Had the single father never met the people he encountered on his dirt biking adventure, he’s certain he wouldn’t be alive.
Steve Hyde, 53, was out in Alberta’s Crowsnest Pass with his two daughters when he encountered the random kindness of total strangers.
The first lucky episode happened when he got his motor home and trailer stuck in a ditch. A kind couple stopped on the highway to help them and escort them to the dirt bike paths. The pair even went dirt biking with the father and his daughters.
Then, the group was riding along when Hyde started to feel unwell. Before he realized it, his girls and the Good Samaritans had biked ahead and were out of sight.
“I thought, ‘before I go any further I am going to stop and sit in this stream and cool down,’” he said. “I laid on my back and was there for 15 minutes and didn’t recover one little bit,” Hyde recalled.
“I scared myself laying in that stream. I saw trees and clouds and thought, ‘this is where I’m gonna die.’”
He attempted to turn around and make his way back to the parking lot. That’s when a group of people on quad bikes intervened.
“They switched into gear and said ‘leave your bike here,’” Hyde said. “One quad raced ahead to cellphone range to call the ambulance and the other guy got me in the front and he was going over big boulders and once we arrived, the ambulance was there.”
The medical personnel told Hyde he was having a heart attack and was in critical condition. As he was being transported into the air ambulance he pleaded for someone to go back for his girls, Brooke and Kelsey.
“I was like, ‘oh my girls are on the mountain I can’t abandon them,’” Hyde said. “They said, ‘don’t worry RCMP and search and rescue are on it’ and I heard on the radio they found the girls and that was a big relief for me.”
The RCMP officer who located the girls brought them back to his own home and treated them to some pizza before reuniting them with Hyde, who was recovering in hospital.
Hyde is grateful and wants to reconnect with the strangers who saved him.
“It’s an eye opener and a second chance.”
And he promises to pay it forward.
“Anything I can do for anybody, I’m there to pay back. Seems like I owe the universe.”
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