Idaho couple got stranded 16 miles from their wedding. Then two strangers showed up on a pit bike and an ATV
'They also saw my hair all messed up and knew, like, ‘Oh, yeah, this was not probably planned,'' said Kyla Dickey, referring to the wedding guessts.
After the pre-wedding photo shoot, Erich Thalacker stood on Idaho’s Highway 21, in his crisp, three-piece wedding suit, watching the four-hour roadblock threatening to postpone his marriage. It was a crash, and he didn’t know how long it’d take to clear the bottleneck. With only 60 minutes before his wedding ceremony with the bride, Kyla Dickey, he needed another way to reach the venue, which was 16 miles away. Help came rising from the mountain dust in the form of an elk hunter straddling his electric bike and a fellow local on her all-terrain vehicle (ATV). As they rode back to the venue, they resembled the cast of 1994's “Dumb and Dumber,” as described by the local outlet KTVB7 on October 13, 2026.
A rocky road to 'I do'
On September 26, Dickey and Thalacker got dressed in their wedding attire and went to Sawtooth Mountains for a pre-wedding photo shoot. “We wanted to capture the beauty, and we wanted to feel wild and adventurous and whatnot,” Thalacker said. While they were returning to their wedding venue in South Fork Lodge, Lowman, Idaho, a crash on Highway 21 cut them off from the rest of the wedding party. The couple was stranded with a four-hour delay. “My jaw dropped a little bit,” Dickey said, recalling the moment. “Like, oh my, I don’t even know what we can do to get around this.”
Strangers came to the rescue
Fortunately for the couple, an Eagle native named Garrett Kerr was on an elk hunting trip for the past 10 days. When Kerr watched helicopters flying overhead, he suspected the road might be a problem. That’s when Thalacker, donning his three-piece suit, approached him. He asked Kerr how long the road closure would last. Thalacker also told him about the wedding, saying that the clock was ticking and they needed to be there on time. “I’m going to get you to your wedding,” Kerr promised him.
Kerr also found a woman named Jessica with an ATV. So Dickey hopped into the ATV while Thalacker and the photographer settled on Kerr’s electric bike. Thalacker, who had never been on a motorcycle, noticed that it wasn’t even a two-seater. But together, they were able to get past the crash site and make the 16-mile journey to the lodge. At the venue, the guests noticed that something unexpected had happened. “They also saw my hair all messed up and knew, like, ‘Oh, yeah, this was not probably planned,’” Dickey described.
Random acts of kindness
In a study published in Applied Economics, researchers analyzed 134 countries and 388,602 individuals. Nearly 62% of people agreed to having helped a stranger. Kindness and empathy are behaviors that contribute more to the helper’s well-being than to the one being helped. For instance, Forbes cited a study by Professor Sonja Lyubomirsky, in which she found that those who became engaged in acts of kindness showed a 42% increase in happiness.
Meanwhile, when Kerr reflected on the adventurous episode, he mused that it was a reminder that life will sometimes throw unexpected obstacles in the couple’s way and that they will have to face them as a team. “They’ll take those bumps in the road, and they’ll put a smile on their face, and they’ll get through it together,” he said. Meanwhile, after reaching the altar, Thalacker realized that the long, chaotic journey was worth it. “I remember just, like, looking at her and seeing the mountain backdrop and just being like, ‘This is awesome! Like, this is my wife. We're going to live a long, awesome life together. We love each other, and it's going to be great," he said.
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