Up, up and away — to Albion

A two-hour flight, reaching 83,000 feet, brought an out-of-town weather balloon right to our doorstep — or at least, really high up in a tree. 

Our right-of-way crew responded to an unusual call in mid-March, when they were tasked with helping to retrieve the balloon from a member’s property on W 100 North, south of Albion. The contraption — which no longer had the balloon but rather resembled a large parachute with a kite string of boxes attached to it — was launched by Valparaiso University. 

It had flown 100 miles east, just south of its projection to land north of U.S. 6, somewhere between Kendallville and Ligonier. And now it was tangled with valuable data attached to it. 

The project was from NearSpace Education’s Dream Big Program, which pairs the university’s engineering and meteorology departments with elementary and middle school students. The program’s parachute was attached to a camera and data collector, while the boxes contained experiments from the younger students. 

The goal is to learn how the radiation and air pressure of space affects different objects at an altitude three-times that of a commercial plane. They included everything from AA batteries, seeds, eggs and even a stink bug and woolly bear caterpillar. 

So, on one of the windiest days of the month, our right-of-way crew went to work meticulously untangling the parachute and string from the tops 

of a group of trees on the property. Imagine the frustration you feel each year when you detangle Christmas tree lights right out of the box — multiplied a couple of times over. But ROW Crew Member Jarrett Hawk was patient, as his foreman, Cole Knox, and fellow crew members, Sawyer Yoder and Lane Norris, helped from the ground. 

An hour after the rescue began, the balloon and its contents were back on the ground, safe and sound, and Dr. Dan White, a Valparaiso University professor, visited the co-op to collect it the next day.