I occasionally dream about rattlesnakes, not really nightmares, just strange tales of snake encounters.  This subconscious theater includes snippets of my real past, half baked and incomplete, often with real people I happen to know, or just strangers.  One real snake encounter in the early 1980s no doubt contributed to these dreams.  I was guiding Eddy Maughan through one of my measured sections in the Pioneer Mountains on a cloudy summer afternoon.  I was a graduate student in the early stages of fieldwork and had asked him to visit my field area and offer his sympathies.  Eddy was one of my US Geological Survey mentors, a senior geologist and an experienced stratigrapher, an expert on sedimentary rocks.  He was a keen observer of geologic phenomena tempered with a touch of controlled sarcasm.  He was also a bit prickly, occasionally quick to anger and often defensive and opinionated.  Eddy and I got along well though, and I liked him.

He saved me from potential harm that afternoon.  We were slowly making our way up an unnamed wash, shuffling through several thousand feet of monotonous volcaniclastic rocks, a dismal nonmarine sequence of brown mudstones, siltstones, sandstones, and porcellanites (rocks with the texture of porcelain).  In a flash, the rocks lost their dull luster as I heard the booming sound, “SNAKE!” coming from Eddy’s direction behind me.  I was off my feet, partly in the air, and with kangaroo-like push, landed about four feet to my right on the edge of the dry wash.  I scrambled up the side at light speed amid loose rock and yucca.  The large, brown prairie rattler had been stationed immediately in front of me, and without Eddy’s quick exclamation, I would have stepped on it or very near it, resulting in an uncertain future for both me and the reptile.  Not a sound, not even a whispered rattle, just quietly coiled and waiting for me.  So much for the term rattler.

We stared at the serpent for a few minutes from a safe distance, pitching a few pebbles his way and waiting for some sound, maybe just a hiss.  Nothing.  I thought he was listless due to colder temperatures. Eddy quickly offered his analysis regarding the evolutionary predicament of rattling reptiles.  “Natural selection favors non-rattling rattlers”, he said.  “People usually kill the noisiest snakes, leaving the quiet ones to breed and proliferate.  Soon, rattlers won’t rattle, and that will be scary.”  I considered his observation for a moment, imagining the geologic implications of evolving snakes.  My immediate goal was to be more vigilant.  In retrospect, most of my rattlers rattled.  I’m still anticipating evolutionary change.

As a child, I didn’t think much about snakes.  The occasional garter snake might get trapped in a window well, or a water snake would pop its head out of the water and slither down the Fox River, but that was it, no major childhood snake encounters.  I was into hamsters, toads, and bugs at that early age.  My interests didn’t expand to include rattlesnakes until the mid-1960s when I arrived in Rapid City to attend South Dakota School of Mines.  The local guys knew about rattlers.  The campus was built along the fringe of some grassy hills at the east end of town atop the Belle Fourche Shale, a known habitat for the prairie or western rattler.  As freshmen dorm residents, we would occasionally encounter them or hear about a confrontation, but to be a snake aficionado—one who looks for them as a form of entertainment—a trip west to the foothills was necessary, and an inspection of the ledges in the Minnekahta Limestone would usually reveal a few under the right conditions.  The Minnekahta is a hard, dense sulfurous limestone of Permian age ranging from 25 to 65 feet thick.  It forms numerous ledges and benches that offer dens for cranky vipers.  Geologic fieldtrips with Minnekahta stops were always interesting because we tried to focus on both rocks and snakes.  The locals always wanted to kill or catch snakes.  My personal view was that this place was their home.  They were here first, but I always found it interesting to watch the snake baters use their long forked sticks and burlap bags to catch them.  One enterprising guy made spending money by trapping snakes for medical labs that made rattler vaccine.

It wasn’t until 1970 when I returned to Mines to attend geology summer camp that my snake encounters increased exponentially.  The class was intended to introduce geology students to field methods: measuring rock sections, mapping formations, and collecting samples.  It was a five week adventure culminating in a 10-day mapping project at Bear Butte, the core of an ancient laccolith, north of Sturgis on the northeastern fringe of the Black Hills.  Two professors, one from Mines and one from the University of South Dakota ran the class.  Each professor brought about a dozen students from his respective department with one odd man out—me.  I had left Mines three years earlier and graduated from Northern Illinois University with a BS in Earth Science.  I needed field camp to start my MS program in geology there.  We met on that first day in late July at the southwest edge of the butte, a massive black talus slope of basalt boulders and cobbles.  This midden of dispersed rock was interspersed with a few gray outcroppings of Cretaceous sandstones, the pre-volcanic host rock in the area.

I recall the first lecture well.  We were informed that Bear Butte was infested with rattlesnakes.  Every basalt slab and every sandstone ledge was the potential home to an angry viper, and we had to be careful.  We formed four-man teams (women didn’t major in geology until the 1980’s) and started mapping.  Unfortunately, much of our time was spent looking for or avoiding snakes.  We would literally see or hear three or four an hour and could jump a foot in the air at the sound of a grasshopper.  We spent our afternoons carefully treading our way through the volcanic rubble and watching thunderstorms develop in the high hills to the west.  By the end of the exercise, I was snake savvy, an expert at recognizing where to find them and how they behaved, but that wasn’t enough to get an A in the class. Everyone got an A but me.  I received the only B+ grade.  As I later discovered, each professor evaluated his students exclusively, and they flipped a coin to determine who would grade the guy from Illinois.  The Mines prof lost the flip and gave me the B grade.  To this day, I know that if I had been evaluated on snake science rather than geology, I would have gotten an A+.

Since then I’ve spent time in the field with some pretty famous geologists, all highly respected specialists in their fields of study, and all with different attitudes and feelings about snakes.  Russ Tysdal and I worked together for more than 20 years.  We hiked hundreds of miles over sagebrush hills and forested mountains mapping and measuring stratigraphic sections of Cretaceous rocks.  We were bound to have snake encounters and developed a casual but respectful attitude toward these reclusive creatures.  Generally, our field areas were ideal rattlesnake habitats, rocky and ledgy outcroppings about 6,000 feet in elevation.  I always wore heavy denim jeans and tall boots and carried my rock hammer for quick use.  Rattlers were seasonal creatures, and it didn’t take much to realize when they were on the prowl.  We generally threw pebbles ahead as we walked through brushy terrane and kept a close watch because we needed to visit sandstone ledges, potential homes for our reptile friends.

There were memorable encounters at places with names like Frying Pan Gulch, McCartney Mountain, and Snaky Canyon.   Russ and I were adept at identifying snaky places, but we weren’t perfect.  On one occasion, we had been hiking up a tributary of Rock Creek in the Pioneer Mountains measuring a section of the Frontier Formation.  It was lunch time, so we found a shady spot along a dry creek bed beneath some scrub oak and juniper to munch on our cheese and crackers.  I had just mentioned that we hadn’t seen many snakes when I glimpsed that familiar speckled brown color and rounded shape to my left on a bed of dried leaves, a coiled rattler dozing in the midday shade not more than 10 feet away.  I’m sure it had been lying there during our entire stay, not large by snake standards, or behaving aggressively, just resting.  Nonetheless, we gave our neighbor a few extra feet of territory and finished lunch.

Several years later when Russ retired from the USGS, I found the perfect gift for him, a life-sized plastic prairie rattler.  I neatly boxed and wrapped his fake snake and presented it to him at his luncheon.  It was the perfect gift.  I concluded my speech to the group by emphasizing the knowledge I gained in snake science under Russ’s tutelage.  To this day, that rattler proudly rests on Russ’s fireplace mantel, coiled and ready to strike.

My friend and fellow graduate student, Larry Davis, had an entirely different attitude toward snakes.  He despised them.  He never killed them that I know of, but he tried to avoid snake territory at all costs, a rather difficult task considering his field area was located in prime rattlesnake habitat in the Oquirrh Mountains of northern Utah.  During our graduate school days, Larry and I occasionally helped each other in the field, tolerating extreme heat, difficult hikes, steep mountain slopes and heavy packs, violent weather, and yes, snakes.  Larry was very cautious in snake country.  He once told me that he had been hiking in the Little Rocky Mountains in central Montana, paralleling a vertical ledge when he encountered a rattlesnake at shoulder height within striking distance not more than a few feet away.

Gary Webster, alternatively, wasn’t bothered by snakes in the least.  He seemed to attract them and relished his snake magnetism.  Gary was my (and Larry’s) chief graduate school advisor.  He regularly visited me in the field, especially when I was working near prime trout streams.  He was a skilled fisherman and always brought his fishing gear on those trips.  He would provide excellent dinners for us.  During the work day, however, he seemed to bring out the snakes.  I always encountered them slithering about when Gary was visiting, and when Larry was also around, I was especially cautious.  I would take Gary to outcroppings unlikely to harbor snakes, locations rather low on the snake index, and the reptiles would appear, often in large numbers.  I could never explain this relationship—snakes and Gary.  He would always laugh off my comments, but I’m sure to this day that some mysterious force of rattlesnake attraction had infected Gary’s personality.

Bill Cobban exhibited an entirely different reaction in snaky country, one that would best be described as unconcerned.  We started working together shortly after his 70^th birthday.  He was still a full-time USGS employee at that modest age, an internationally known expert on Cretaceous ammonites, extinct cousins of modern day Nautilus, a swimming cephalopod found in the deep waters of the western Pacific.  Fossil ammonites are used globally to identify the relative age of sedimentary rocks of the Cretaceous Period.  These marine creatures evolved rapidly, and subtle differences in their morphology would help geologists identify epochs in the Cretaceous. They were excellent time markers and Bill was in demand.  With keen eyesight and an old red-handled rock hammer, he would find a specimen in a matter of minutes, and using his near photographic memory, tell us the name of the creature and the age of the rocks we were standing on.  We spent many occasions together in Montana, Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado, and Bill often saved the day as I pondered questionable rocks.  Bill was also very reserved and seemed to be oblivious of rattlesnakes, or so it seemed, and most prime ammonite locations were in rattlesnake country.

Several of us were on a trek to find the westernmost exposures of the Tropic Shale sometime in the late 1990s.  Why would anyone be interested in such a trek you might ask?  Well, that transition from sea to shore 95 million years ago could tell us a lot about the nature of the continent and the inland sea that inundated it.  It was also fun, and we were in beautiful country.  That quest finally brought us to Fiddler’s Canyon, maybe 12 miles northeast of Cedar City, Utah, in what was called the Hurricane Cliffs.  Fiddler’s was a hot, dry place during the summer months, and the monsoons hadn’t yet started.  The crew that afternoon included Bill and me, our Utah friends Gayle Pollock and Bob Eves, and of course, Larry Davis.  Gayle was executive director of the Bryce Canyon Natural History Association, a private nonprofit that ran the gift shop and information center at the national park.  Gayle was also a geologist and to our eternal benefit, a very knowledgeable local guy.  Gayle knew everyone, every canyon and trail, and most importantly, every rattlesnake den in the county.  Bob Eves was a geology professor at Southern Utah University, and like Larry, an old friend from grad school days.  Bob was a relaxed guy, always well organized, and he knew his stratigraphy well.  He was also local, having grown up in Cedar City and St. George.  Bob and Larry could carry their share of rock samples and more.  We had quite a team and plenty of eyes to watch over Bill.

Bill was on the high side of 85 by now, still very reticent, an unassuming and friendly expert with that keen eye for fossils, not even a hint of failing mind or body, but we always took special care to watch over him because of his age.  As it turned out, he could keep up with the best of us even in hot dry places, steep trails, and rocky surfaces.  We parked at the mouth of Fiddler’s that morning where it emptied into Cedar Valley along the eastern margin of the Basin and Range Physiographic Province. This is a region, as the name suggests, of mountains and intervening valleys, the result of continental scale extensional forces during the Tertiary Period.  It was getting warm as we started up the canyon that morning, an early indication of a hot afternoon.  A mile or so up the trail, we saw the Tropic above us along the valley wall to our right, well exposed dark gray, flat-lying strata with a clear base and top.  The Tropic was thin here, maybe 100 feet, a far cry from equivalent shales in the central part of the Cretaceous Seaway in eastern Utah and western Colorado, where thicknesses can reach more than 1,000 feet.

The trail was well marked.  We halted about 3 miles up the canyon where the Tropic reached nearly to the valley floor, a place with excellent exposures and easy access to the entire formation.  This was definitely a Nirvana experience for us, right here in Fiddler’s Canyon, staring at the westernmost exposures of the Tropic Shale, where the sea stopped advancing.  West of here, the Tropic was replaced with coastal sandstones and mudstones.  We decided to measure this section of Tropic using a hand level and tape measure and to describe each thin bed of shale for detailed lithology, sedimentary structures, fossils, and overall character.  Gayle, Bob, Larry, and I started up the hill with our assigned tasks, slowly measuring upward, inch by inch, spreading out in order to get all of the rock information.  We stopped regularly to take notes as we continued upward while Bill wandered off with sample bags and hammer in hand looking for ammonites.

We kept climbing, discussing, writing, and observing the shale.  A 100-foot section doesn’t sound like much, but when described in detail, any rock section takes time to measure and fully describe.  Gayle and Bob had wandered off to my right, maybe a quarter mile away.  Larry and I continued up the valley wall taking notes and completing the descriptions, surprisingly, one hundred and thirty feet plus a few inches.  We had included several feet of underlying and overlying rocks in our measured section.  I looked at my watch.  It was 5 pm, giving us plenty of time to organize ourselves, slowly walk back, shower, and have dinner.  I always lose track of time measuring sections, self-absorbed in the flow of the moment.  Larry and I looked up.  Gayle and Bill were in the far distance, down valley, talking to each other.  Seconds later, I noticed that Bill had started down the trail, toward the trailhead and our vehicle.  Gayle hiked back up canyon to where we were working and mentioned Bill had indeed found a few good specimens and headed back to wrap and store them for the trip home.  We thought nothing of this at the time since Bill knew the way back, and besides, we would see him at the trailhead.

It took us an additional 20 minutes to finish describing the units in the measured section and started to head back, scanning loose shale slabs for elusive fossils as we headed down valley.  We had walked no further than a quarter mile when we spotted our first rattlesnake, a large adult, coiled loosely in the middle of the trail directly in front of us.  We looked at each other with that same concern written on our faces.  The headline of the next Geologic Division Newsletter flashed in front of me:  “Geologists responsible for internationally known paleontologist’s death by rattlesnake venom, found negligent will lose jobs.”  My career would be flushed down the Cretaceous drain.  I would be blacklisted by the global paleontologic community.

Gayle was always optimistic.  “Oh, I’m sure Bill saw the snake and stepped around it. Maybe it just got here.”

We walked another quarter mile.  Another snake, even larger than the first, was slithering slowly across the trail.  We increased our pace.  It was about 6:30 when we reached the parking lot and our vehicle.  Bill was sitting in the shade with a bottle of water, unperturbed, in his usual state of relaxation.

I can’t remember who spoke first.  “How was the return trip, Bill?”  “Fine”, he said.  “See any snakes?” Someone offered.  “No” he said.

After a resounding sigh of relief, we loaded the Bronco and headed to town.

My scariest rattlesnake experience occurred only a few miles from the Canadian border in the Sweetgrass Hills of north-central Montana.  The Sweetgrass Hills are a spectacular place to study the Cretaceous because the entire sequence was tilted up along the margin of some early Tertiary igneous stocks or plugs, intrusive rocks that had crystallized in the subsurface.  Historically the area had been mined for gold and silver on a small scale.  International boundaries are always interesting for stratigraphers as each country uses its own terminology, and trying to mesh different names can be exciting.  Karen Porter had mapped the Cretaceous sequence here and wanted to show everyone what she was doing.  Karen was a geologist with the Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology.  She was an experienced mapper and creative thinker.  She was involved in a project to update the Montana state geologic map.  So that’s what geologists do.  They organize a fieldtrip for their friends and colleagues, prepare a cooler with beer and sandwiches, and hit the road.  It was late summer in the late 1990s, and Karen had invited friends from both sides of the border, including Bill Cobban, Ken Takahashi, and me.  Ken Takahashi was a computer and visual arts specialist with the USGS and my former supervisor.  He came along to document our stops for posterity.  The Canadians were always a jovial lot, laughing, telling jokes, yet very knowledgeable geologists.

The entire group was staying in Chester, Montana about 20 miles south of the hills, at the Minuteman Motel, a stark reminder of the Cold War era and the primary source of a stable economy for the local community.  Missile silos dotted the region, lonely sentinels reminding everyone of nuclear Armageddon.  Our fieldtrip got off to a sobering start that morning when the local ranch owner warned us about snakes.  “Be careful”, he said, “there’s lots of snakes out now.”  We were on the east flank of Mt. Lebanon near East Butte, along the eastern margin of the hills heading for the Blackleaf-Kootenai contact, a 95-million year old point on an outcropping in a dry creek bed about a quarter mile from our parking area.  Karen was going to point to a spot on an outcrop that represented several million years of erosion, a momentous location for curious scientists. 

We never reached that 95-million year-old point in the outcrop.  Our group was walking single file through a grassy meadow the size of a baseball field, up to our waists in prairie grass when we heard the familiar sound.  We could see nothing below us.  Not one sound or two sounds, but several, each a high pitched rattle originating in a different nearby location.  We stopped in unison in that sea of tall grass. With minimal discussion and mutual agreement, we did an about face, and retraced our steps back to safety.  That 95 million year old point didn’t seem as important to us after our successful retreat.

My career as a snake spotter for the US government ultimately ended but I still had encounters with reptiles.  I had not stopped thinking about snakes while hiking but was occasionally jolted into reality when I saw them, like the time I was strolling next to my camp site at Maxwell NWR in eastern New Mexico and spotted a four-footer in front of me, or the time I was hiking with Irv Janero in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains near Taos, New Mexico at 9,000 feet.  I grabbed Irv soon enough, but was shocked at the size of our interloper directly in front of us and the high elevation of our encounter.

As time passed and I hiked more frequently, I got my snake groove back.  I hike a lot as a retiree.  I have to keep moving.  On a recent trip to Denver, I selected a favorite trail on Green Mountain just west of the city, a nice place for a two-hour hike.  I’m very fortunate to have hiking opportunities nearby and I like Green Mountain, a 6,500-foot mesa top of latest Cretaceous rocks strewn with basalt and granite cobbles—excellent rattlesnake habitat.

I had completed a 3-mile loop to the mesa top and just reached the parking lot.  It was early November and maybe 60 degrees at most, cloudy, a chill in the air, and I wasn’t thinking about snakes.  I started to chat with a young mountain biker from Calgary.  He had just arrived and was preparing to head up the trail on his bike.  He was on vacation and wanted some two-wheel thrills.

“I love Calgary”, I said.  ”Kind of like a cold Denver in a beautiful setting, but farther from the mountains.  When I’m in Alberta, I always think of rattlesnakes.  I consider Alberta snake country.”  He agreed, and we shared a story or two from our favorite encounters.  At one point, I happened to look down on the gravel in front of me next to my jeep and instantly stepped back.   I was nearly toe-to-toe with a juvenile rattler, an 8-inch long baby prairie viper with a tiny black rattle on his rear, head up and ready to strike.  He seemed alert despite the cool weather.  We had been too busy sharing rattlesnake stories to see this little guy.  He wanted recognition and was very angry.  I looked up, and the Albertan and I shared a knowing glance, as savvy snake entrepreneurs do when they encounter their prey.  I extended my walking stick, gently placed the tip under his middle, and lifted him off the gravel onto the grass behind a large basalt boulder so he would be protected from vehicles.  He crawled away into the dry grass still obviously in a bad mood.  My Canadian acquaintance and I  wished each other (and the snake) safe travels.  Life’s tough when you’re a rattlesnake.