.

The 2009 flying season will go down as the worst for hot air balloon flying weather in my 33 years of flying passengers around here. The early spring flying season started dry with about average ride demand. But by Memorial Weekend, the weather turned wetter and stayed that way for most of the flying season, other than for a short dry period very late in August through the 1st couple of weeks in September.  By the time we got around to the end of October, the weather turned dryer again and has stayed that way into the middle of November. My apologies to the folks who were trying to schedule flights at the end of October. We grew reluctant to attempt flights, even tho select days were flyable, due to the extremely wet ground conditions out in the flight area. Through much of October, we were getting a series of very heavy rain systems pass through and by the time the weather finally dried out late in the month, the damage was done. With short days and a low sun angle, our saturated flying area was not able to recover from all the rain. So, now it’s time to get ready for the long winter season and make plans for our 2010 hot air balloon flights, which will begin again when winter finally turns to spring come April or May.