The New Yorker:

The explorer’s grandfather travelled higher than anyone; his father went deeper. Now it was his turn to make a mark.

By Ben Taub 

Each winter morning, in the Swiss alpine village of Château-d’Oex, the first sunlight appears as jagged slivers on the edges of surrounding peaks. Then light descends into the valley, bathing the ground in radiation. As the valley warms, the air in the village begins to rise, creating a circulatory effect: cold air rushes down the slopes to replace what has risen, only to be warmed and lifted up into the sky. At night, the opposite occurs. It is, according to the Swiss aeronaut Bertrand Piccard, “as if the mountain is breathing.”

Before dawn, “there is this pause between breaths,” Piccard continued. “It’s cold, and there is just no movement in the air.” One early morning in 1999, during such a pause, several dozen locals stood in a field near the church, in front of an eighteen-thousand-pound contraption of nylon, aluminum, and steel—a balloon. The sky was overcast, the valley full of mist, as technicians and villagers set about preparing the craft for launch. By dawn, it was standing nearly as tall as the Tower of Pisa. It had nine times the volume of an ordinary hot-air balloon, and carried a pressurized cabin that could bring its pilots to the cruising altitudes of most commercial airplanes. The balloon, which the team called Breitling Orbiter Three, for its sponsor, the watch company, was so delicate and unwieldy that it had never been properly inflated before; its inaugural test flight would be an attempted circumnavigation of the Earth.

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