Seattle Hot Air Balloon Ride Guide

From a wicker basket at sunrise, ballooning offers stillness and awe

written by Cathy Carroll | photography by Seattle Ballooning

Even for someone who’s been skydiving, paragliding and rappelling, I was surprised by the nervousness that set in the night before my hot-air balloon ride. The next day, at dawn, a bright blue, red and yellow bulb-shaped craft lifted me in a wicker basket above the treetops. As the last few shreds of dread drifted away along with terra firma, a lighter-than-air state of solitude and freedom took over. I was hooked.

Eliav Cohen of Seattle Ballooning sees this transformation happen regularly with his passengers, and Cohen, a world championship ballooning competitor, admits he’s terrified of heights—except when wafting thousands of feet above land in his chosen mode of flying. “I know it’s weird, but even if my kids throw something and it lands on the roof, I make my wife climb the ladder to get it. I’m that nervous about heights. But in a balloon, for some reason, I’m totally fine—and everyone is.”

Some of the reasons include how calm and quiet it is. Unlike a high-powered jet, lifting off into silence at 5 to 15 miles an hour lets the breeze take you. “Flying over the treetops, you just feel like a bird. It’s the most amazing chill, laid-back experience—every time,” said Cohen.

Launching near Auburn, he leverages daily wind conditions for optimal views of Mount Rainier, flying his basket of passengers down the White River, the Green River and over Lake Tapps—at some points gliding at 4,000 feet or just a few feet above the water. In the morning, just above the tree canopy along the Green River, a touch of fog adds an ethereal quality.

A raptor’s view of salmon running upriver in August is a per-spective most humans never witness. When conditions are right, Cohen will vent just enough hot air from the balloon to gently descend, momentarily skimming the water with the basket like a heron catching breakfast.

Drifting from treetop level to thousands of feet high, passengers might skim the river or see three sunrises as the balloon rises and falls with the terrain.

Typically, it’s a zen moment, but during a sunset ride in June of 2021, Cohen was hovering his ten-story-tall balloon carrying pas-sengers about 5 feet above the water when he heard calls for help. A young couple’s small blowup raft had deflated. After three hours on the river, with their cellphones dead, the shoeless, swimsuitclad pair were 4 miles from any road with darkness approaching.

Quickly assessing the situation, Cohen lowered the balloon to the surface of the shallows and called to the couple to wade over from the bank. “Go, go, go!” he said, hitting short bursts on the burner to increase the balloon’s lift. An inch or two of water had seeped onto the floor of the basket, which was starting to move with the current. The rafters climbed in, and Cohen hit both 20 million-Btu burners for a 400-foot-per-minute climb. Quickly clearing the bank’s 100-foot-tall trees, he flew them and his passengers to safety.

Aside from a once-in-a-lifetime rescue, the apex of the flights are the views of Mount Rainier, all 14,410 feet of its snow-capped beauty looming in the early-morning light. On a clear day, at about 4,000 feet, the full, horseshoe-shaped crater atop Mount St. Helens comes into view, where in 1980, blasting magma emitted a 15-mile-high mushroom cloud of ash that circled Earth in fifteen days.

Gazing west, the Puget Sound ripples in the sun, and to the north, Seattle’s skyline and Space Needle rise to only a fraction of your height above them.

Throughout the flight, Cohen shares fun facts about ballooning history. For example, celebrated aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont helped popularize the wristwatch—easier to use while flying than a pocket watch—after Louis Cartier designed one for him in Paris around 1904. Five decades later in America, Ed Yost, a former aerospace engineer at Boeing in Seattle, developed high-altitude balloons for the U.S. Navy for Cold War espionage.

The stories and journey end as you give yourself back to gravity, and Cohen gently lands the balloon in one of 1,100 properties that welcome it, from farms to front yards.

“When I come home from flying, I tell my wife, ‘God, that was the most amazing flight I’ve ever had,’” said Cohen, who left a C-suite career in tech for ballooning a decade ago. “She says, ‘How can every day be the most amazing?’ But each day is like that—it just never gets old, ever.”