Australian woman’s biking weekend in mountains turns into harrowing night stuck on Highway 1

Traffic travels along the Trans Canada Highway past Mount Rundle of the Rocky Mountains near Canmore, Alta., Monday, April 24, 2023.THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntosh

An Australian woman from Calgary who is a cancer survivor was reeling Saturday after a pleasant weekend biking trip to the mountains with a friend turned into a harrowing night stranded on the Trans-Canada Highway with a flat tire that has left her traumatized.

She got stuck on the Trans Canada for five hours, where her Juliana Furtado mountain bike was stolen when a man walked up to her car with a knife, cut it loose and drove off on it. When the Alberta Motor Association (AMA) told her they couldn’t fix the flat on the highway, she contacted a Calgary tire repair outfit that charged her close to $1,000 to fix it.

Saturday afternoon, still reeling from a road trip gone terribly wrong, Katie Hesketh spoke to CTV News about her ordeal.

Friday night Hesketh was driving on Highway 1 when her tire blew out right near Smitty’s Family Restaurant.in Mini Thni around 7:30 p.m.

Mini Thni is just off the Trans Canada Highway about halfway between Calgary and Banff.

“It’s a second-hand car,” Hesketh said. “I just recently bought it, so I didn’t realize there was anything wrong with the tires.”

There was no spare tire that fit.

Hesketh contacted AMA immediately, and was told that it would be two hours and they couldn’t fix the flat; they would just have to drop her off at a shop in Cochrane to fix it.

Rather, Hesketh used her phone to find someone who said they could fix it.

“I called up some emergency highway tire people from Calgary, and they came out,” she said.

It took around two hours for the highway tire people to arrive, and when they did, they said they couldn’t fix the tire by the highway. They needed to take it back to Calgary.

“By this time it was like 11 p.m.,” Hesketh said, “and I was on my on the phone to my friend who I was meant to be going to visit and stay the weekend with -- and this man comes up to the car on foot and he’s just like, ‘Oh, can can you give me some water?’

“He’s like, ‘What’s wrong with your car? Why are you here? Can’t you put a spare tire on? You need to move.’ And then he’s like, ‘Well, I need some water. I’ve just walked all the way from Calgary, and I visited my friend who was in hospital, and I need something,’”

Hesketh had no water left so she couldn’t offer the man any.

" I was going through my bag, and I found I had two bars in my bag, that’s all I had," she said, “so I gave him those, and I said, ‘I hope this helps,’ I don’t know what else to do, I can’t really do anything, I can’t move, I’m waiting for these people to come back to put my tire on.

“And then he laughed, and then he just walked off,” she said, “and then when that was happening, my friend called the police. She hung up, and she called the police because she heard what was going on -- because he actually was also asking for money, and I said I didn’t have any cash as well.”

‘I needed to pay up’

“Another man came up to the car, and he had a hoodie on, and he was like banging on my window, saying that I had to move, and I said, well, I couldn’t move, and then he was asking for money,” she said.

“He said, I’ve been there for too long, and that I needed to pay up the money for being in that area, and I was just like, “Well, I don’t have any money.

“I was like, ‘I can e-transfer you something, but I don’t have anything,’ and he wouldn’t accept that, and then well, he started whistling,”

Then he changed the ask: he said if he couldn’t have any money, he was going to take her Juliana Furtado bicycle.

And then he started whistling again, and pulled out a knife and started cutting the cords to remove the bicycle, when Hesketh’s phone rang.

It was the Cochrane RCMP who had been contacted by Hekseth’s friend.

She found herself narrating the theft of her bike to police while the man removed it from the back of her car.

The police were trying to find where Hesketh was parked, and as the second man rode off on her bike, she could see the police lights in the distance but they couldn’t see her.

Finally the police arrived and when Hesketh told them what happened, they drove into town to look for the bicycle thief but couldn’t locate him.

Then they came back and said they would wait with her until the tire repairmen returned with her tire.

“They didn’t come back until like 12 or it was maybe 1 a.m.,” she said, “and they put the tire on, and the police checked it, and they took a statement from me and made sure the tire was fine, and then they left.”

$980 to fix a tire

Then she got the bill to repair her tire.

“It was very weird, because they charged me like $300 and I had to e-transfer them the money,” she said, “and then I couldn’t understand when they were coming back, because their English isn’t that good, and then they came back, but they ended up charging me $980.”

“I mean, I get the tire was probably it’s expensive [to fix], but like they pre-charged me $300 and then now I still have like $675 left to pay them.”

An Alberta RCMP spokesperson confirmed that Cochrane RCMP officers responded at 11:26 p.m. to a broken-down vehicle on the Trans-Canada that was approached by someone who rode off with a bicycle.

Officers patrolled the area but weren’t able to locate a suspect. They said the victim was able to get her tire fixed.

Return to Australia

Hesketh is Australian and spent six years living in Banff until three years ago, when she had to return to Australia when she got sick.

“I had cancer three years ago, and it’s just been really hard getting my feet back on the ground since, ” she said. “I ended up having surgery for ovary cancer, it was called an endometrioma carcinoma, and basically it’s caused by endometriosis.”

Hesketh said her ovary had a cancerous cyst on it that was surgically removed. It turned out to be low grade, and they didn’t need to do any other treatment.

In January, she moved to Calgary only to find herself alone on the Trans-Canada Highway late on a Friday night in June.

After it was all over, she spoke to her parents in Tasmania and they said “it was awful, but just as long as you’re safe” and Hesketh agreed with that, but Saturday afternoon, after being up until 3 a.m., the terrible night on the highway remained too fresh in her mind to just be a tale of a road trip gone way wrong.

“It’s just a bit traumatizing to have that happen,” she said. “You do feel really vulnerable, as a woman being on your own, and in the dark, and then, like, you just get taken advantage of when you’re just broken down.”

“It was really traumatizing, especially when he was standing there, banging on the car and whistling and telling me, like, threatening me, I had to find money.”

Hesketh said she still hopes to find her bicycle but she has no contact number for the police -- and she wants to tell them the bike’s serial number, which she didn’t have when they were on the highway with her.

CTV News has reached out to the tire repair company for further comment.