A TWO-MAN SWISS TEAM IN A BASKET WINS THE ANNUAL AMERICA’S CHALLENGE GAS BALLOON RACE, LANDING IN LABRADOR CITY. THEIR UNIQUE VIEW OF CANADA: ‘THERE IS ONLY FOREST AND WATER.’
BALLOONISTS SET RECORD, SURPRISE RESIDENTS
There were trees and lakes and a wilderness so big and vast that it looked as though it might never end. And there was snow, biting, blowy snow, and there was the ground — and it was getting closer — as Laurent Sciboz and Nicolas Tieche drifted down through the clouds in a gas balloon after a record-setting 3,666-km journey, landing in a small clearing a few kilometres outside of Labrador City, N.L., at precisely 8:35 a.m. Tuesday.
“It was very nice to be in Canada,” Sciboz said Wednesday from a hotel in town.
Sciboz and Tieche are Swiss balloonists. They set off on their trip Saturday from Albuquerque, N.M., as one of eight teams competing in the America’s Challenge. They wound up floating farther than the rest, which was nice, but also briefly alarming for Joe Power, the local fire chief.
Power’s phone rang at 9 a.m. Tuesday with a report that the bustling mining town near the Quebec border had some unexpected Swiss visitors marooned in the wilderness on its outskirts.
“I thought it was a prank call at first,” Power says. “We are in Labrador City — in October — and we are starting to get some snow, right? It was a bit unusual to hear tell that there was a hot-air balloon making an emergency landing outside of town.”
A helicopter was called in to retrieve the balloonists, who were given the once-over by paramedics and declared healthy, adding happy punctuation to what had been an incredible journey.
Sciboz and Tieche have been competing together for four years. The America’s Challenge is the Super Bowl of balloon races. Their field of play was the skies and the winds, and the tiny, one metresquare basket they shared.
“We had to stand for three days and three nights,” Tieche says, laughing. “To sleep we would trade off. One guy is the official pilot and the other would eat, sleep and rest, so we slept for maybe four hours each 24 hours.”
Life in a balloon is busy. The crew was floating through monitored air space and had to be in constant touch with the airports they were passing over — and the airplanes jetting about.
“We have the same equipment aboard the basket as you would have with an aviation jet,” Sciboz says.
It wasn’t all work, though. Gas balloons are silent, and sound radiates up from below. The men were serenaded by blasts from train horns hauling goods through the American (and Canadian) countryside. They passed over the New Mexico desert, floated by sprawling farms, saw Minneapolis during the night — a “magic time,” says Tieche — and blew over Lake Superior and into Canada.
“We crossed the big lake, roughly in the middle, and then you enter into Canada and there are just so few people per square kilometre. There is only forest and water, and forest and water, and forest and water, and it is really amazing,” Tieche says.
Their support crew in Switzerland — meteorologist and route mappers — were in constant touch and asked them to stay aloft for Monday night. They were on track for a record. The wind speed was increasing. The balloon reached speeds of 140 km/h.
In the end, they had to stop somewhere, or risk never coming back to Earth.
“We were at the end of our ballast, our sandbags,” Sciboz says. “And, anyway, a few hours before the world record was broken, so we tried to land in front of a large city.”
That was Labrador City, population 9,000. On Wednesday, the balloonists stopped into the fire chief’s office to thank him for all he had done.
“The first question I asked them was, was it cold up there?” Power says.
It was cold, indeed. But the heat Wednesday was working at the Two Seasons Inn, where two weary Swiss travellers were hungry for a hot meal and a cold beer and a good night’s sleep.
“We’re going to get some rest,” Tieche says. “Because tomorrow morning we need to go and get our balloon back.”