Cosmoline
Member
I'll toss this incident out for critque. I'm personally torn on the matter.
Yesterday was extremely wet and rainy in Anchorage. Visibility was not great, and I was on my bike as usual. I decided to get off the roads and cut through town on the Chester Creek greenbelt that runs east-west from the Chugach to the inlet. There's a nice bike path along it. It was pretty much abandoned by two legged creatures, and I saw nobody for several miles until I passed a couple in rain gear headed towards their car in a parking lot off the trail. I passed them, went through two tunnels under a major road and started my ascent into downtown.
Then I heard a series of what might have been seven .22LR rounds going off somewhere behind me. Or they might have been blanks. But the sound and timing of them seemed like a firearm, not just fireworks. However, with two busy highways over my head between me and the sound and with the rain enhancing the noise from the car tires it was extremely difficult to pinpoint where the noise came from or exactly what it was.
As it happened I had shifted my Colt from my soaking wet pants to my bike trunk, a fact I cursed while I dug through the junk to find the revolver. I retreived it, set my bike down and walked back a bit down the trail to listen. Nothing. No sound. I thought for a moment if I should boldly go down and see if someone had been hurt, but hearing nothing I figured it was a) nothing but a someone firing blanks or b) a misheard sound. I also thought that I would be pretty ineffectual poking around along a very exposed trail with about 100 hiding places along either side of it. And the threat level was not so great that I could pull my revolver. So I just had a hand on it in pocket, with wet glasses and limited visibility. I poked around but ultimately heeded my own advice and boldly ran away.
Should I have gone back? At what point would that have even been possible? Hearing a struggle? A cry for help? Do you *ever* go back and try to help? I can see arguments for that.
Times like that really highlight how useful it would be to have a rifle. And sometimes I do have one, but not all the time.
Yesterday was extremely wet and rainy in Anchorage. Visibility was not great, and I was on my bike as usual. I decided to get off the roads and cut through town on the Chester Creek greenbelt that runs east-west from the Chugach to the inlet. There's a nice bike path along it. It was pretty much abandoned by two legged creatures, and I saw nobody for several miles until I passed a couple in rain gear headed towards their car in a parking lot off the trail. I passed them, went through two tunnels under a major road and started my ascent into downtown.
Then I heard a series of what might have been seven .22LR rounds going off somewhere behind me. Or they might have been blanks. But the sound and timing of them seemed like a firearm, not just fireworks. However, with two busy highways over my head between me and the sound and with the rain enhancing the noise from the car tires it was extremely difficult to pinpoint where the noise came from or exactly what it was.
As it happened I had shifted my Colt from my soaking wet pants to my bike trunk, a fact I cursed while I dug through the junk to find the revolver. I retreived it, set my bike down and walked back a bit down the trail to listen. Nothing. No sound. I thought for a moment if I should boldly go down and see if someone had been hurt, but hearing nothing I figured it was a) nothing but a someone firing blanks or b) a misheard sound. I also thought that I would be pretty ineffectual poking around along a very exposed trail with about 100 hiding places along either side of it. And the threat level was not so great that I could pull my revolver. So I just had a hand on it in pocket, with wet glasses and limited visibility. I poked around but ultimately heeded my own advice and boldly ran away.
Should I have gone back? At what point would that have even been possible? Hearing a struggle? A cry for help? Do you *ever* go back and try to help? I can see arguments for that.
Times like that really highlight how useful it would be to have a rifle. And sometimes I do have one, but not all the time.
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