An Idaho couple made it to their wedding with minutes to spare after a stranger on an elk hunt organised an ATV and motorbike rescue around a closed highway, in a story that has delighted readers across the United States.
Erich Thalacker and Kyla Dickey had planned every detail of their wedding at South Fork Lodge in Lowman, Idaho, on September 26, but a fatal crash closed Highway 21, the only road back to the lodge, with an estimated four-hour wait and the ceremony just one hour away.
Photos in the Mountains, Then a Closed Road
The couple, who met in a high school composition class about 12 or 13 years ago, had put on their wedding clothes and driven into the Sawtooth Mountains for photographs, the same mountains where they got engaged.
“We wanted to feel wild and adventurous and whatnot,” Erich told KTVB, in reports carried by Times Now World and Latest Packages.
While their guests gathered at the lodge, the couple found themselves stranded in the canyon, dressed in formal wedding attire, with no way through the closure.
The Stranger Who Said: I’ll Get You There
Garrett Kerr, from Eagle, Idaho, was driving out of the canyon after 10 days in the woods on an elk hunt, with a large elk in the back of his pickup, when he spotted helicopters overhead and realised something had happened on the highway.
Then a man in a three-piece suit walked up to his truck. “He’s asking, ‘Hey, do you know how long this closure is going to be? I’ve got to get to my wedding in an hour,'” Kerr told KTVB. “And I go, ‘Wait, you’ve got to get to your wedding in an hour? You’re the groom.'”
Kerr knew no truck was getting through, so he made a promise: “We’re not going to be able to get through with the vehicles, but I’m going to get you to your wedding.”
He coordinated a makeshift transport plan using his electric pit bike and an ATV operated by a woman named Jessica, and the group covered the 16-mile distance to the lodge in time for the ceremony, with the bride and photographer on the ATV and the groom riding on the back of Kerr’s bike.
Kerr later compared the sight of the groom clinging to him on the small bike to a scene from the 1994 film Dumb and Dumber, and the couple’s dishevelled arrival told their waiting guests everything about the journey.
