Balloons to take over Black Bear

The folks at Black Bear Casino Resort turned a torn-down hotel into an opportunity, by planting grass on the demolition site and hosting a hot air balloon festival next weekend.

Up to a dozen hot air balloons (and their pilots) will convene there Friday and Saturday, Sept. 15-16, for the 2023 Kismet in Carlton Hot Air Balloon Festival. The festival is free to attend, and will feature balloon demonstrations, local food trucks, live music, chainsaw carving, tethered balloon rides and a special (but limited) number of balloon trips.

Festival founder and Sweetly Kismet Candy Store owner Jon Parrott said people are drawn to the balloons when they see them.

“We flew during Carlton Daze; you could see people tracking us and following us wherever we went until we landed,” he said with a chuckle.

The festival will begin at noon each day with a pilot meet-and-greet, a time when they will lay out equipment and baskets, and spectators can ask questions and get hands-on with the equipment before it is blown up. Each balloon has its own name — Parrott’s is “Sugar High,” and others include Fire and Frost, Sunny Daze and Way Out West. The hot air balloons come in a range of sizes and will include at least one special-shaped balloon (named Lindy), with a face and arms.

After the meet-and-greet, the hot air balloons will be inflated, and people can take tethered rides 50-70 feet in the air. Cost is $10 for kids and $20 for adults.

If the weather permits and the evening winds are light and variable, five balloons will launch and go flying, Parrott said, adding that they’ve already filled the limited slots for those rides.

At about 7:45 p.m., everyone will reconvene on the launch field (the former hotel site).

“Our grand finale is the night glow, when the balloons are lit and inflated,” Parrott said. “It’s a pretty surreal moment to experience. The balloons are illuminated like big luminaries or jack-o’-lanterns.”

Balloons stay up until 9 p.m., while the music runs until midnight both days. Bring a lawn chair or blanket, to better enjoy the bands and balloon watching. Bringing some cash is probably a good idea, since not all the pilots might have credit card machines, he said.

This is Year 2 for the Kismet balloon festival, but its first year at Black Bear, after starting out in Cromwell last year. Parrott hopes it’s the first of many successful balloon festivals at the Fond du Lac facility.

Getting here

Parrott said he and his wife, Ashley, see the festival as a natural outgrowth of their Sweetly Kismet Candy Store — across Interstate 35 from Black Bear — and some of the other activities they offer the community, including wagon rides and Easter egg hunts.

“You do it for the enjoyment, kind of like owning the candy store,” he said. “Putting smiles on people’s faces and giving them something to see and discover for the first time. It’s a lot of work to do everything a hot air pilot and crew does. … It’s definitely a team sport.”

A trained commercial pilot, Parrott said he and Ashley wanted to keep aviation in the mix when they started the candy store in 2020.

“It was between a banner towing aircraft or a hot air balloon for advertising purposes,” he said.

Long story short, he found a hot air balloon mentor in Ed Chapman, and now Parrott has been flying for three years. Chapman, 70, has a few decades more experience and 20 world records in hot air ballooning.

“He helped me find a balloon, did my training — it was just an additional rating on my pilot’s certification — and laid the seed for starting the festival,” Parrott said. “He’s been a wealth of information.”

Now Ashley and their kids — Brea, 17, Dawson 15, and Bryce 11 — are part of the balloon crew.

While there is a fee to fly, the pilots are in it for passion, not profit, he said.

“It’s definitely a hobby sport,” Parrott said. “People are compensated, but not making a killing. It’s very expensive equipment, so people do it for the passion of ballooning and the camaraderie of being around other balloon enthusiasts and pilots.”

He is optimistic the weather will behave. Fall and winter are the best times to fly — “the colder, the better,” he said, explaining that with cooler temperatures comes greater stability.

Being farther away from Lake Superior than previous Duluth balloon festivals is a bonus too.

“In Duluth, the wind is never predictable. It just kind of swirls,” he said. “And the lake is right there — it’s a hazard if winds do change. Here, we have a lot more options … and there are a lot of hayfield landing locations within five miles of Black Bear. Combined, our pilots probably have centuries of experience. So if weather permits, there’s a very high probability we’ll be doing launches.”

If Mother Nature plays nice, expect to see multiple balloons soaring over Carlton County next weekend.