Snakes on a Plane, I mean, a hike

Scary things to be on the lookout for hiking in Yellowstone: bears, bison, elk, mountain lions, ……. snakes ??

I am returning from my hike into the Blacktail Deer Creek trail in YellowstoneNP, just strolling along the Yellowstone river; there are the obvious sounds of the river running on some rapids and a nearby falls.

My rules when hiking solo are very strict when it comes to sounds. I am always startled the first time I hear a new sound: squirrels running in the bushes, large insects flapping their wings, dead trees bending due to the wind; that makes me stop on my tracks until I know what is going on. I catalogued all these sounds in my brain and when I hear them I just know what they are and I go on my merry way.

I love this trail so I am walking very slow to give me more time to admire the views. In this area I am in a forested area. I hear what I first catalogue as flapping wings on an insect that I have heard before, but the sound lingers the way it shouldn’t. My brain is decoding a “rattle” sound but it doesn’t compute (these things always happen in slow motion), so I think something is hissing at me (not better, actually).

I stopped on my tracks immediately and scan the ground next to me since I don’t see where the ‘hissing’ is coming from. And then I see it, a snake recoiled towards me ten feet from me, ready to strike:

I couldn’t believed what I was seeing. I immediate took some steps back since I was 10 feet away from a recoiled snake ready to jump at me and took the video. You can hear the freak out in my voice on the video.

At that point, I was not aware of this type of snake and I convinced myself it was hissing and not rattling (no wait I was going to take a look if it had a rattle) ……….. until I came back to the hotel and posted the video on the Facebook Yellowstone page that I post my Yellowstone videos and people started freaking out and telling me how lucky I was. This is from the official NPS website.

I was ten feet from becoming person number 3.

“Lives in the lower Yellowstone River areas of the park, including ………….. Rattlesnake Butte”. Well, ‘X’ marks the spot where I ran into it; look what Butte it is next to it.

Looks like the snake is too small to kill an adult human, but a bite on my leg would become an incredibly painful and stressful hike back to the trailhead …………. which was 5 miles away (i.e., 2.5 hours on my regular pace). And from the description below, that hike back to the trailhead and the 30 minute drive to the ranger station would have been painful as shit.

So I was a lucky boy.