E. Mtn. Flight Had Soaring Role in Ballooning History

By Dick Brown, photos courtesy of the Stamm Family

Ballooning in Albuquerque started in the 1880s and 1890s with ascensions by “carnival professors” during Fourth of July celebrations and New Mexico Territorial Fairs. Significant in history since was the long-distance record attempt made on Oct. 19, 1909 across the East Mountains, by merchant Roy A. Stamm and professional aeronaut Joseph A. Blondin, a veteran of 13 balloon ascensions (his first having taken place in Paris in 1896) who also clerked for the ATSF Railroad in Albuquerque. 

Two years before that historic flight, Stamm, then Fair Commission secretary, had hired Blondin for a much ballyhooed New Mexico Territorial Fair balloon exhibition during which Blondin flew a gas balloon up the Rio Grande Valley. Despite being shot at eight times over Alameda, the flight went well and Blondin landed safely on a mesa west of Corrales. The balloon, which had been purchased by Stamm, sat in storage during the 1908 fair. But fair commissioners, recalling how pleased they’d been with Blondin’s 1907 performance, brought him back in 1909.  

During the 1909 fair, Blondin and Stamm offered tethered balloon rides to passengers willing to pay a dollar to risk their life for 10 minutes at the end of a 500-foot rope! For these rides, explosive hydrogen gas was generated on the fairgrounds using iron filings and sulfuric acid. Despite use of a leaky, makeshift wooden vat as a hydrogen generator, Blondin and Stamm managed to inflate the rubberized silk fabric gasbag with 25,000 cubic feet of hydrogen.  

President William Howard Taft, who 27 months later would sign the New Mexico Statehood Bill, arrived by special train in time to witness the balloon repeatedly rising and descending on its tether line, and congratulated the aeronauts on their daring aerial exhibition.  

After the tether rides, at the close of the fair, Blondin and Stamm then set about preparing for what would be a free flight from a vacant lot at Sixth Street and Central (then Railroad) Avenue. This time, the balloon was filled to only 75 percent of capacity as there was no more sulfuric acid to replace the hydrogen used during the tether operations. Worse, the balloon could only carry 100 pounds of ballast. There was enough lift to carry the two men, but they had to abandon their overcoats, camera and six-shooter, as well as some food supplies and half their water. Privately, Blondin and Stamm agreed they would end the flight nearly naked if that was what it took to set a record by getting out of sight of Albuquerque. 

The 10:55 a.m. launch was witnessed by Mayor Lester Felix and a large cheering crowd. A gas balloon jettisons ballast to go up and valves off gas to descend. The balloon basket narrowly missed some trolley wires, thanks to quick action by Stamm in dumping an entire bag of sand ballast. With the emergency release of that precious ballast, the balloon shot up to 5,000 feet, where it paused as if in doubt as to which way to go. With its aeronauts still fully clothed, the balloon then veered eastward toward Tijeras Canyon and the snowcovered Manzano Mountains and, hopefully, a new world longdistance record. By 11:45 a.m., the balloon had passed three miles northwest of Coyote Springs.  

As the balloon neared a point roughly midway between the Sandia and Manzano peaks, it dropped so low the aeronauts could hear the wind roaring through the Ponderosa forest. More ballast was dropped. Then, in a repeat of the Alameda potshots, the balloon was fired upon by an angry rancher as it passed directly over Escobosa. Balloons do not take kindly to bullets. Fortunately, the shooter missed.  

The intrepid aviators continued on. To pinpoint their location and track their progress, they used postal route maps of New Mexico’s eastern plains, which showed roads, section lines, railroads and streambeds. A little more than an hour into the flight, they determined their position was about five miles north of Chilili.

Moving east at 50 mph, warmer air over the Estancia Valley sent the balloon up to nearly 13,000 feet, giving the men a panoramic view of Moriarty, Estancia and Willard’s string of salt lakes. Hydrogen expanded and bled through an open appendix at the base of the gasbag, thus initiating a descent, slow at first, then alarmingly fast. At 12:42 p.m., the balloon passed over the William McIntosh ranch and the tracks of the New Mexico Central Railway.  

As the balloon flew over the Angus McGillivray ranch, Stamm noted they were racing toward the base of the Pedernal Hills, 10 miles south of what we know today as Clines Corners, dropping 8,000 feet in just four minutes. At this point, they were 26 miles east of Estancia and 22 miles from Lucy Station on the Belen cutoff – and still dropping.  

At 100 feet, Blondin avoided a crash landing by tossing overboard the last sandbag and the grapnel hook. The hook plowed a long straight furrow and the wicker basket tilted over, nearly dumping both men into a cactus patch. Blondin tugged on the valve cord to release gas and the balloon finally skidded to a stop. 

As they began packing up, cowboys Charley Calkins and Lewis Bachmann arrived on horseback from the McGillivray ranch and offered the weary travelers wagon conveyance to the ranch for an overnight stay. The next day, the aeronauts and their balloon journeyed by wagon to the Estancia railway station, where they boarded a northbound train that stopped in McIntosh, Moriarty and Stanley, then headed on to Kennedy and connected to the ATSF line. They finally made it back to Albuquerque just after sundown.  

“I am confident that never before with such a small gas bag and with a bare one hundred pounds of ballast, has a balloon gone so high above the earth and made the speed which we did on our way across the Manzano mountains,” Blondin noted at the time.  

A charter member of the Aero Club of America, Blondin made meticulous log entries during the flight, using onboard scientific instruments to measure barometric pressure, altitude and temperature. For verification of the landing, he also collected affidavits from the McGillivray cowboys for submittal to the Aero Club.  

The balloon had traveled 90 miles in two hours and 25 minutes, hardly a record for distance or duration, but a pioneering flight all the same – and a historic first for the East Mountains – perhaps foretelling the many world distance records that would be set by future Albuquerque aeronauts, logging a place in the history of the Balloon Fiestas that now grace our October skies.  

Editor’s note: Dick Brown, an EMHS member who lives about three miles north of Escabosa, has a unique perspective on the 1909 flight. He has flown twice over the Sandias by hot air balloon, once landing at Zuzax and once at Golden. Like Blondin, he went up to 13,000 feet on his first flight, concerned about turbulence on the east side of the mountains.