Brightly colored hot air balloons floated into the sky as the sun came up over the mountains near Santa Paula on Saturday morning.

"They're flowers in the sky," Laurie Beckwith of Ventura said as she stood watching with her husband, Steve.

For others, the balloons looked like Christmas ornaments hanging on an invisible tree, as their slow-moving formation drifted westward.

Five-year-old Aaron Johnson of Camarillo watched in wonder. "They fly so high," he said.

Aaron, his 8-year-old sister Akimi and parents Ida and Jay joined hundreds of others who got up before dawn to attend the first Citrus Classic Balloon Festival at Santa Paula Airport.

"It's amazing," said Ida Johnson. "We wanted the kids to see it, and it's pretty cool, the whole process of setting them up and taking off."

Hot air balloons generally fly at sunset or sunrise, when the winds are at their lightest. Winds of more than 7 mph make it unsafe to launch, according to the festival's Web site at http://citrusclassic-balloons.com.

More than 20 balloon pilots, aided by volunteers, unfurled their huge envelopes, as they're called, across the runway and then held on tightly as high-powered fans breathed air into the lifeless material.

"This is called the cold inflation," Steve Madorsky, a commercial airline pilot from Clare-mont, said as he struggled to keep taut a long piece of rope attached to the top of one inflating balloon.

Paula Rumessom, 29, of Thousand Oaks was one of the volunteers who turned out to help launch the balloons.

"I've never done this before, and it's great," she said, as she and several others held down 210,000 cubic feet of inflating material. "There's a lot of air in there."

Once the balloons are filled and attached to the basket or gondola, propane gas burners are brought in to literally throw flame inside the expanded envelope, heating the air.

"The physics is really basic. Hot air rises, and so we make the inside of the balloon hotter than the outside air temperature, and it goes up," said Tina Wong of Rancho Cucamonga.

Wong and her husband, Dale, have a 69,000-cubic-foot balloon and travel to festivals and races across the nation and overseas.

"We don't have that many festivals in California, and flying areas are really tight, so this is just wonderful for us," Wong said.

About 20 balloons took part in a "Hare and Hound" competition shortly after 6 a.m. A lead balloon, or "hare," dropped a marker in a field a couple of miles from the airport, and other balloon pilots tried to drop their markers on the target.

With the winds extremely light, it took about an hour for the balloons to drift at about 2,000 feet and 5 mph toward the target.

Some, though, came up short, including two that landed in the Hillview Estates Retirement Community on Telegraph Road and another that came down in a nearby shopping mall parking lot.

"We gave them quite a stir," said Gene Caulfield, who was in one of the balloons that woke up the retirement community residents. "They had to get dressed in a hurry!"

When it was over, pilot Dean Davies took first place in the competition, taking home $2,500. Dale Wong was second, winning $1,500, and the third prize of $1,000 was awarded to Pat Nilz from Tucson, Ariz.

The festival's balloon meister, Steve Wilkinson, said that all of the balloons landed safely and that festival organizers were thrilled with the visitor turnout, which exceeded their expectations.

"Everything worked out really well," he said.

The Citrus Classic is Ventura County's first hot air balloon festival, organizers say, and they hope to make it an annual event.

The two-day festival, which ended at 1 p.m. Saturday, was presented by the city of Santa Paula and Limoneira Co. with the help and support of local businesses.