Davis has thrown a lot of things into the air over the years: candy, confetti, the occasional 916-bike Guinness attempt. It had never thrown a hot-air balloon into the air until Saturday, November 1, 2025, when a glorious zombie-green envelope rose over the headstones and arboretum oaks of the Davis Cemetery & Arboretum District, 820 Pole Line Rd, and did something the organizers called, without much exaggeration, "something Davis has never done before."
It was announced first as the opening ceremony for the 7th annual festival, powered by the Davis Food Co-op: free tethered rides for about 150 to 200 guests ages 5 and up, first come first served, with NorCal Trykers on hand to fit kids with new adaptive tricycles and short remarks from Davis and Yolo County representatives, The Bike Campaign, Davis Bike Club and the Davis Odd Fellows. Açaí Fresh sold bowls. Visitors were pointed to the cemetery's COVID-19 Memorial mosaic archways, installed in 2024. It was, on paper, a lovely Saturday morning.
Rained out, then rescheduled
The weather had other plans. Rain and wind forced a postponement on October 24, 2025, and the balloon rides moved to Saturday, November 1, which meant the event that was supposed to open the 2025 Halloweekend Festival ended up closing it instead. Organizers warned on Instagram that even if the wind kept the balloon grounded, the ceremony would go on anyway, "complete with climbing into the balloon basket and igniting the flame."
The balloon itself belongs to Sky Drifters Hot Air Ballooning of Rancho Murieta, a family-owned operation whose pilot Tim and photographer Erin were thanked by name on the festival's Instagram and who are listed as 2026 collaborators on the zombiebikeparade.com home page. Whether Tim personally flew the burner that particular morning is one detail Aaron Wedra still needs to confirm, but the balloon and the crew are unmistakably Sky Drifters', and the site describes it lovingly as "that glorious zombie-green hot-air balloon."
A line that started at 5 am
Demand turned out to be, in the festival's words, "sky-high." Some people got in line as early as 5 am. More than a hundred smiling faces made it into the basket before the morning was through, and even the people who did not get to ride were invited up to the basket to pull the burner flame at the end, a consolation prize that, by most accounts, was not much of a consolation at all.
Around 50 raffle prizes went home with the crowd that day: about a dozen t-shirts, a couple dozen sweatshirts, a few dozen copies of the festival's own Coffee Time board game, and 30 bags of candy, donated by the Davis Odd Fellows and Smartz Graphics. "Nearly everyone walked away a winner," the recap post said, which is the kind of thing organizers say every year and, for once, the math actually backs up.
"This entire festival is by nonprofits and for nonprofits."
Anyone who missed a seat in the basket was told to email smartzgraphics@yahoo.com to be moved to the front of the line for 2026, an offer that says a lot about how this festival treats its guests: less like customers, more like people the committee already knows by name.
Nine new trikes on the lawn
The morning was not just spectacle. While the balloon inflated, NorCal Trykers fitted nine children with brand-new custom adaptive tricycles right there on the cemetery lawn, the same organization that has quietly been the entire point of this festival since 2019. Read more about that thread of the story in why we ride, or see the numbers add up on the history page.
The Davis Cemetery District itself has deep roots in this event. Founded in 1855, it is a Level II Arboretum with more than 150 species and home to Gallery 1855, and it was a two-year major sponsor of the ride back in 2019 and 2020, long before anyone had floated a balloon over it. The 2026 guide page already promises a return to "igniting the flame of the hot-air balloon at the Davis Cemetery" as part of the Saturday lineup, so if the weather cooperates this time, Davis may get to see its second-ever hot-air balloon morning right on schedule.
Photographers on the ground
Jessi Davis and a teammate shot close to 500 balloon photos that morning, uploaded straight to the festival gallery, and Matthew Strong of Action Flipbooks was credited for balloon-morning photography as well. A volunteer drone pilot also caught the launch from above, footage that the festival had specifically asked for and someone stepped up to deliver, which is more or less how everything at this event gets done: someone asks, and Davis shows up.
Want to help make sure 2026's balloon morning goes off without a rain delay, or at least with a warmer coat? Sign up to volunteer, or if your business wants its name on the next launch, learn about sponsoring the festival that keeps finding new ways to lift Davis, literally, off the ground.
