RiSE Lantern Festival 2019

RiSE Event Link: https://risefestival.com

The RiSE Lantern Festival is an other-wordly experience just a few minutes away from Las Vegas.

Overall, I had a great experience with this festival! I thought it was pretty well-organized and the sight was beautiful!

The Festival

I attempted this experience last year. A thunderstorm brew at a distance as my group and I waited to release our lanterns. The RiSE coordinators decided it was the best choice to cancel the lantern festival our event due to safety concerns and offered us discounted tickets for next year.

This year, the weather was perfect! We left the Strip at 5PM and arrived at the festival by 6:10PM. The traffic into the playa flowed pretty well due to people directing traffic. Some parts of the road was dirt but nothing too terrible. If you’re picky about your car (interior included, due to playa dust), take the shuttle.

One angry note — the back passenger of the car next to me opened his door and hit our car, which I was very displeased about!

My group and I walked over to the entrance and showed our barcode to the RiSE employees there. As a safety, I printed my barcodes due to the emails warning us that cell service might not be good in the playa. I also took a screenshot of the barcodes from my phone email.

Once they scanned us in and we got through the bag check and metal detector, we were each given a sheet to sit on, two lanterns, matches, and a pen. My group and I walked over to the north quadrant and claimed a lighter. We also shared a large corn dog from one of the food truck vendors. Yum!

By 7PM, things got moving.

Lighting the Lanterns

There was panic and stress to be had in my group’s initial lantern lighting. But, once we got a few lanterns in the sky, we really got the gist of things and are now pro! Just listen to the announcers and you’ll do fine. Here are the instructions that I recall so you have some prep, but I defer to the RiSE announcers.

Initial prep – with your provided match, take off the cap of the lighter that your group claims and light the lighter. You can wait for the RiSE announcers to announce when to do this, which I think happened around 6:30PM.

When they announce it is time to light the lanterns, take the plastic off around the wick(?) off. Burn the wick. They suggested burning each corner of the square.

Once you got a decent flame going on the wick, let the hot air fill the lantern. We held ours sideways for a bit and held out the lantern in a sort of 45 degree angle and let the hot air flow into the lantern. Hold the lantern out so that it doesn’t get burned by the wick. Eventually, we set the lantern do a 90 degree angle with the ground and held it about 6 inches above the ground.

Don’t worry if your lantern has holes! One of our lanterns had several holes and another lantern also had a missing string. Both of them still took off!

Be careful when you launch your lantern. Make sure the lantern feels buoyant. You can test it by letting it go to see if it will rise. If it feels it will fall to the ground, keep on letting the hot air fill in by holding it 6 inches from the ground.

Also, be aware of nearby lanterns that fail to launch.

Finally, when it feels buoyant enough to float on its own, let it go! 🙂 And enjoy the sight!

There was a lot of panic and frustration in our first attempt! We were still trying to figure things out that we missed the actual launch since our lanterns weren’t quite ready. Once we finally got our first ones into the sky, we decided to just prepare ahead of time for the second launch but to, most important, just be present during the time of the second unison launch. We decided not to stress out about getting our lanterns totally ready, as we have so much time to launch them. So, in the second launch, we had our system down to a pat. We released one lantern at the unison launch and we just took in the beautiful sight that followed. There’s a small window of opportunity to get great pictures when you have so many lanterns so close! As the night progressed, the large majority lanterns get further away.

Other Thoughts and Tips:

• When opening your door, please be careful of the car next to you.
• A part of me felt worried about the environment. As far as I can tell, most lanterns took off and kept on flying. Based on what I’ve seen with the lantern make up, I assume they disintegrate in the sky. I did see a couple that took off and then fall back to the ground.
• Bring a bandana if you want to avoid dust in your face.
• I was a the north quadrant. The wind was blowing south, so the lanterns floated south. Check where the wind is blowing. I wonder if being the south would offer better views.
• I enjoyed the songs they played!
• Leaving the festival might seem daunting. The traffic merged into two lanes. Most people were polite but there were some trying to cut in front of people, which wasn’t cool. In any case, the traffic out wasn’t terrible. Just be prepared to wait. I believe we had until 10PM to leave and there were still music and food going out in the festival, so it might be nice to just wait things out.