Two pick truck drivers in Canada were caught on camera coming to the aid of a cyclist who was being followed by a grizzly bear.
Robbie Flemming was driving from Calgary toward Radium on July 14 when he saw a cyclist with full touring gear riding slowly up a long climb.
He told Global News: “All of a sudden, I see a young grizzly jump over the Banff-bound guardrail in front of a tour bus and go loping across the highway.
“As he gets into my lane…he stands up on his back feet, and I’m sure he can smell that cyclist coming for a bit, and I’m sure he had visions of supper.”
“It was very surreal,” he added. “My first concern was that I was going to hit the bear. And then I realized I wasn’t going to hit the bear and then, OK, ‘He’s after that cyclist.’”
He began hitting his horn to get the cyclist’s attention, seeing that his speed would not outrun the bear.
“Finally he looked over at me and I said, ‘You’ve got a grizzly bear about 25 feet behind you.’ He looked back and went, ‘Oh!’ and started to pound on the pedals.”
He pulled his truck in between the rider and the bear, and turned his hazard lights on. A second pickup-truck driver saw what was happening and also pulled in between the space between the bear and the cyclist.
Once the cyclist was out of the bear’s line of sight, the rider gave a thumbs up to the drivers and rode on.
Cassie Beyer and Donald Poster of Idaho who were in a camper van, took photos at the scene
“He saw the cyclist, we were going down, he was coming uphill and the bear was chasing him,” Beyer told Global News. “It looked like the bear was after the cyclist.”
“His head was turned, he was looking back, he knew [the bear] was back there.”
In 2013, we reported how Brad Paras posted footage to YouTube that showed him and his cousin being charged three times while out on their bikes in Alberta, Canada by a female grizzly bear protecting her cub, with both riders escaping unscathed.
After an unpromising start, having to be bribed by her parents to learn to ride without stabilisers, Sarah became rather keener on cycling in her university years, and was eventually persuaded to upgrade to proper road cycling by the prospect of a shiny red Italian bike, which she promptly destroyed by trapping a pair of knickers in the rear derailleur. Sarah writes about about cycling every weekend on road.cc.