Hiking pal Erica and I found this cute little guy in the Verdugo Hills, between Burbank and La Cañada Flintridge. We’d been warned about his (?) presence by a mountain biker with a golden lab puppy, who apparently tossed rocks at it to get it to move off the trail. The mountain biker tossed rocks at it, I mean. Presumably the dog did not. Golden lab puppies in my experience tend toward a view of snakes that falls somewhere on the plane defined by the three points “stick,” “friend,” and “meat,” and interactions based on this worldview can easily end badly for both puppy and snake, so I didn’t begrudge the guy the stone-throwing, though I did wince to hear of it.
“It’s a big one,” the biker said. “Three feet long!” He was holding his hands four feet apart.
I was kind of hoping we’d find a rattler this morning. Larry Hogue and I saw a coltish 12-inch juvenile in Runyon Canyon a couple of weeks ago, as meek and inoffensive a deadly venomous creature as you’d ever hope to see, trying to cross the fire road as joggers and bicyclists bore down on it, looking for all the world like a hemotoxic version of Frogger. I’d neglected to take the long lens on our walk that day, and missed getting a photo. I took the camera today, long lens attached.
A strange thing: after a half century of trying to shed the snake-fear Dear Old Mom layered over her toddler’s innate herpetophilia, I seemed to have finally done so with that Runyon Canyon snake: I felt only joy in seeing it there, mere inches from my boots. This one today was mere inches from Erica’s low-cut running-shoe-style hikers. Fortunately for both Erica and the snake, she noticed him at the last moment and levitated nicely. The snake didn’t flinch at all, nor did it rattle or in any way behave as though it felt threatened or beleaguered, despite the previous rock-throwing. As I suspected, the snake wasn’t anywhere near three or four feet long: the well-documented phenomenon of crotalid linear folkloric inflation had increased his putative length by the usual factor of two.
I took the above and a few other photos and we walked a little ways out to a promontory with a view of the San Gabriel and San Fernando Valleys.
When we doubled back I didn’t see the snake. “He seems to have taken off,” I said, to which Erica replied “no, he’s just coiled under that plant.” I’d walked past his face, well within striking distance. He could easily have ruined my day, and yet he didn’t.
My affection for rattlesnakes grows. What sweet and noble animals they are.
Hysterical! The “phenomenon of crotalid linear folkloric inflation” is indeed well-documented, and what a great name for it. Now we’ll have to come up with a like name for the parallel tendency of people to consider any snake in or near the water to be a cottonmouth.
The photo is stunning, Chris. I love snakes no matter their type or disposition, and this does indeed look like a handsome representative of its kind. Excellent find.
Oh, and she levitated nicely. That tickled me so—and great visual!
Reminds me of this one ravine my family explored when I was a kid that was thick with rattlesnakes (there was one maybe every ten or 15 feet). The high point came when I was walking behind my godmother on the trail and she stepped completely over a coiled rattler that I only saw just before I stepped on it. They were very well camouflaged! and in colors to match the pinkish tint that quartz gave the local sand.
My dad collected snakes for zoos when he was a kid, sometimes trading local snakes for more exotic ones for his terrariums, so my brother and I grew up expecting that every road trip would involve at least one stop to remove a snake from the road - he could see them a long way away, even at 60 mph.
I too loved the humor in this!
The only time I’ve seen a rattlesnake is from high up on a horse in Zion National Park—and I only saw it because the horse spooked.
I’m not sure how I’d react if I saw one inches away from me on the ground. I think my instinctive reaction would be to freeze.
I am so used to the harmless snakes in upstate New York—you can pick them up, play with them, then let them go—that the idea of a snake being powerful fascinates me.
Jason, I was so taken by “a view of snakes that falls somewhere on the plane defined by the three points ‘stick,’ ‘friend,’ and ‘meat,’” that the gems you mention just seemed to arrive as a matter of course. This short post has an extraordinarily high giggle content.
A rattlesnake in the field is always a treat.
Jo(e)—be careful…depending on just how “upstate” there are still some timber rattlers in NY.
spyder—catching any of the tour? Me, Nassau and MSG next weekend!
I’m very very scared of snakes, although I love them from afar and wish everyone would stop demonizing them. I don’t fear that they’d attack me unprovoked, but I’m a very absent-minded person with not-so-great eyesight to boot, and dread the thought of not noticing one until it is too late.
Reminds me of my first visit to the “mystic maze” (a Native American earthworks of subtle design and huge scale) just outside of Needles, CA in the direction of AZ. I was in the middle of the formation, trying to make sense of the hundreds of thousands of feet of low, concentric, sinuous white rock mounds separated by dark rock shallows when some upstart part of my brain stuck a stick in between the spokes of my train of thought and asked, “How did that branch get out here?” The branch was the size of my arm (see comment above on herpetological estimation skills) and there were no trees in sight.
I approached and the “branch” curled into a spiral and started rattling! The rattle induced me not to run but to call my buddy over to see what I had found. Just amazing! The snake was so well camouflaged that I had trouble taking pictures—in the viewfinder of my camera I couldn’t tell where the sand ended and the snake began.
We kept a respectable distance and eventually he/she went on his/her way.
Ron
Borrowed, that is, linked to, this photo for a recent post on local snake encounters and rattlesnake mimicry. It’s at Scales and tails if you want to check. Thanks for a great story!
Great post, Sally!