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Mountain Biker Recounts Witnessing the Kobe Bryant Crash
Tess Weaver Strokes
At 9 a.m. on January 26th, Michael Dyer and Sam Gaglani met at Pedalers Fork in Calabasas, a boutique bike shop, restaurant and coffee spot, just like they do most Sunday mornings. Dyer, 47, a Hollywood Hills-based private chef whose past gigs include professional snowboarding and Oakley R&D, and Gaglani, 50, VP of Global Business Development at Xsolla, had coffee and morning biscuits while chatting with their mechanic, then headed to the Bark Park trailhead on Las Virgenes Road.
They pedaled up a singletrack leading from the northern end of the dog park to climb up to the New Millennium Loop Trail—a 12-mile loop that Los Angeles mountain bikers tout for its continuous, buff singletrack, challenging switchback climbs and scenic views of the Malibu Creek Watershed and its surrounding peaks and hills. The extra credit Las Virgenes section offers a classic SoCal descent—rocky, loose, steep and fast. Dyer and Gaglani chose Millennium that day because they’d heard some locals had cleared the post-burn overgrowth and added a downhill flow section they had yet to ride. That decision led them to the most traumatic bike ride of their lives, when they heard the helicopter basketball star Kobe Bryant was riding in crash into the hillside and saw the immediate aftermath and emergency response.
Dyer recounts the ride that put him second on the scene of the Sikorsky S-76 private helicopter crash that killed all nine adults and children onboard.
Can you tell us a little about the trail?
Millennium is a pretty well-known cross-country trail here. I’ve been riding it for about four years. It loops through fancy neighborhoods where the Kardashians live and all that crap. It was all overgrown after the fires, but some local guys came in and weedwacked it, and it was rideable again.
You and your friends ride every Sunday?
It’s kind of a standing group ride with guys from all over LA—everyone’s in their 40s and 50s and has kids. Normally four or five of us meet up at Pedalers Fork. It’s a brew pub that serves good food and it has this really cool bike shop in the back that’s housed in a rustic cabin and sells all the high-end stuff. It’s one of the better bike shops in LA. We meet at 9 a.m., get coffee and a biscuit, and chat with the guys in the bike shop who work on our bikes. Then we figure out what trails we’re going to ride. Between here and the Santa Monica Mountains, there are a lot of choices.
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Photo Credit: Michael Dyer
Michael and Sam started at the Bark Park Trailhead in a zone that was burned in last year’s fires.
How did the ride start off?
It felt just like any other day, but it was cold and foggy. I hadn’t ridden in three weeks, and I was feeling a bit out of shape. We had just taken off and started up the trail. We were about a quarter of the way up the switchback climb, when we heard a helicopter right over the top of our heads. We thought it was unusual, as foggy as it was. It was about 9:40 a.m. We knew the heli was going really fast and flying very low, because it was very loud. It really caught our attention and just felt ‘off.’ Sam and I were both like, ‘What the F@ck? Why is he so low?’ The cloud cover seemed like it wasn’t more than 50 feet above us at the time. I’ve been in helicopters before—I’ve never seen a heli fly into a fog bank like that. They say he was traveling between 125 and 150 miles per hour right over our heads.
About 30 seconds later, I had to stop because my hip pack fell off. Sam was heckling me, and about a minute later we started pedaling again. About another minute went by and Sam, who was a couple hundred feet ahead of me, yelled: ‘Did you hear that?!’ I looked up and all off a sudden saw smoke and fire. The first thing that came across my mind was that somehow we made a wrong turn and were near the freeway … or a wildfire. We rode around the corner and saw total devastation. As we got closer, Sam started pointing and saying: ‘It was that heli! It was that heli!.’
What did you see?
You could see helicopter parts everywhere. We dismounted and ran to the wreckage. The debris field was so crazy—it’s unfathomable how something as big as a helicopter could end up in so many small pieces. Papers were still flying. There was a 4-foot part of the tail laying right on the trail. The fuselage of the heli was on the other side of trail on fire. There were two other mountain bikers on the trail beyond the crash. We yelled, ‘Is anyone alive?’ and they said they didn’t think so. We got closer and started seeing things too gruesome to say. The smoke was blowing our direction and you had to put your shirt over your mouth to breathe. The smell of burning fuel was something I’d never experienced and will never forget.
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Photo Credit: Michael Dyer
Michael Dyer’s Strava map from the morning of the crash, showing where on the trail the heli went down.
Who made the call?
The other riders arrived at 9:45 and called 911. We showed up at approximately 9:50 and we could already hear the rescue helicopter. I texted my wife at 10:09 and said there had been a helicopter crash. We had no idea how many people were onboard. When the rescue heli arrived, we signaled to them that we didn’t find anyone alive. They lowered a guy down on a line. He checked the scene and immediately started roping stuff off. There was nothing to do but ride back.
Did you experience any physical symptoms from what you saw?
I was more or less scatter brained, and we kept talking about what we saw. It didn’t hit me until I got to parking lot. There was a reporter in the lot gathering equipment who asked us if we were at the scene. We said, ‘Yeah, we saw the whole thing.’ He offered to buy all our photos and video, but we declined. [The other mountain bikers’ photos were posted to TMZ on Wednesday.]
He interviewed me and filmed me, and mid-interview, he dropped the bomb and told me that Kobe Bryant was on that helicopter. My first question was whether there were any children or families on board. He nodded, and that’s when I lost it. I had to drive home. All I knew was that I wanted to go hug my 6-year-old son and my wife and tell them I loved them.
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Photo Credit: Michael Dyer was riding the New Millennium trail in Calabasas when the helicopter carrying Kobe Bryant crashed and was one of the first people on-scene.
How are you doing now?
Taking it day by day. Today, I was in the yard and heard helicopters flying over. Every time, I look up. I can’t turn on the TV. Sam and I talk a lot about it. My brain’s kind of noodled on the whole thing. For me, it’s not so much the Kobe Bryant story, but the collective loss of life—the tragedy of losing children and parents.
Have you been back on your bike?
No, but I want to get out soon.
