Sunset from 106,000 feet

Because the GPS unit on our first bal­loon launch failed, Team Death Punch set out to accom­plish the mis­sion of filming a sunset from 106,000 feet. Launching the second bal­loon from Sugarhouse, Utah we watched as our pay­load drifted to the east towards the Unita moun­tains. When the bal­loon reached 106,000 feet it popped, at which point the pay­load was under the care of our home­made para­chute. We received a single ping from our GPS unit after our cal­cu­lated crash time. No con­fir­ma­tion data was retrieved after that. We fig­ured that the silence was due to the pay­load being buried under a few feet of snow, and we could only hope that the last ping we received was from the actual crash loca­tion. The problem was that this par­tic­ular loca­tion (40.7995 degrees north and 110.70015 degrees west) was one of the most dif­fi­cult places to reach in the lower 48 states.

For our first recovery attempt, Marc, Angela, Marcus, Roger and I rented snow­mo­biles and snow­shoes and set out for a full day of con­quering the snow. Over pris­tine moun­tains, sev­eral rivers, we tra­versed the snow in a del­i­cate dance at the mid-height of the trees. Making our way through thick forests of ever­greens, and the ghost-town rem­nants of old forest fires, we invented our own trail over incon­sis­tently packed snow. Each new step was preg­nant with sur­prise. At 6:30 pm we were forced to con­cede that we were not going to make it to the crash site in time. We turned around and raced the set­ting sun back out of the back­country. We made it back to our snow­mo­biles just in time for the last few moments of nau­tical twilight.

Two weeks later, after 57 inches of snow had melted in the region, Marc, Angela, Ingo and I made another attempt to reach the crash site. Without the snow we were able to moun­tain bike a trail for about a mile. But the pop­u­la­tion of fallen trees, and the immense propen­sity for the ter­rain to be wet, quickly made our bikes more of a lia­bility than an asset. So we aban­doned our bikes and headed on towards our crash site. The ter­rain was braided with sea­sonal rivers, marshes fed by melting snow, fields of dead trees, and then once again – snow.

We crossed 38 streams and rivers over logs, found a water­fall that we sus­pect is both sea­sonal and unnamed, and never slowed down. At 6:30 pm we were 0.57 miles away from the crash site, according to our GPS unit (as the crow flies). Although we were reaching exhaus­tion, the set­ting sun did not allow us to take a break. Later than we were hoping, we finally reached the crash site at 7:30 pm. The problem was the crash site was actu­ally 45 feet up in a pine tree!

Angela attempted to climb a nearby dead tree that was leaning into our tree. When she got about 25 feet up the branches started breaking under her feet. The base of the crash tree had no low hanging branches, so we had to search for a dead tree that we could break off and prop under­neath our tree as a wedged starter. It took me a while to climb the tree safely and cut the pay­load down, but I made it with only some scratches and cuts.

At this point we were exhausted, but we had to race back down in an attempt to cross back over the raging river, bal­ancing on a log before night­fall. We barely made it. Then, without a trail, and led only by head­lamp, we tra­versed the next two ridges in the dark. We finally ran into the trail that our bikes were on at 4:15 am. After finding our bikes we pushed them out (we were far too tired and exhausted to bal­ance on them) and made it back to our car at 5:30 am. We made it out to a paved road just in time to watch a sun­rise from Wyoming.

The retrieval was a lot of work, it car­ried us out into a region unknown to human eyes, it pushed us to our limits, but it was worth it. We now have footage of a sunset from 106,000 feet.

(There ended up being a little mois­ture inside the GoPro casing, so the high ele­va­tion images are dis­torted by a thin layer of fog, but the images are still beau­tiful. Next time we will pack some dehy­dra­tion beads into the casing to avoid that problem.)