Revenge of the Gamer

Trust me you don't want to run into this guy

Last Tuesday I had the day off and decided I’d start it by hiking Sugarloaf mountain.  The day was perfect.  Warm, sunny and not a cloud in the sky.  I got there around eight and spent the next two hours crossing streams and climbing hills. 

After reaching the summit I started the long trek down, and right after I turned around I came to a stretch of path with a cliff on the right and the hillside on the left.  The trail was only about four feet wide, which ordinarily wouldn’t bother me.  It certainly hadn’t on the way up.

I was motoring down the trail at a brisk walk when I glanced down and froze.  Three feet ahead of me was a five foot rattlesnake stretched across the path.  It wasn’t moving, but as it hadn’t been there when I was coming up the mountain I was postive it was alive.

My heart fell out of my chest and I gaped at it in disbelief.  I’ve seen rattlesnakes before, but always behind a pane of glass at the San Diego Zoo.  The mottled scales were unmistakable, as was the rattle at the end of its tale.  I knew this thing could kill me, because if I got bit I was screwed.  I was alone at the top of a mountain and by the time anyone came to help I’d be dead.

So I slowly backed up to about thirty feet away.  The snake didn’t move.  I decided to wait it out, but ten minutes later it was still sitting there.  I decided to kill some time by getting out my camera and taking some pictures though they didn’t come out very well.  Here’s one of them and I’ll post the rest when I get home. 

A blurry photo of my friend the rattlesnake

The snake still didn’t move.  I wasn’t sure what to do.  The hillside was too steep to climb, so the only way down was the trail.  If I wanted to get back to my car I needed to get around the snake.  What the hell was I going to do?  I did what any self respecting geek would.  I got out my iPhone and Googled rattlesnakes.

The first link took me to the wikipedia page.  I spent a few minutes reading it and found some very important facts.  First, rattlesnakes will attempt to flee from humans unless cornered.  The snake should run away if I left it room to retreat.  I also checked the range of it’s strike.  It can cover roughly two thirds of its body length faster than the human eye can follow.  That meant this snake could jump about three feet.  A snake can hear a human speak in a normal tone of voice at about ten feet away.  Much further than that and their ears can’t pick you up.

Snakes are very instinctual creatures and follow very simple rules.  When a snake sees a person they think ‘oh crap this thing is too big for me to eat, and its big enough to eat me’.  That’s why a snake will always try to flee if it has the option.

When I nearly stepped on it the snake didn’t rattle and I wondered why.  According to this article (also viewed on my iPhone) the snake won’t rattle if it thinks its camoflague is working.  In other words if the snake thinks I don’t see it then it wants to avoid drawing attention to itself.

The second article confirmed that snakes can strike about two thirds of their body length, but recommended 15 feet as a safe distance.  I trippled that and retreated to about forty-five feet where I gathered a small pile of rocks.  From the reading I’d done the snake was barely aware of my presence at that distance, and would much rather flee back into the brush than come after me. 

I took a deep breath, steeled my nerve and started lobbing rocks at it.  The snake ignored the first few and I started to worry. What was I going to do if it refused to move?  Then one of the rocks struck it in the head, and it moved about a foot.  I reached down to pick up another rock, and when I straightened back up it was gone.

My heart started beating like a rabbit’s.  Where the hell did it go?  It was no longer on the path, but it blended perfectly with the grass so I had no idea where it was.  I froze.  Five very tense minutes passed but there was no sign of the snake.  

Finally I said screw it and took off at a full sprint.  When I passed the rocks I’d thrown I fully expected the rattlesnake to lunge out at me.  It didn’t.  In fact I didn’t see any sign of it so I kept right on running.  I didn’t stop for at least a hundred yards, where I paused to catch my breath.

I was elated that I’d avoided the snake, but I was terrified that there might be others.  The entire trip down the mountain had me jumping at lizards, birds and anything else that moved.  When I saw a garden snake I almost wet myself.

In the end I made it safely down the mountain, but I was shaking like a leaf from all the adrenaline.  I survived my first encounter with a rattlesnake, and I’m not in a hurry to have another one.  Hiking is definitely more dangerous than I ever expected!