This Nasty Spiked Booby Trap Was Found on a Colorado Trail

Someone is apparently leaving potentially deadly booby traps along a popular hiking trail in Colorado.

Pike National Forest officials are on the lookout for more traps after several motorcyclists ran over a half-buried spike strip as they lost their way along the Rampart Range trail.

The metal spikes were partially buried along a trail southwest of Denver. (Image Source: Forest Service)

The dark metal device looks like a cross between road spikes and anti-bird spikes; it is about a foot wide with long nails protruding out. The Forest Service has no suspects or leads in the case, KCNC-TV reported.

“Someone could really have gotten hurt,” Forest Service spokesman Chris Strebig said.

Strebig said several cycling bloggers reported flat tires on bikes from the trail southwest of Denver, and one rider suffered an ankle injury after falling, but he says it could have been worse.

“Riding, or even running, or even walking, it’s something you could have accidentally stepped on,” Strebig said.

A local resident agreed, insisting someone could have have had a potentially fatal injury from the trap.

“Come up here and bury something that could potentially kill somebody if they slipped and fell on it or crashed into it,” Sedalia resident Keifer Jacobson said.

In 2013, an Oregon psychiatrist pleaded guilty to setting booby traps to hurt mountain bikers along national forest trails in the area. Jackson Tyler Dempsey was sentenced to 30 days in jail and ordered to stay off national forest trails for two years for stringing nylon cord across the trails and putting nails and small trees on the paths in an attempt to throw cyclists from their bikes.

In 2012, the Utah State police found this contraption.

A 20-pound rock with foot-long spikes was found in 2012 in Utah (Image Source: Vital Mountain Bike)

The Utah County Sheriff's Office said the two booby traps could have killed someone; they were set to trip through a ground wire, and would send the a 20-pound, spiked boulder swinging into an unsuspecting hiker.

The two men arrested in this case said the traps were intended for wildlife, but investigators don't believe the story since one trap was set to swing the spiked rock at head-level while the other trap was designed to trip a passer-by into a bed of wooden stakes.

Check out the video below:

(H/T: CBS Denver)

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