This sprung up on my photo feed for this week in history. It got me thinking what’s the most unusual thing you have saw on a ride?
Back in the early 90s, I was mtb’ing with a buddy. We stopped for a break, and my friend noticed some Polaroids laying in the dirt/leaves. He picked one up and we examined it forever trying to figure out what it was looking at it from different angles (it was an old, faded, dirt covered picture), when suddenly he realized it was a selfie someone had taken pointing down to their “lower half”. He screamed, threw it, and hopped around like he’d just put his hand on the actual “item”. 
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A dead horse underslung beneath a helicopter
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A car in a tree(s). Specifically a small pickup. It didn’t occur to me at the time to take a picture of it though.
Everyone involved (except the trees 
) got fairly lucky; pretty steep drop off the switchback and there was a house below.
A runner up would be coming around a bend at the top of a climb to find a bundle of (Christmas, I think) trees under a helicopter swinging directly towards me.
Edit: Also I’ll add a full sheet of plywood flying off the back of a pickup truck and landing in the shoulder 50’ or so. If I’d been a couple seconds up the road it would have made for a very unusual crash.
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What kind of TIE fighter is that?
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A squirrel flying through the air after it jumped into my foot.
A cargo van running over a six foot snake … as in actively going backward and forward over it. Guess the driver really didn’t like snakes.
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A BBQ grill flying off the back of a truck and sliding in the road adjacent to me while I was on the shoulder. We were going the same speed for a few seconds. I pulled it out of the road while the truck came back to pick it up. No harm no foul.
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Kylo Ren’s I think.
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Seeing a woman dance naked on a rock in a stream comes to mind first.
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Yesterday, I was riding through a park and a guy was following me around for a bit with a remote-controlled glider.
In the summer, I was riding down a trendy street (the sort where people sit at pavement tables), and a flatbed wrecker came down the hill at a cross-street, and turned onto the street coming towards me. It trailed about 20 feet of tow chain, bouncing along the road. In my mind, I thought was going to have to time it just right and bunny-hop the chain. But the chain straightened out behind the truck and didn’t block my lane. If someone had been standing there when the truck went around the corner, it would have taken them out at the ankles. The truck driver was shouted at by about 50 ultra-caffeinated hipsters.
Also, there’s a club of riders who occasionally ride penny-farthings up and down the parkway. Traffic always slows to watch them and take pictures.
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Trade you 
2001 Florida State Road Race, cat 1,2,3. Half way through the race a deer started running alongside the back of the field and then decided it needed to cross the road by going through the pack. Lept up into the air and landed on the back of the referees motorbike. Fell off and kept going. No one went down…
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The list is long.
Most of my recent one’s relate to all the homeless people that live under the river bike ways around Brissy. The weather is fine and the drugs are a plenty. I don’t judge others based on substance abuse.
One that really sticks in my mind is the very large Red Belly Black that decided to make a home in a log pile jump on an MTB trail near Batemans Bay.
You’re flying along single track and it’s like playing a computer game.
Next thing you know there’s a log pile to launch over and you see a huge snake looking out from the top of the pile.
Do you hit the brakes? Nope. Nobody wants to crash into a snake. No snake wants you to crash into it.
I’ll dig up a couple of photos and add them when I get some spare time.
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Short story: I was watching a hawk fly with a snake in its talons. A second hawk came up behind the first hawk with the snake. Grabbed the snake and pulled its wings in to become a dead weight until the first hawk let go of the snake. The second hawk then flew with dinner while the first hawk was SOL.
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Several years ago, I did the climb to the ski area outside of Glenwood Springs Colorado. Headed back down, and saw some dogs in the road. As I got closer it turned out to be a mama bear and 2 cubs. Had to wait till they cleared out before finishing the descent.
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Had the pleasurer of seeing a bee nice and up-close as it landed and started walking around on the inside of my glasses
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Some LARPers, lingerie and nude photo shoots (I’ve seen like half a dozen times mostly MTB rides), an Ag Helo landing/taking off from a truck about 50 yards off a road, a hawk that I scared rose up with it’s rabbit lunch dropping guts, squirrels rabbits and rats running under my bike/wheels, and a bobcat running alongside and then jumping over my front wheel.
Just normal things, nothing weird.
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Not biking but running through the woods. Came up a hill and saw a man off to the side in the trees. Said hello and he turned to me silently giving a thousand yard stare and a silly smile. Then i noticed about a dozen others individually stood or sat staring at the trees in silence… I ran on.
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did you hear any banjos?
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I once came around a sharp bend in some backcountry singletrack and startled a pair of wild turkeys. The interesting part is that, while one of them ducked into the underbrush, the other started running down the trail in the same direction I was moving, at roughly the same pace. So I ended up chasing this big turkey through the woods for what felt like a very long time, but probably was only 20 or 30 seconds. It was actually leaning into the turns and hopping over stuff.
Eventually there was a kind of exploding sound as it extended its wings and took flight. That was the day I learned wild turkeys can fly—they just really, really don’t like to.
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