Bullets, Gold and Avocados: Roadside Finds From a Bike Commute

Spring is here, and there could be gold and diamonds in your future if you ride your bike. Just put on some gloves and a jacket.
It’s not just hyperbole, these are actual items I found during my bike commutes between Reno and Carson City from spring to summer in 2023. During that time, I found a bounty of valuable gifts, so many I felt compelled to stop, take a picture and write about it on social media.
I was commuting a few days a week from Reno to Carson City for work, and as I rode below our majestic mountains and watched the road, I started to see a different side of Washoe County, one that highlighted the scourge of driving and the solace of the bicycle.
Also during this time, I was battling a push by leaders to make cycling harder.
There was a plan by the Regional Transportation Commission (RTC) to make a safe connection for students to ride on Center Street between the university, Downtown and Midtown. The RTC even celebrated the kickoff of the project publicly.
But then, suddenly, the RTC changed leadership and the city, RTC Washoe and casinos colluded with false and misleading information to crush that plan, ignoring their own traffic studies, wasting a decade of planning and hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars. I was extremely frustrated. I was flabbergasted that our leaders would put our children’s lives in danger, and with every pedal push, my anger grew.
As a parent, and the president of the Truckee Meadows Bicycle Alliance, I went on a rampage, stirring the pot with news and opinion pieces, calling Reno the only city in America without a bike path through downtown. These little daily roadside treasures were a reminder to keep going and a respite from my rage.
In the end, we won. While we didn’t get the planned bike path on Center Street, the city of Reno took dramatic action, expanding the one-mile bike path idea into a five-mile network of streets–and they started immediately.
They did install a pilot project on Virginia and 5th Street during the Conference of Mayors (to show that we can have bike paths and we do care about safety). A parking-protected demonstration project on 5th Street became permanent. So, now the Biggest Little Bike Network through downtown is planned for implementation next year, including painting the entirety of Virginia Street through downtown green.
So, if you choose to spend less time behind the wheel and more time gripped to the handle bars this summer, you might find some treasures of your own. Here’s just some of what I saw on those sunny rides.
First, some of the fun.
Gold and Diamonds

See original Facebook post, from 2023
Avocados

See original Facebook post, from 2023
The organic avocado was at a three-way intersection. They must have rolled out of the back of someone’s truck as they turned and I was the hapless beneficiary, brave enough to stop in the road and pick it up.
It wasn’t all fun things I saw from the saddle. Some things were more curious, and even concerning.
Bullets

See original Facebook post, from 2023
One day, there was a blasting tail wind through Little Washoe Valley pushing me like a rocketship, rolling on the skinniest and hardest of tires. I was flying. Cars weren’t going much faster. But unlike them, I was silent except for my pumping breath.
When you ride like that, you keep your eyes peeled as tiny obstacles can cause you to suddenly swerve into traffic, give you a flat that can lead to road rash, cost you time and temporarily end a really fun ride. But that did not slow me. I was in the moment. At 30+ miles per hour through Little Washoe Valley, suddenly, a scattering of shiny, pointy things zoomed into view. I weaved and dodged them. ‘Were those what I think they were?’
I checked over my shoulder, stopped and rode back. Because I’ve learned that when you see things once, you may never see them again.
As I held the bullets in my hand, I looked at the road, the nearby tree and off into the horizon where a fun little story started to seep into mind: A guy was driving his truck drunk, got pulled over by cops. The drunk driver pulled out a gun and in the ensuing struggle, the cop won and dumped the offender’s bullets out of his gun on the side of the road and wrestled him to the ground.
I gave the bullets to my daughter Aeva. She put them on her workbench, preciously on a furry pink piece of cloth and they sat there for years–like a shrine. She was probably wondering what they mean (the difference between life and death). Now, she keeps just one of them in her room standing on a shelf, upright and proud. It’s her power. To me, it represents the commute with cars, dodging bullets (cars) every day and staying alive for her.
Wildlife

Ever had deep, daily compassion for roadkill? Try riding your bike. I’ve watched hawks, coyotes, calves, marmots, frogs, lizards, snakes, chickens, horses, deer, dogs and cats all decomposing, day after day with the glimmer of life in their eyes gone. Humanity is callously killing countless animals with cars every day, just so we can get to work.
Seeing them first hand from the saddle is one thing. It’s even worse when they are still alive–barely. One day there was a moth struggling on the side of the road. I stopped and picked it up.
At the time, I was not sure why I wanted to console this little beautiful dying creature. I celebrated in silence the final moments of its life on Earth, in solidarity. I wondered if it could feel my warm fingers. Somewhere deep down, I felt like that insect. I could be squashed at any moment by a car too–my only mistake trying to get somewhere. I could be slightly grazed and immobilized with a broken wing at any moment on the road.
As a cyclist on the side of the road, death was passing by within feet of me every few minutes for hours on end. This is how I became more aware of the plight of other vulnerable road users–and sometimes we fight back.
Out in Carson City, while climbing a hill at slow speed, a rattlesnake reared up at me. I swerved just in time, rode past and turned back to grab a pic as it slithered off into the sewer. Sometimes I think drivers think of cyclists like sewer dwelling rattlers who don’t belong on the road.

See original Facebook post, from 2023
Cyclists aren’t dangerous like rattlesnakes. Drivers are the apex predators, squashing us and wildlife without even batting an eye. Sure, cyclists make pedestrians and other animals nervous, but we don’t kill people and animals like cars do.
Here is a good example. Once, while having a peaceful ride through the park, my daughter Alara hit a goose on her bike. It got stuck between her front wheel and feet. It must have seemed like an eternity of pain for her. Both of them were absolutely fine. We laugh about it to this day, and importantly, no one died. If it was goose vs. car, the story would be very different.
Fear of Cars

Cyclists are also drivers (we have cars and pay road taxes too), but we are different from people who only drive cars. Unlike drivers, we feel an intense difference of crossing the threatening threshold of peaceful rural roads to major urban traffic.
One day, after riding through the pastures of Washoe Valley, I arrived at the intersection of Mount Rose Highway and Virginia Street. This is where I’m now suddenly faced with constant 60-mile per hour traffic and eight lanes and cars coming from six different directions, while we cyclists stand still at intersections. As I stood there, cars wheezing by me, I dreaded entering the urban jungle. How could I quantify this stress of crossing from rural roads to the urban?
There is a heart monitor in my wristwatch. Later that night, I brought up my Strava account and when I looked at my heart rate as I crossed Mount Rose Highway into Reno, there was an intense spike in my heart rate. I suddenly had to navigate more traffic at high speeds. To relieve my stress, I started to wave at EVERYONE in a car in the urban environment, thanking them for not killing me. I find Reno drivers are pretty compassionate, even letting us roll through stop signs. I made a short video about why letting cyclists roll through stop signs is safer for everyone.
Over the hours of thinking about why some drivers don’t like cyclists, I realized that many drivers are scared that they will hit us, and that fear comes out as anger. Instead of being mad at each other, we should be mad at the road managers who pit us against each other with their poorly designed roads. Most roads in Nevada don’t follow the Federal Highway Administration’s Bikeway Selection Guide.
Drivers and vulnerable road users need to stop being mad at each other and start demanding that RTC Washoe, City of Reno, City of Sparks and Nevada Department of Transportation start following best practices on every road, and pass laws that protect cyclists. Instead lawmakers are killing such legislation and passing new restrictions on vulnerable road users like they can’t do wheelies and need bike bells, as if that is the problem. If they would just do what is right and fix our roads, we would ultimately have safer streets and happier taxpayers.
Fear (and Rescue)
No drivers have ever honked at me or threw anything at me. I was chased once by someone in a car through downtown Reno, but it’s easy to get away on a bike. Most drivers give me plenty of space. The fear that I would be assaulted would crop up every time I heard a car coming up behind me.
“I hope they don’t hate me for being here. And if I do get hit, will someone pick me up?”
On one of my first commutes from Carson, it was so windy that the I-580 freeway was closed. That means heavy winds whizzed through Washoe Valley and all the trucks were routed onto the frontage road where I rode. So, as I was leaning sideways into 40-60 mile-per-hour winds on my left, a giant truck would pass me, sucking me into the side of the truck and forcing me to lean the opposite way to the right. Then the truck would pass and the winds would throw me to the right, threatening to send me into the rocks and bushes.
There was less than a foot of shoulder to work with. I swore out loud every time a truck passed as if I was dying. I thought I was going to die.
On one of my last commutes home from Carson, I decided to head up over Virginia City in February. I climbed all the way through the historic town and out and up along the lonely road to the frozen summit at dusk. The road was silent and ice-covered. I was beat, cold, had nothing to eat and I was fading into the night with no lights. I caved, stopped and sat on the gray metal guard rail above the canyon in silence among the pinions to ponder my non-existent options.
A white truck came up the road. I instinctively stuck my thumb out, thinking a rural truck could care less about a guy on a bike. But he stopped. I threw my bike in his truck without asking and got in. It was Denny Dodson behind the wheel. He was a Virginia City government employee who was in a national news story I wrote about how the ghost town was “old fashioned” and lax with its accounting of taxpayer money.
He had also surely seen another of my stories about how the Virginia City school district had prostitution and a bar to thank for funding high school. I kind of fancied myself as a modern day Mark Twain, writing about Virginia City tongue and cheek. Maybe Denny liked it? Bottom line, I don’t think Denny recognized me because he didn’t throw me out of the truck. He drove me down the windy road at night and dropped me off at the base of Geiger Grade.
“You be careful now,” he said, in a way that made me feel like he was genuinely worried.
Thank you for saving my life, Denny.
Some Trash (and a Ladder)

There are far too many things that I have come across on the road to remember them all. The mountains of things eventually give way to big-picture thoughts of America. What does all this stuff on the side of our roads say about who we are?
Between rotating pedals, I often stare back and forth at the beauty of the mountains and the roadside. The stark contrast became evident. The mountains were covered in pines, snow, and purity. There were probably back country skiers frolicking up there.
But down here, on the side of the road, we have endless cigarette butts, alcohol bottles and fast food wrappers. It’s sad. People who don’t care about our environment are in cars, smoking, drinking and eating fast food and leaving a trail of their vomit behind. They don’t care about the health of their bodies, where we live or anyone else who wants to enjoy our planet.
Alcohol bottles, mostly empty and discarded, some filled with yellow liquid. That scared me a little, knowing that people like that are on the road, guzzling booze, pissing it back in bottles and throwing them into our shared spaces.
Looking back, I wish I had taken pictures of the nasty trash on the side of the road. There was simply too much of it and it became part of the scenery of America. It’s not in piles, but it is constant. Drivers don’t see it because they pass by so fast. It’s still there. Take a look sometime.
There was also an abundance of our work wares. Gloves, probably left on someone’s roof, showed the mindset of workers as they rushed from job to job with their rough hands. There was a ladder laying in a frog ditch in Washoe Valley. BBQ lids were in excess supply on the side of the road. Car parts, giant nails and glass were daily hazards. That encouraged me to write endlessly to county officials to urge them to clean bike paths. Eventually they bought a little bike path street sweeper. Win.
Pillows, stuffed animals and kids’ toys laid peacefully on the shoulders among the alcohol bottles and cigarette butts. I once picked up an unused road flare, probably left by an officer for some hazard he encountered.
A knife under a bridge told me the story of a person fighting for their life. Used diapers shared the imagination of a mom, barely getting by, changing a child in the back of a car and then throwing the poopy diaper out the window in disgust, only to cause me disgust later.
Tie downs flapped and frayed, forgotten, and fell off after the things they tied down started flopping. Hats flew off as people stuck their heads out the window to barf. Expensive tools, shiny and appealing, were left on car bumpers only to be jostled off, forgotten. Lost a tool? No biggie. We Americans will just buy more. I often stopped to pick up some tools only to find that they were destroyed by cars driving over them.
There were lots of plastic container lids too – showing that people put things in bins so that they wouldn’t lose stuff, only to lose the lids that protected their things that they ended up losing anyway.
“This is America,” I thought.
What It Means
To me, the trash heaps and dead things say we are a society that collects so much stuff, we don’t care enough to secure it and we don’t care about killing stuff. We will just buy more and act like the people and animals on the roads are expendable.
In just about any other country, the things at the side of the road would be picked up by people who are walking or biking and put to good use (not just have articles written about them). Not in America. Not that many people walk or bike because we don’t value health, the outdoors or build roads that are safe for biking and walking. So, the bounty of roadside treasures just sits there, building up and decaying in a rotting culture.
The message: Slow down, see the place where you live, and you might be surprised. You might care more and write to your elected officials to use your taxpayer money in a safer, more sustainable way.
This road is big enough for both of us–cyclists and drivers. Just give us three feet (it’s the law) and maybe a protected bike lane here and there.
This period of commuting from Reno to Carson by bike was one of the most amazing periods of my life. Our road treasures, trash, safety, threat of death and anger led to great anxiety that eventually gave way to the closest I may ever come to zen.
You can feel it too. Ride on.
If you are looking for tips for how to start bike commuting or tips for existing bike commuters who face challenges, the Truckee Meadows Bicycle Alliance is hosting a panel of experts on April 29, 7 p.m. at Craft Beer and Wine called Drive Less, Ride More – learn how you can do it. Register here.









































