Author: Kristen Cosby / Source: Atlas Obscura
When we entered the clouds I started to question the decisions that led me to dangle in a wicker basket 8,000 feet above sea level with nothing between me and the alpine chop but a bit of plywood, straw, and air.
The four of us in the balloon basket had launched predawn from a small airfield in the Swiss city of Villeneuve, on the edge of Lac Leman opposite Geneva. We’d risen over the lake and through a saddle between the low mountains that hemmed the water, then swept through the Intyamon Valley. At times, our balloon floated so close to the hillsides that I could smell their dank, loamy scent. Then we rose over the Alps and drifted northeast towards Thun. Our speedometer clocked us at 30 mph, but because we travelled at the same speed as the wind, I did not feel our pace at all. The stillness was eerie and stunning, interrupted only by the periodic roar and hiss of the propane burner.
I was relaxed only because I knew I was flying with the best. Two of my companions, Laurent Sciboz and Yannick Serex, were members of the Swiss team that holds the world record for the longest, continuous hydrogen balloon flight. They shattered the standing record when winning the 2017 America’s Challenge Gas Balloon Race. Sciboz was half of the two-man crew in the balloon. His team, the Fribourg-Freiburg Challenge, launched from Albuquerque, New Mexico and landed outside of Labrador City, Newfoundland, 59 hours, 19 minutes and 2,280 miles later.
As part of the team’s ground crew, Serex followed the balloon’s path in a van, keeping them aloft through the tail end of a hurricane that swept the balloon over America at 88 mph.
Keeping two men in the air in a basket the size of half a bathtub for seven days requires physics and psychology, Serex told me as we floated over Lake Gruyere. “But then,” said Yannick with a grin. “I’m not a psychologist!”
I met Serex near his home in a small Swiss mountain town nestled in the Jura mountains, about an hour and half from Geneva by train. By trade, he works as an electrician, heating specialist, fumigator, and plumber. But when he handed me his business card, it read Yannick Serex, Aérotisier—French for “balloonist.” He’d invited me for what I’d presumed would be a short, touristy balloon trip. We’d gathered up the two other pilots, Laurent (who works as a programmer) and a former student of Yannick’s, Louisa Felis. At 28, Felis is a licensed and highly competitive ballooning pilot in a male-dominated sport. Of all of us in the basket, she’s the only one who owns her own balloon. When not in the air she works as a truck driver, horse-trainer, and mortician.
As we drift over the peaked red roofs of the oldest monastery in Switzerland, Sciboz and Serex told me: The America’s Challenge is an endurance race. There are few rules and no…
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