It was more than 10 years ago that Chris McNeill and his wife drove down to Dyea for a bike ride through its roads, flats and trails on a brisk April weekend.

McNeil, a social studies and English teacher at F.H. Collins Secondary School, was hoping “to get a little bit of that early Alaskan spring.”

What he got was substantially more.

As the McNeills were pedalling toward Skagway along the Dyea Road, they caught a glimpse of a fellow cyclist.

“There was a gentleman pulled over to look out on the view,” McNeill recalled in an interview this morning.

“I stopped just because of his beautiful bike.”

The man sported spandex cycling attire, sunglasses, a helmet and a bushy beard. He was riding a Specialized mountain bike with a carbon fibre frame.

“He was really interested in the wildlife and he was asking me questions about sea lions and eagles and bears,” said McNeill, now 48.

“I have to say that I was hogging the conversation.”

The trio continued to chat and started riding back up the road.

“He could definitely ride ... he knew what he was talking about and he was quick — quick on the Dyea road, which is fairly hilly.

“There was no witty repartee; we were just talking about bikes and bears,” McNeill added.

After about 15 minutes, the group parted ways.

It was then that his wife turned to him and said: “‘You know, that was Robin Williams you were talking to, you bonehead.’”

Though he “felt a little foolish” for not making the connection — Williams was in town shooting The Big White, a comedy filmed largely in the Yukon, particularly near the White Pass — McNeill has no regrets.

“I was just as happy in the long run that I didn’t know who it was and that it didn’t turn into a big deal.

“This was just some people talking about bikes and enjoying a nice ride on a spring day.”

Williams, an actor and comedian familiar to international audiences for more than 35 years as a frenetic, impression-prone, impossibly quick performer, was pronounced dead Monday in his San Francisco Bay-area home.

A preliminary investigation has revealed the cause of death to be a suicide due to asphyxia.

Williams was 63.

McNeill, like millions of other viewers, first came to appreciate the Academy Award-winning actor through his role as an upbeat alien on Mork and Mindy, which he watched as a kid.

The high school teacher has even integrated into his lesson plan an inspirational clip from 1989’s Dead Poets Society, for which Williams received an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of an unconventional English teacher.

“There’s a great point in there about carpe diem — seize the day.

“And there’s a tie-in with one of the main themes in the Outsiders (assigned to McNeill’s Grade 8 students), which is that nothing gold can stay.

“It will kind be kind of weird to watch that clip now knowing that he’s gone,” McNeill added.

Williams was not McNeill’s first celebrity encounter.

In the late 1980s, when he was working as a rickshaw runner near the Halifax harbour, he picked up rockers Axl Rose and Slash of Guns N’ Roses, ferrying the “scurvy, skinny” duo — fresh off a plane and a bender from Los Angeles — to a soundcheck uptown.

“They were in rough shape, those guys.”

Williams too struggled with addiction, fighting a public battle with the bottle and drugs in the 1980s as well as later years.

His personal trials, however, did not lessen his appeal to Yukoners in the spring of 2004, when he was in the territory for The Big White along with Woody Harrelson, Holly Hunter and Giovanni Ribisi.

Deborah Hilderman, a diehard Williams fan, was with her husband, George at the G&P Steakhouse & Pizza, then in the Kopper King area, to celebrate their son’s birthday when in strolled the Genie from Disney’s Aladdin.

“My husband said to me, ‘Oh, my gosh, Deb, Robin Williams is at the front of the restaurant.’ And they seat them two tables from us.”

Hilderman, now 51, pondered how to extract an autograph. “And I thought,’ I’ll use the birthday card.’

“He was very, very kind; he wasn’t put off that I approached him.”

They chatted and Williams eventually asked to meet her family, introducing himself to her husband.

Hilderman, then a registered nurse at Whitehorse General Hospital, had no trouble connecting with the star of Patch Adams, a film about a doctor who evokes laughter as a means to healing.

Hilderman had met the real-life Dr. Hunter “Patch” Adams at a medical conference at the University of Calgary years earlier and took his unorthodox prescriptions to heart.

“Humour therapy was absolutely paramount to my nursing practice, in a very respectful way. That’s one of my favourite movies because of my philosophy while nursing,” she said.

“I’m not alone in thinking that it was a real loss to everybody. I think we’ve really lost somebody that really has given so much to the world, in terms of his gifts with acting and comedy.”

Williams will be remembered for his riotous, lightning-fast standup act as well as films like Good Morning, Vietnam; Mrs. Doubtfire; and Good Will Hunting, for which he won Best Supporting Actor at the Academy Awards for his role as an empathetic therapist.